Michael Koby

In today’s world of consistently updated news websites, RSS feeds, and push mail phones like Blackberrys, it is tough to imagine that normal news outlets like newspapers and television news stations not becoming more obsolete everyday. Today it is all about the RSS reader, the gadget or widget, and news website. So what does this mean for the common news outlet?

For starters, it means a drastic change in targeting their market. No longer are people reading a physical newspaper. Well, that is not entirely true but the number of people reading a physical newspaper are down significantly. Instead, people are choosing to use their My Yahoo! pages or their Netvibes pages to keep up with the latest news. If they do not use a web browser, they almost certainly use some form of widget application to have news delivered directly to their desktop. What this means is that people are only seeing the title or the title and the first couple of sentences of an article and thus are only following thru by clicking the articles that interest them. What this means to the news provider is that they need stories going out on the RSS feed that a reader are more than likely going to click.

Since people are more inclined to get their news online, the newspapers and news stations have to compete with millions of other websites out there that are covering the same topic and probably doing a much better job at it because of the ability of the writers on those other websites to speak in terms and jargon that the target audience understands. Major news outlets have to reach the broadest audience possible in order to bring in the widest range of readers, which means they can not cover certain stories in a more in-depth manner. While some news outlets are realizing that utilizing blogs for their staff writers and allowing them to use those blogs to cover topics more in-depth, several still do not make use of this technology to make their reader’s experience better. Some current print publications only use the "blogs" as a secondary location to post articles by that particular writer and while this is great in the fact that it lets people subscribe to an RSS feed to get that writers stories, it does not allow a reader to see more by that same writer on a regular (read daily/semi-daily) basis. What is the use of subscribing to a writers RSS feed if all that is going to be published there are the same stories I read in the print version that comes to my house?

Several print publications and news stations are working extremely hard to make their websites more Web 2.0-ish. They are adding social features and expanding their RSS feed selection on a fairly quick release schedule. However, several others are doing no such thing and see the internet site as nothing more than an extension of their other production. I think that the companies following this line of thinking will realize, only too late, that they chose to continue marketing the wrong audience. There is and will continue to be a market for print and viewing public, but I believe that overall, we will see the market shift towards web readers, and any company that decides to not focus on those readers is going to end up with less subscribers and less income as a result.

[Technorati Tag: Commentary]

When it comes to digital media, who is really winning? Are the consumers coming out ahead with the ability to get their media from more places or are the companies winning because of the consumer’s ability to get their media in multiple places? The idea of consumer choice might be helping the large corporations, that a large portion of the geek community hates, to really come out ahead.

When it comes to selling and distributing digital media, the big companies have their hands in everything and no one is allowed to sell something or even make it available without their consent. This makes some level of sense, because after all they are spending the money to produce this content. But instead of offering free downloadable solutions, they continue to nickel and dime their customers to death. These content creators have gotten a law into place that basically says that utilizing any method to access the content that they do not have their hands in is illegal. The television industry even tried to get Tivos to be illegal while the recording industry was busy targeting internet radio stations and recording capable satellite radios.

The idea that a customer might come up with a new way to access their content scares the snot out of these people, so they try to get their hands into every possible distribution method they can to maximize their money making potential. But it seems slightly unreasonable to lobby to have laws passed that supersede already long established laws. They managed to get it to be illegal for me to take a DVD (a movie I have purchased for personal use) and make a copy that is playable on my iPod. Instead, the movie industry wants to purchase the movie again, spending another $10-14 dollars so that I can play that movie on my iPod or computer on top of being able to play it in my DVD player. DVDs already cost $15-$30 dollars depending on which version of some movies you buy. Add it all up and I am spending around $30 (on average) just to be able to play a movie on all of my devices legally. Seems a little shady to me to use the law to further a business model, but I am not a business major.

I understand that there is a desire to protect the content, especially when it is sold online. But there needs to be some middle ground somewhere. Why can I not pay $5 dollars extra for a DVD in the store that comes with a version I can play on my iPod? Why not sell music CDs with a data layer on the CD that contains high quality Mp3 files that I can play on my portable media player? And instead of using DRM to limit the usability of these files, why not watermark them to know exactly where they came from. There are ways that these companies can work with their customers to come up with logical and realistic ideas to downloadable digital media.

The way I see it right now is that if things keep going the way they are then we can expect the consumer to be the loser in the long run on downloadable digital media. The companies producing the content are not concerned with what is fair or even right in this case and are working extra hard to ensure that we as consumers are nickel and dime-ed until our dying day.

[Technorati Tag: Commentary]