ChasNote

Telstar Logistics, a spoof company of sorts, has zigged when its competitors zagged. As other publishers abandon their print-magazine efforts in favor of Web 2.0 editions, Telstar is bringing Web 2.0 to print. Welcome to the newsstand, Everywhere!

(Thanks, Justin!)

AdAge is launching a series of articles tracking the efforts of America’s 1,437 daily newspapers as they attempt to get their mojo (and revenues) back. The grim math by Annenberg’s Jeffrey Cole goes like this:

“‘When an offline reader of a paper dies, he or she is not being replaced by a new reader,’ he said. ‘How much time do they have? We think they have 20 to 25 years.’”

The series will also watch what the Project for Excellence in Journalism calls “decoupling of news and advertising.”

Here’s Battelle from a piece he contributed to American Express’s blog on the decoupling of content creation from advertising, about a month before the piece by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Some chart candy from Global Insights, originally published in BusinessWeek. Overall investment is up 2%, with the online segment up nearly 26%, broadcast TV down 1.5% and newspapers down more than 6%.

Not much good news for print newspapers, according to Eric Alterman’s piece in the New Yorker.

“Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago…. [T]rends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.”

According to the Economist, a recession (whether it’s in 2008 or 2009) will hit TV and print advertising sectors much harder than online advertising:

“In rich countries the internet is claiming a growing share of advertising—at the expense of traditional media, such as TV and print. There is still a gap between the time people spend online as a fraction of their media consumption (about a fifth) and the fraction of marketing budgets spent on the internet (about 7.5%). Many companies are trying to narrow the gap, which will sustain internet advertising during a downturn. Search advertising, the most effective kind of all, should be safest.”

While I agree with the obvious part — that anything done online is more trackable than something done offline — I hope a recession doesn’t serve as a time machine, pushing the online ad industry back to its roots as a blunt instrument for harvesting clicks and leads.

That’s the headline for Greg Jarboe’s column today at Search Engine Watch. I worked with Greg at Ziff-Davis in the mid 1990s and was at CMP before that, so it’s sad to see the group tombstone for the trade magazines that have gone under in recent years.

The good news is that the readers of those magazines did not suffer the same plight. They’ve just gone online and, in most cases, filled their informational needs with leading business blogs for their industry.

“According to Compete, 382,749 people visited Search Engine Watch in November 2007; 342,970 visited Search Engine Land; 278,014 visited WebProNews; 139,914 visited Marketing Pilgrim; 77,085 visited Search Engine Roundtable; and 32,398 visited Search Newz.

“This puts them in the same ballpark as the circulation of print publications: 440,000 for InformationWeek; 400,100 for eWeek; 58,979 for Advertising Age; and 23,152 for AdWeek.

“More to the point, the number of visitors to the online publications and group blogs covering the search industry is in the same ballpark as the number of visitors to the websites of trade publications in the technology or advertising industries.

“According to Compete, 424,773 people visited InformationWeek.com in November 2007; 331,060 visited eWeek.com; 213,900 visited AdAge.com; and 101,140 visited AdWeek.com.”

Nick Carr’s recent column for Guardian Unlimited is called, “How corporations still control the marketing conversation.”

I like the implied admission that these conversations — what we used to call publications — are controlled at some level by the corporations who pay the bills through advertising. (Excluding, of course, Ms Magazine and Consumer Reports.) Hey, admitting the problem is a great place to start! He even turns the mirror on his own sector of the media business:

“Even in traditional media, the line dividing marketing and editorial content has long been a blurry one. Many newspapers and magazines publish in their pages advertorials written by companies, even though they know that many readers don’t distinguish the paid content from the articles written by journalists.”

But, ironically, he concludes with this:

“It has long been assumed that the internet, by democratising media, would level the playing field, shifting power away from corporations and to individuals. A lone person, using a computer and a web connection, could broadcast his opinion about a company or a product to the entire world. There’s truth in that, but it’s not the whole truth. As the line between media and marketing blurs further, corporations are finding that the web may give them more power to influence what people see and do. In the end, conversational marketing is more about marketing than about conversation.”

When the NY Times let ATT wallpaper the print pages of the business section in January 2007, horrified readers didn’t have an easy channel to voice their feedback. Or when it has launched new sections of the newspaper — such as Automobiles or Small Business — not because there was suddenly more news about those topics, but because advertisers would pay the Times more if they wrote more stories on those topics, there was no forum for public discussion. When the Wall Street Journal promoted Dell advertorial videos as video news coverage (with another tech vendor’s commercials running before and after the advertorial, to make the ruse complete!) the traditional journalists at the Journal and its competitors looked the other way. When CNET, ZDNet, PC Magazine, CNN, Fortune, or Car and Driver have lent their voices, words, logos and names to advertisers for use in ad creative — it’s something we consumers just have to deal with, quietly.

When websites — especially the new generation of “conversational” sites that , oh my!, make it easy for their readers to express themselves right there in the publications (attached to the story itself, not on page 28 where “letters to the editor” are hidden) — explore more relevant approaches to advertising, they DO open themselves up for criticism, actively. They invite it, in fact, because they recognize their survival depends on listening to reader feedback and improving from it. Conversational media and conversational marketing certainly “level the playing field” and “shift the power away from corporations” more than old school media and marketing ever has. It ain’t perfect yet, but it’s a move in the right direction.

From Forbes, the September issue of Business 2.0 will be its last.

“…media outlets focused on startups and new technology haven’t shared in Silicon Valley’s resurgence. Venerable tech title InfoWorld cranked out its final print edition in April. One-time venture capital bible Red Herring–under new management since the tech bust–has struggled to pay its bills. PC Magazine’s editor-in-chief left that magazine after ad pages fell 33.5% through March of this year. Even one-time online powerhouse CNET Networks is reporting growing losses as the companies it covers flourish.

“Part of the explanation: Ad dollars that used to be spent touting new products in tech publications are being spent buying ads via sophisticated, keyword-based ad systems such as Google’s–a phenomenon that has helped power the tech industry’s resurgence. Meanwhile, fast-moving, low-overhead blogs are pushing into the territory once dominated by magazines such as the Industry Standard and Upside, and they’re sucking up many of the ad dollars that remain.”

An earlier Forbes article put even more of the blame on companies like FM:

“Meanwhile, Industry Standard founder John Battelle is keeping the bonfire of the print titles burning. His Federated Media Publishing is selling ads on more than 100 blogs, giving ad buyers the ability to spend big money on a collection of highly specialized sites–many of them focused on tech–that suit their needs. ‘If Cisco has to spend, I don’t know, a couple of million dollars on a trade campaign, they are not spending it with Red Herring or Business 2.0. They are spending it with Federated Media, with bloggers who cover the sector,’ says Rafat Ali, editor and publisher of online media tracker PaidContent.org.”

Over the past 2 years, FM has worked with dozens of advertisers and 100+ leading independent authors, editors and publishers in an effort to give readers and marketers a better opportunity to talk to each other. We call it “conversational marketing.”

The idea is simple. The best publications have always been dialogs between great writers, passionate readers, and, yes, advertisers. This “conversation” is more obvious and more iterative among today’s social media communities, but it’s been happening since long before the Internet. The most successful advertisers have always been the ones that recognize and respect this conversation — rather than those who see media as a “delivery platform” for their pitch or an opportunity to “target their demo.” Advertisers that license New Yorker cartoons for their print ads in that publication, Wired advertisers that write ad copy in the definitive grammar of that publication, and tech advertisers that re-use in their ad units favorable reviews from CNET and PC Magazine are three examples.

To be clear, I’m not talking about advertorials; I’m talking about ads, those things that every human over the age of 7 recognizes as paid messages from a marketer. Provided publishers follow two long-standing guidelines — be transparent, listen to reader feedback — advertisers can join the conversation without tainting anyone’s credibility.

During the 1990s hey-days of tech magazines, readers of PC Magazine and PC World said they spent as much time with the ads as they did the editorial content. And that’s not because IT professionals are so dumb they can’t tell the difference (please!) — it’s because ads that work hard to join the conversation, to be relevant to participants in that conversation, are more valuable than generic ads that attempt to interrupt the conversation and steal your attention for half a minute.

This is all to say: I’m a believer that highly relevant advertising — advertising that joins the conversation — is better for all involved parties.

So I took issue with Nick Denton’s Friday post on ValleyWag accusing some of the web’s most highly respected, most experienced professional journalists of selling out their credibility to help Microsoft bring more relevant ads to their readers.

One of Microsoft’s marketing messages is built around the phrase “people ready,” and the equation “software + people = business success.” It’s a mouthful, and — to me, anyway — not immediately digestible. So, working with FM, Microsoft invited 8 FM authors to talk about the concept of “people ready” in their own words, in language that might resonate better with their readers. What those authors wrote was featured in the campaign that ensued.

Did Microsoft ask the authors to endorse their brand, use their products, or tell their readers what to do? Of course not.

Did Microsoft or these journalist try to sneak these ads past their readers, in a costume of editorial or even advertorial? Nope. Microsoft paid for ad impressions, and the rates for advertising on each of these sites is published at FM’s website. Quite obviously, Microsoft was running paid ads on their sites. John Battelle took the added measure of blogging about his participation in the campaign (see Searchblog) — and that’s a great idea to make the self-evident even more evident!

Did readers get confused by what they were looking at in those ad banners? Well, Cisco did something similar last fall, around their “Welcome to the Human Network” campaign. A dozen leading tech and business journalists affiliated with FM wrote their own definitions of “human network” that they let Cisco use in ad banners on their sites. Like Microsoft, Cisco didn’t guide or edit or participate in the copy written by these journalists. And readers seemed OK with the project. Thousands of them clicked on the Cisco ads to read more definitions and voted on their favorites. Nearly 900 of them went back to their own blogs and wrote up the experience (not all were positive reviews, but most were). The Wikipedians added “human network” as entry to their encyclopedia, and made reference to Cisco’s “commercial use of the phrase,” so the distinction between advertising and editorial was clear to them, too. And for the past 2 months — the Microsoft campaign started running on these sites in April — readers of those sites haven’t raised an outcry.

So there’s a fair amount of evidence Denton is raising a stink all by himself. Or perhaps his disdain for the advertisers that support his business (Gawker Media), our business (Federated Media), and every other ad-supported content business online or offline, is so great that he feels they don’t belong in the conversation at all. Except, of course, the conversation in which they agree to pay him, then shut up. At FM, we think that — for commercially supported sites, anyway — marketers might just have something to add to the conversation. And we’ll keep working on innovative ways for them to do just that.

Other coverage:

Robert Scoble at Scobleizer.
Fred Wilson at AVC.
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch.
Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web.
Don Park at Daily Habit.
Neil Chase at FM’s blog.
John Battelle at FM’s blog.
Om Malik at GigaOM.
Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed.

Stephen Baker at Business Week says “I thought BW had clout, but Michael Arrington at TechCrunch appears to have a level of influence I have never seen at the magazine.” Business Week says that TechCrunch is more influential than Business Week??  What an endorsement!