Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A survey in the West pointed out the obvious: news consumption is declining. Jeff Jarvis feels that old media is still “chasing the wrong horse”: news consumers. He says that the world has moved to the engaged reader, one who wants customized news and not the one-size-fits-all version of news, wants it available when needed, not just at predetermined times. Now that’s the very definition of online news, isn’t it? Others could (rightly) argue that personalizing news means people just read whatever views they already subscribe to, and whatever topics interest them already. Where is the expansion of horizons, they wonder? Where is the opportunity for serendipity, they lament. On the other hand, is that just editorial ego , as Jarvis wrote in another blog: “It’s all about us , about  our  content, about how  we  want to make it, how  we  want to present it to you, how we  organize it, how  we  make money on it, how  we  protect ...

When I was a kid, a Hollywood blockbuster would take months to come to India (if at all). Same with TV shows. Now, simultaneous worldwide releases are becoming quite common. And at times, even big name movies, like the recently released The Amazing Spider-Man 2 gets released in India before the US! TV shows are getting broadcast in India within days (or a week or two) of the US/BBC broadcast. The reasons are easy to see: there is no longer the constraint of only so many reels; digital content can be sent almost instantly to any corner of the planet; and if they wait too long, people would have already seen the pirated version. But with music, the digital medium has changed things in a different way. Describing Beyoncé’s last album released on 13 Dec last year, David Hepworth points out something very strange : “The window of ballyhoo around a big album, which in the past would have lasted a couple of months, was finished in a week, leaving the rest of us wondering whether ...

A couple of years back, my dad had commented about the tendency of the news media to “be irresponsible, sensation-mongers, emotion-whippers, a gang that succumbs to the rot of commercialization”. Of course, things have just gotten worse since then. Many ads look exactly like content: there's even a term for it, the advertorial. There's nothing new about this (magazines have had such sections for ages), but now it's becoming hard to tell the difference between an ad and content since even the font, layout and background looks like regular content. Check out this Economic Times advertorial from 2 years back to see what I mean: Hard to say which is the advertorial in the pic above, right? (It's the one titled “Move Towards ‘CoreFirst’ Competence”). And the digital world just followed that trend. Last week, the New York Times unveiled its new website design with some articles labeled as “paid post” and a blue line for demarcation. But Emily Bell worries : ...

Chris Anderson, curator of TED and author of The Long Tail is a smart guy. And his book on the economics of Free makes for interesting reading. In that book, he points out an interesting difference between the physical and digital worlds when it comes to placement of ads and content. Anderson points out that traditional media build a Chinese Wall “between their editorial and advertising teams, to ensure that advertisers cannot influence the editorial e.g. by ensuring that a car ad is not next to a car story or a Sony ad anywhere near our reviews of Sony products.” In the digital world, he points out that companies like Google do the exact opposite: they match ads with content! Having made this observation, he then tries to analyze why such matching is taboo in print but so successful online…and with no loss of credibility? I was surprised Anderson doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. In print, the magazine/newspaper is the content provi...