Howard Owens

I happen to believe that when I buy a song or a video, I should be able to consume it on the device of my choosing, and multiple personal devices for my own enjoyment as I chose. Big media creation companies have been working feverishly to strip me of that right. The Fair Use Act of 2007 looks to return sanity to this piece of IP law.

UPDATE: No surprise, the perpetually anti-consumer, ignorant-about-digital RIAA opposes it.

If you haven't followed the saga of Wendy McCaw, Jerry Roberts and the Santa Barbara News-Press, it's a sad story for journalism, but it's sadder still for Roberts, who has been faced with a cancer fight amidst McCaw taking legal action against Roberts.

E&P reports on a big fund raiser for Roberts, but it's expensive and far away. You can help Roberts through the PayPal button on JerryRobertsandFriends.org.

Funny piece from Amy Gahran on Poynter:

"You paid for this?..." he frowned, shaking his head. "How do you search it?"

"It's not really searchable, but it's scannable. See, you can open up the pages wide and see lots of stories."

"Looks like mostly ads."

"Well, yeah, this page is mostly ads..." I rifled further through, and tossed aside entire sheafs of pages. "But then some pages have several stories, usually at the front of the sections. There are no links, though."

"You're kidding! What good is this, then?"

But as Amy notes, lots of people like it. Some even swear by it.

CareerBuilder is being dumped by its ad agency after playing the agency in "review."

SuperBowl ads for CareerBuilder failed to crack the top 10 of most popular. You've probably seen the ads -- office workers in a jungle.  I don't know if the agency or CareerBuilder should be blamed for ads, but they do suck. Big time.

The monkeys were better.

[youtube]rkeOB699qfI[/youtube]

Yesterday, I popped on YouTube and ortoPilot's "Insecure" was a featured video. At first, it was hard for me to believe this guy was for real. Surely, he's lipsynching. What great guitar and great vocals -- and a great song ... must have been a cover.

OrtoPilot, according to this myspace page, is a one-man band from Manchester, England turned five-man band. OrtoPilot has an official web site. On that site, are several MP3s. So I made, "Insecure" today's free MP3 on MP3Caravan.com.

Great song. The YouTube acoustic version has more energy, but the full-band studio mix is probably more radio friendly (if radio friendly even matters any more).

BTW: If you're not subscribing to MP3Caravan's RSS feed, here it is.

Here's a great example of using attached video to improve a story, not try to make the story.

It comes to us from a post by Robert Freeman.

Rather than watching the news on TV and attempting to emulate the format, these publications should start by using video to illustrate better the stories they are already writing.

Here’s a good example from the Eastern Daily Press. It’s short, it’s got great pictures and it’s illustrative of the story it sits in. There’s nothing else. No ‘production value’, not even a voiceover.

That’s all you need to concentrate on doing at the moment, because reporters need time to develop those skills (which can all be taught incidentally). Walk, then run.

That's what I've been saying all along, of course. I am still surprised that the approach remains controversial in some quarters.

Jack Lail writes about newspaper video disrupting TV news inspired by a post from Michael Rosenblum.

Some commenters lambasted his post as promoting a type of journalism that's basically not professional enough. But the question is: Is it good enough?

I think the answer -- at least for now -- is that VJ, backpack, MoJo, or just reporter with a camera video can attract an audience and be disruptive to the traditioanl TV model. And while the production qualities are derided by the "pros," the viewers are watching.

Classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff. A lot of times, it isn't executives unwilling to fund change who hold back innovation, but middle managers and lower who can only conceive of doing their job one way. With web video, it's photographes and videographers who believe some fairly substantial standards must be maintained despite terrabytes of evidence that all consumers really want is "good enough." That's why TV stations will lose, and why newspapers that let photo staff dictate the terms of coverage are making a big mistake.

Dan Kennedy:

Not that we didn't all know this, but check out the latest from the General Social Survey, reported in today's New York Times.

...

The percentage of Americans who say they read a newspaper every day has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just over 30 percent.

So, do we blame:

• Bean counting publishers who trimmed staffs
• Dreams-of-glory journalists who chased too many big government stories instead of small people stories
• A turbulent media environment of too many choices and a rapidly shifting culture

There's plenty of blame to go around, I expect. And maybe no blame. Maybe that's just the way it is. Now the question is, how do we adapt and protect our investors, our co-workers and serve our communities (which includes readers and advertisers)?

I have my ideas, and regular readers probably have some clues as to what those are, but what are yours?

Google has found it exceedingly difficult to attract established B&M small business advertisers. Google AdSense, while simple to guys like us, is not necessarily easy, and operating an advertising program well takes time and attention. These are stumbling blocks for most small business owners.

The advantage for newspapers in selling low-cost, low-touch advertising are local relationships.

But Google isn't going to give up, and Greg Sterling observes that Google Apps may be the gateway into SMB hearts.

Google isn’t going to be able to convert the majority of those SMB Apps users into advertisers but it will acquire some of them. And as it grows the overall base of Apps users, Google will likely gain new SMB advertisers accordingly. This is the secondary benefit for Google of beefing up the productivity suite. Further, it reinforces Google’s brand and usage as well as creating more ad inventory in selected cases. And it could prove, over time, to be a reasonable and cost-effective way to more deeply penetrate the SMB market.

Are you ready to trust Google with all your proprietary business data? Apparently, a lot of businesses are.

Google's motto is famously, "don't be evil," and for the time being, I personally believe that Google is largely not evil and as well intentioned as any for-profit business. I believe Sergey and Larry genuinely want to be both helpful and profitable. That said, Google won't be growth juggernaut into infinity. Eventually, the growth engine slows and investors become restive. What then? What pressures will Google executives face to better leverage all of the data in its stores?

Just a thought ...

Of course, it's a promo piece for Apple products, but this profile of the Washington Post's web operation will give you a good glimpse of how this award-winning operation is put together and what it does.

Alan Mutter:

With inexpensive auto-focus and image-stabilization cameras now widely available – and PhotoShop at hand to rescue any less-than-successful effort – even reporters could be trained to take some decent shots.

Throughout my entire reporting career, I took my own photos. That was many years before digital cameras or even PhotoShop. In fact, when push came to shove, I could go into the dark room and process my own prints.

That said, I've come around to believing that photographers, still photographers, are going to be quite employable in the news game for a long, long time yet. There's no innovation yet that can replace a really good photographer.

It's been a big story: A Norwegian newspaper is generating 20 percent of its revenue from online.

People have e-mailed me the story, IM'd me links, blogged about it, spoken to me about it -- did you see this story?

There's one problem: It's not true.

At least, that's the way I read this post from Lucas Grindley.

Special note: Unfortunately, the IHT story's statement that online business comprises 20 percent of Schibsted's revenue conflicts with the company's own Web site, which says it's actually 20 percent of the profit. That's a big difference, not just a semantic one. I've gone with the number cited on the company's Web site. Truthfully, I don't know that 20 percent of profits is even noteworthy now that I'm thinking about it. Originally, I wrote this based on the IHT's understanding that it's 20 percent of revenues.

Twenty percent of profits is about normal for a well performing newspaper operation. It's not noteworthy at all.

It's also worth noting that if the Norwegian paper is reporting profits for online like most US newspapers (all, actually, I think), then the entire burden of paying for content falls on print advertising -- the content is essentially free to the online operation. There's no reason to believe that the web site is any where close to being able to stand on its own as a significant revenue engine.

In the comments on the post, there's more from Lucas:

I've just gone back and read the story for the fourth time very carefully. And with the stats from the media folks at Schibsted in hand, I think I understand now what the IHT was trying to say. It was trying to say that online is projected to become 20 percent of revenues, not that they are now. What is actually happening is that online accounts for 14 percent of total revenues, according to Schibsted’s own media folks.

Fourteen percent of revenue is good, but it is at best average for many US-based newspaper.coms. Certainly, many newspaper sites do worse, but at least some do better.

Right now, the two main ways newspapers get advertising video is to repackage a TV commercial or get a vendor such as Digital Media Communications to turn a print ad into something that is very video-like.

There may very well be a newspaper shop producing original advertiser video, but I don't know about it.

Greg Sterling:

Video is now very cheap to produce but the question is: who will shoot it for publishers? The newspapers (i.e., NY Times), for example, are training reporters to become pseudo-professional videographers. But you’re not going to ask the YP sales force to shoot commercials, notwithstanding the fact that YouTube and related sites have conditioned people to tolerate “production values” that fall below agency/Hollywood standards. (bold added)

Why not? Why couldn't an ad rep walk into an advertisers store with a point-and-shoot and get a few shots, return to an advertising artist who would edit the clips and create the online commercial?

At this stage, most small business owners would LOVE to have a video commercial on the web, even if it wasn't as slick as an ad agency might produce. It's called coming in at the low end. It's called disruption.

We learned while I was still with E.W. Scripps, Inc. that the JOA between the Cincinnati Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer would expire and not be renewed at the end of 2007. There was some speculation then that the paper would die. It looks like, it is going to die.

Not surprising, of course. It would be too expensive for a weak paper to gear up again to print and distribute a paper product.

Still, I said it then, and I'll say it now: Why let it die? The Post could be an incubator for the greatest experiment yet in online journalism. Why not use what life it has left to switch readers to a robust, interactive, user-focused web site? The kind of site that would have a fighting chance to thrive.

The marketing power of even a weak daily newspaper is enormous, so you could promote the crap out of the new site (plus the effort would create a lot of buzz and interest around town). All of the worries newsrooms and advertising people have about cannabilizing the print product -- worries that frankly hold back newspapers from creating the kind of web sites they should -- would be irrelevant. You could leverage all your existing advertising relationships, making it easier to switch revenue to online. You could keep most of your best editorial talent. You would be a hero to readers who understand the value of having an alternative to a Gannett-owned monopoly.
Scripps has the additional advantage of owning a strong TV station in the Cincinnati market.

What a great time to experiment with the notion of what happens when a print paper dies, and can the newspaper survive as an online only product?

This is a huge opportunity lost for Scripps, and the industry, to just let the Post die.

(via Romenesko)

It's nice to have a big media blog like CBS PublicEye link to my puny little site, but I just wish they had gotten the context right.

Howard Owens looks at the dustup and wonders: "Are we in danger of letting reader stats dictate coverage?"

But I didn't wonder that. I just said that has been a question.

I actually don't wonder about that at all, because I believe that smart journalists can figure out how to understand readership and produce ethically sound, socially redeeming content. I think there is room in journalism for both the news of Tom Brady's baby and the next Watergate. There is nothing wrong with giving people the candy they want so you can serve the Castor Oil they need.

That isn't to say that Will Sullivan doesn't have a valid point about the slippery slope, but I tend to think smart journalists will do well at striking a balance between what we learn from stats and what TradJ news hounds want to make sure we keep covering.

There's also an element of this that strikes me as arguing from the extremes. Any newspaper webmaster who has spent a good deal of time with story stats knows that measuring reader interest is really more complex than just a straight recitation of what's popular at any given moment in time.

Ever since the first online editor e-mailed to the newsroom a Top 10 list of the most read stories on the web site, the debate has raged:

• Why do readers want the sensational stuff?
• Are we in danger of letting reader stats dictate coverage?

There has always been an underlying conflict in journalism -- readers complain about sensationalism, but accidents, crimes, natural disasters and gossip help sell papers and spike TV ratings. On the web, we just get to witness the conflict in real time. Journalists want to be high minded, but they also want an audience.

Adam Reilly notes that the dueling values of readers and journalists are epitomized on one story on Boston.com: Tom Brady's love child. Readers complain, but it's also the most e-mailed story on the site. Umm ...

(Via Dan Kennedy)

Scott Karp points out that Digg owns its niche.

Digg is the apotheosis of niche media — of the niche, by the niche, and for the niche. Never has another media company so perfectly captured the interests and ethos of one defined group of people — in Digg’s case, under 25, male, liberal, interested in tech

There's a lesson here, I think, that goes beyond social bookmarking: If you can tap into a niche and let the user own the experience, you're onto something powerful. The question is, is hyperlocal potentially that kind of niche. I don't think anyone has quite figured it out yet. That's not to say there aren't good hyperlocal business models to be worked on, but can it really excite the kind of passion Digg has uncovered?

I guess I don't mind the merger of Sirius and XM so long as I don't lose any of the programming I enjoy, such as X-Country, the Loft, XM-Cafe, etc. And I can continue to avoid Stern.

Somehow, though, I don't have a good feeling about this.

I missed this a couple of weeks ago when it came out (Greg Sterling referenced in it a post today): A Harris poll has found that frequent YouTubers watch less TV.

Recent research by Harris Interactive^® suggests that this fear may indeed be warranted. Over four in 10 (42%) online U.S. adults say they have watched a video at YouTube, and 14 percent say they visit the site frequently. Almost one in three (32%) of these frequent YouTube users say they are watching less TV as a result of the time they spend there.

And they don't want pre-roll advertising.

If YouTube is considering airing ads before its videos, they may be advised to halt that thinking; 73 percent of frequent YouTube users say they would visit the site less if it started including short video ads before every clip.

What the poll doesn't seem to cover is the type of content YouTubers spend their time watching -- is it MSM clips, cats juggling, UGC, vlogs, or all of it? Also, how important is the community aspect of YT to frequent users?

From the tables on the link above, note that 36 percent of frequent users spend less time on other sites. Also, some 23 percent of the oldest age bracket watch video on YT, while among the 18 to 24 crowd, 73 percent have watched YT. On the flip side, 39 percent of 50 to 64 have watched video on an MSM site, but among the younger cohort, not so much. There's a lesson in there, I think, about how MSM is losing the young audience. The relatively low "somewhere else" numbers are where newspaper sites are losing out.

Jeff Jarvis misses the point, I think.

Most news is a commodity. And that which isn’t faces no end of competition. OK, so I can get the Wall Street Journal only because I pay. And, yes, it’s good. But there is plenty of other media coverage of business out there, covering mostly the same news. And I don’t have an expense account anymore. So I’ll find plenty that is good enough. If your content is not free, you have to compete with free, and that’s damned hard. Ask every classified manager who’s competing with Craig’s List.

If people wanted to pay for content, they would. But they don't, and unless you count buying books or DVDs or other content that isn't advertiser supported, they never have.

Newspaper subscribers have never paid for content. They have paid for delivery.

These days, I read thousands of words a content every day. I pay for all of it. But I don't pay the producers or publishers. I pay my computer maker and my broadband provider. I pay for delivery.

It isn't a matter of competing with free. If it were, Craig Newmark would already have put every newspaper classified ad department out of business. But most people aren't looking for free; they're looking for efficiency at getting the job done. In content, readers don't care that they are worth pennies on the dollar online vs. print; they expect us to figure out the business model to make content available at no direct charge. They just want efficient delivery, and because they pay for their digital devices and digital delivery providers, they've done their part. Now we need to do ours: Find a business model that works. That business model won't include charging consumers for news reports.

Jarvis is responding to Mark Potts.

UPDATE: Related, I just read this post by Cyndy Green about UGC, and she says: "Philosophically … in my gut … news should be a pubic service. The audience gets it free ... "

Now, I'm not saying this is any particular person's position, but it seems to me that a lot of people who argue in favor of paid content are journalists who believe the news has a value that should be compensated ... in other words, some variation of "high journalistic ideals" sort of thinking ... but if journalism serves a higher purpose besides profits, shouldn't it be free, stay free and always be free? Or to put it another way, do we want to deny equal access to news based on an ability to pay?

Cory Bergman wonders how local TV could have fallen so far behind in the race to make something out of online video.

To me, the answer is easy: It's broadcast vs. personal voice.

See my posts on personal journalism.

Generally, repurposing packaged goods media content for the digital doesn't work because the digital is a whole different way of communicating.

There are a lot of people in MSM who comfort themselves with the myth that YouTube is nothing but pirated video or cat juggling. For those among you, I post this link.

If it's not you, share with your friends.

If only it were so easy to let the government solve all our problems, or to expect some Utopian charity-model to save newspapers. Jason Salzman is the latest to pontificate on such magical thinking.

Despite the undeniable importance of newspapers, circulation is sliding, particularly among young people.

Economic models are not built on importance. They are built on supply and demand, need and desire.

You can create all the tax incentives you want, and cajole any number of rich people to turn newspapers into philanthropic causes, but if the product doesn't serve a purpose that sufficient numbers of people find useful, or if it fails to adequately address competitive pressures, it will not thrive, and it may not survive.

In the end, newspapers still need to be run like businesses. No matter what the ownership model, newspapers employ real people -- people with spouses and children and mortgages and car payments and aspirations for a better life. Ownership, no matter who or what it is, has a certain moral obligation, to keep the doors open.

You'd think newspapers are losing money. But no - the average profit margin for newspaper operations at publicly held companies was 17 percent during the first nine months of last year, according to Morton Research.

Sounds like a good money to me, and ad revenue from newspaper Web sites is climbing.

Yet, it's not good enough for Wall Street.

The problem with blaming Wall Street is that Wall Street isn't uniformly focused on short-term revenue. A good segment of investors, especially institutional investors, are more concerned about long-term viability. Sure, profit margins are 17 percent, which sounds great, until you consider that just a few years ago they were 20 percent, and a decade or two earlier, 30 to 35 percent was common. When profit margins fall that dramatically, any investor should get nervous. At the same time, newspapers have failed to articulate a vision for survival or demonstrate a basic grasp of the turbulent media environment, which further erodes the Street's confidence in our industry.

The exception, of course, is the Rocky's owner, E.W. Scripps, which is one of only a couple media companies holding newspapers that Wall Street likes.

Rocky owner E.W. Scripps announced Jan. 30 that it has no plans to sell its newspaper division, an idea that had been floated previously and sent Scripps stock to a 52-week high. After its announcement, which included lower-than-expected first-quarter earnings, Scripps stock witnessed its biggest single-day decline since 1990.

Except that, the issue isn't necessarily that investors view Scripps newspapers in bad light; it's just that the rest of the company is doing so much better than the newspapers. The rest of the company has an obviously bright future, and while (as a former employee of Scripps) I have a great deal of confidence in the newspaper.com division, Scripps still hasn't found the baby's arm holding the golden apple. That's not good in a sector that is viewed as regressive and shortsighted by investors.

Meanwhile, the rest of the company -- HGTV, Food, Shopzilla -- are focused on something entirely different than newspapers -- the broadcast and digital holdings are focused on giving people what they want (and doing it very well), while newspapers tend to focus more on giving people what journalists think they need.

And here we hit the crux of the problem that no amount of government interference will solve (btw: Do journalists really want to be that beholden to the government?). What good are tax breaks if newsrooms are producing products nobody wants?

Which brings me back to my point of running newspapers like a business: There has got to be a willingness to balance all of the journalistic idealism with an understanding audiences, strategy and creating products that remain relevant and desired. If we can't figure out how to do that, then neither the government nor charity can save us. And if we can, the greedy bastards who own us will be very, very happy.

If you're planning or have launched customized news pages, you better read this first. Yahoo! has been awarded a patent:

... a page server coupled to a network, a method of providing a customized page to a user, wherein the customized page is customized according to the user's preferences, the method comprising: obtaining real-time information from information sources; storing the real-time information in a shared local storage device ...

And it goes on ... fairly comprehensively covering, as far as I can grok it, customized pages. I would think Google and NetVibes will be in long meetings with attorneys on Monday trying to figure out where they stand.

You know, patents are supposed to foster innovation. I can't help but feel that patents like this and the Friendster patents, could hold back innovation. In this case, for example, there is still so much to learn about customized user experiences on the web. To have just one company control the idea could limit the opportunity for trial and error.

(via Greg Sterling)

Previously, I've written posts critical media companies jumping on the Second Life bandwagon and dedicating critical R&D resources to something that is unproven and has obvious flaws. What I haven't written about is how and why the press -- the people covering they hype -- hasn't been more skeptical of Second Life.

For the most part, the media has fallen all over itself to spread the meme that Second Life represents some sort of Utopian future for how we're all going to interact with each other some day.

Fortunately, the universe of web pundits includes a man as smart as Clay Shirky, who has produced a well constructed analysis of Second Life's unskeptical hype coverage. As a piece of media criticism, even if you have no interest in Second Life, it's an important post to read. Professors should assign it to college students.

First, the tech beat is an intake valve for the young. Most reporters don't remember that anyone has ever wrongly predicted a bright future for immersive worlds or flythrough 3D spaces in the past, so they have no skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML. Instead, they hear of a marvelous thing -- A virtual world! Where you have an avatar that travels around! And talks to other avatars! -- which they then see with their very own eyes. How cool is that? ...

Second, virtual reality is conceptually simple. Unlike ordinary network communications tools, which require a degree of subtlety in thinking about them ... As Philip Rosedale explained it to Business Week "[I]nstead of using your mouse to move an arrow or cursor, you could walk your avatar up to an Amazon.com (AMZN) shop, browse the shelves, buy books, and chat with any of the thousands of other people visiting the site at any given time about your favorite author over a virtual cuppa joe."

Never mind that the cursor is a terrific way to navigate information; never mind that Amazon works precisely because it dispenses with rather than embraces the cyberspace metaphor; never mind that all the "Now you can shop in 3D efforts" like the San Francisco Yellow Pages tanked because 3D is a crappy way to search. ...

Third, the press has a congenital weakness for the Content Is King story. Second Life has made it acceptable to root for the DRM provider, because of their enlightened user agreements concerning ownership. This obscures the fact that an enlightened attempt to make digital objects behave like real world objects suffers from exactly the same problems as an unenlightened attempt, a la the RIAA and MPAA. All the good intentions in the world won't confer atomicity on binary data. Second Life is pushing against the ability to create zero-cost perfect copies, whereas Copybot relied on that most salient of digital capabilities, which is how Copybot was able to cause so much agida with so little effort -- it was working with the actual, as opposed to metaphorical, substrate of Second Life.

Finally, the current mania is largely push-driven. Many of the articles concern "The first person/group/organization in Second Life to do X", where X is something like have a meeting or open a store -- it's the kind of stuff you could read off a press release. Unlike Warcraft, where the story is user adoption, here most of the stories are about provider adoption, as with the Reuters office or the IBM meeting or the resident creative agencies. These are things that can be created unilaterally and top-down, catnip to the press, who are generally in the business of covering the world's deciders.

The ability of a reporter (or a business person charged with developing new projects) to recognize hype is never a bad thing.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Rich Skrenta thinks its time to throw in the towel on "we media." Jeff Jarvis disagrees.

The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed. . . .There is actually a media revolution in the works. So what’s going on here? By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.

There we disagree. That’s the problem with PayPerPost, not with commercially supported media, big or small. And we have not even begun to plumb the possibilities of commercially supported networks of small media.

I think Rick's basic mistake, and one that Jarvis doesn't correct, is that Rick is seeing "we media" as just another entity. He's seeing the companies that do Web 2.0 sort of things as ends rather than something you ignore at your own peril. We Media exists, but not in any way that can be corralled by a definition that makes it a thing. And no company, or any collection of companies or individuals can own it. It is not a thing. It is an experience. You can't own the conversation. You can only participate. And you can't avoid participation. Every person, company or organization that puts communication out there is part of the conversation, whether it knows it, cares about it, likes it ... or not.

To judge We Media by any piece of its parts is to miss the point. The conversation has always been there -- in letters to the editor, in coffee-shop banter, in water-cooler talk -- it's just that digital media is bringing it to the fore in ways that are new, different, more egalitarian, more distributed, and I would say better.

Skrenta cannot honestly say Gillmor's "we the media" vision has failed. These blog posts prove otherwise.

I'm no fan of anonymous-source reporting. Getting a story through unnamed sources should be an exception (and a damn rare) one, not the rule.

Glenn Greenwald is unhappy with the recent spate of belt-way source hiding.

There are two serious and obvious dangers generated by reports which rely upon anonymous government sources -- (1) it allows the government to disseminate false and misleading claims without any accountability, and more importantly, (2) it elevates rank government propaganda to the level of "investigative reporting" by implicitly bestowing it with the appearance of journalistic approval. From Watergate forward, readers instinctively view information "leaked" by anonymous sources as more credible than formal government statements ...

I'm not being partisan here, or even entering into the current political debate, because both sides do it: So, my question is, why can't these supposedly highly trained, highly educated, elite, big media reporters see that they're just being used as propaganda tools? Since when has getting the story become more important than honest reporting?

(via Romenesko)

Google is working its way more and more into our business. Time will tell if their expanded offerings to publishers hurts or helps.

Not everybody, of course, is happy with Google's free ad server.

Now Google comes along attempting to deliver the coup de grace for ad servers: If your website is in one of Google's key ad categories, they say they'll give you an ad server for free in exchange for access to your inventory. Will publishers entrust their inventory to Google in order to save ad-serving charges? With the search giant encroaching on so many segments of our business, this is no sure bet, but it's available for those who dare.

This cannot be good news for commercial ad servers. Accipiter sold itself to Atlas recently, and perhaps others will seek shelter elsewhere.

Who needs Comedy Central on YouTube?
[youtube]NN3MGN899yE[/youtube]

(via Steve Smith)

Too many times when newspaper reporters start to blog, their posts are static, lifeless, too journalistic if not outright pedantic. Once in a while a reporter gets blogging right off. Meet William M. Hartnett. His posts so far are short, often funny and always personal. Good stuff. And he has a fine selection of cat photos, too.