If there was a bright spot in the latest quarterly results from the New York Times, it’s the fact that the newspaper’s metered paywall has attracted almost 325,000 subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee for the site. Despite all the celebrating from the pro-paywall camp, however, that bright spot was more than overshadowed by the other dark clouds in the numbers — including the fact that print advertising revenue continues to decline, and the paper’s former online jewel About.com got whacked by Google’s algorithm updates. Anyone who takes on the job of CEO at the media company is going to have to start thinking creatively about its business, because all the easy money has already been made.

Although the paywall and related print-subscription deals helped boost circulation revenue by almost 5 percent in the NYT’s media group — which includes the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune — and digital advertising revenue was also up by about 5 percent for the quarter, neither of those things were able to compensate for the continued drop-off in print advertising. Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of million.

Paywall revenue isn’t even close to making up the gap

The New York Times didn’t provide any helpful charts that would make the reality of this situation more obvious, so one blogger decided to come up with his own. Paul McMorrow, an editor at CommonWealth magazine, put together a chart that shows the contrast between the NYT’s advertising revenue, circulation revenue and its total revenue:

According to newspaper-industry analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT is probably pulling in about million or so from its digital paywall — or “metered access,” as the paper likes to call it, since you get to read 20 articles for free before you get hit with a request for your credit card. But that’s not even close to being enough to make up for the decline in ad revenue, both print and digital, which dropped by 7 percent in the quarter.

One of the biggest problems for the Times is that its former online star About.com, which the company bought in 2005 for 0 million, has seen both its profitability and revenue-generating ability implode in the wake of an update to Google’s search algorithm — a change that was designed to penalize what the company called “low quality” content sites, or what some call “content farms.” In the most recent quarter, the NYT said About’s revenue fell by 26 percent, and profit fell by a staggering 67 percent.

As McMorrow’s chart shows, the Times is still far under water in terms of revenue, despite the benefit of its paywall. As I’ve argued before, there’s nothing wrong with having a paywall — although in many cases it amounts to building a wall of sandbags around the print newspaper edition, which provides most of the ad revenue — but if a paywall is your only strategy for responding to digital disruption of the media business, then you are almost certainly doomed, whether you are the New York Times or not.

Which way will the new CEO go — towards the past or the future?

So what should a new CEO be looking at to revitalize the NYT for a digital age? Ken Doctor suggests that the paper needs to look beyond just subcription revenue and focus on how it can target those 325,000 digital subscribers — since it knows who they are and where they live, and it already has their credit-card numbers.

I would take it one step further, however, and suggest that the new CEO think about some of the suggestions about “reverse paywalls” that have been made by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, and also by former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti (who is now at the Wall Street Journal in a digital role). The main principle behind this idea is that regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.

The NYT has taken a few steps towards trying to build relationships with its readers through what I’ve called the “levelling up” process that it recently added to its comment section, where readers can achieve preferred status for good behavior. Those are the building blocks of a relationship that the paper could use to its own benefit in all kinds of ways, many of which could generate new sources of revenue — real-life events, for example, which has been one of the things that has helped turn The Atlantic around, or a line of e-books based on the newspaper’s original reporting.

Another thing the NYT could — and should — be thinking about is what the role of an information provider is in the digital age. Is it to act as a gatekeeper for certain kinds of data and try to reimpose the scarcity that used to exist in the print era? Or is it to find partners to distribute that information in as many ways as possible, and to think of the paper as a data platform, as The Guardian has with its open-platform project? One way looks to the past, and the other to the future. Which way will the NYT go?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users jphilipg and Giuseppe Bognanni

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Digging your 3D TVs, video game consoles and laptops? Thank the past — the New York Public Library is here to remind you that streographic entertainment has been blowing minds for over 100 years, and has the animated gifs to prove it. The Library recently introduced Stereogranimator, a web app that taps into the institution’s large collection of historical stereographs and allows user to convert them into wiggling GIF animations and 3D anaglyphs. The program was inspired by “Reaching for the Out of Reach,” a manual labor of animated stereographs started by San Francisco artist Joshua Heineman. The library currently has over 40,000 pairs of stenographic images just begging to be converted to depth-suggesting wigglepic. Interested? The link is below, friends — go ahead and create your own psudeo-3D view of history. Too lazy to make your own? Fine, read on for a shaky and colorful look at an orange tree.

Continue reading NY Public Library turns stereographs into animated GIFs, reminds your 3D TV of its roots

NY Public Library turns stereographs into animated GIFs, reminds your 3D TV of its roots originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ripples continue to spread from a recent Oregon court ruling involving a blogger who was sued for defamation, and argued that she should be covered by the state’s “media shield” law. The judge decided that she didn’t qualify as a journalist, which in turn reignited the old debate over whether bloggers are (or can sometimes be) journalists. Some have argued that instead of this question, it’s more important to define what journalism is, and ensure that it remains protected. But in many ways, that is even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist.

To recap the case, Crystal Cox — who refers to herself as an “investigative blogger” — was sued for defamation as a result of some blog posts she wrote about a company and its CEO. The judge who heard the case looked at Cox’s blog and ruled that she wasn’t a member of the media, at least for the purposes of Oregon’s media shield law, because she wasn’t affiliated with any traditional media outlets. This caused a wave of outrage in the blogosphere from many (including me) who believe that bloggers can be journalists regardless of whether they work for a mainstream media entity.

We shouldn’t be protecting journalists, but journalism

In the wake of the ruling, several bloggers — including Kashmir Hill at Forbes and David Carr of the New York Times — noted that Cox’s behavior went way beyond what most journalists (professional or not) would describe as journalistic: among other things, she created domains aimed at tarnishing the reputation of her targets, and then apparently sent an email to the company offering her services as an SEO consultant to repair the reputation she helped destroy.

As Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic pointed out, this allowed journalists everywhere to heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: “She’s not a journalist; she’s just a crazy lady with WordPress! We don’t need to protect her.” But this avoids the real question, said Rosen — not who is or isn’t a journalist, but what is journalism and how do we make sure that it is protected? The framers of the U.S. constitution weren’t concerned with journalists, she said, because they didn’t even exist yet as we know them. Instead, they wanted to protect free speech regardless of who engages in it.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen has made a similar point: we should be talking about protecting journalism, he says, not just trying to figure out who is a journalist. But how do we define what constitutes journalism? The judge in the Oregon case tried to come up with some qualities that he said Cox didn’t exhibit, including:

• proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
• keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
• mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
• creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others
• contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story

All of these are excellent examples of things that some journalists do — but there are plenty who don’t, and practices are all over the map. The point about confidentiality alone is probably ignored by more journalists than adhere to it (not to mention the confusion over the exact meaning of phrases like “off the record,” “on background” and “not for attribution”). Should licensing bodies be giving tests, the way they do for doctors and lawyers before they are accredited? Some think they should. Josh Stearns of the non-profit group Free Press, who has been tracking journalists arrested during the crackdown on the Occupy movement, argues that actions should speak louder than labels.

How do we classify “random acts of journalism?”

Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire about the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, noted that he wouldn’t meet many definitions of a journalist because he isn’t actually a reporter — and I doubt that he maintains detailed notes of the conversations he conducts with people in the Arab world over Twitter, or discusses confidentiality agreements with them in depth. He also does a lot of “assembling the writings and postings of others,” as the judge put it. But I don’t think anyone would argue that what Carvin is doing isn’t journalism.

When a Pakistani Twitter user posted observations about the Osama bin Laden raid while it was happening, a debate sprang up about whether what he did qualified as journalism, and Carvin argued that there are more and more examples of what he called “random acts of journalism,” where someone happens to be in a certain place and provides on-the-scene reporting — or takes a photo of a plane that has landed in the Hudson River, for example.

Are these people journalists? Not really. But what they are doing is clearly one of the crucial elements of journalism now — as journalism becomes an ecosystem that anyone can become part of, rather than a static concept associated with a specific group of professionals and a specific group of platforms. Learning how to work within that process, to add journalistic skills (however we define them) to the streams of information that are flowing over us, is more crucial than ever, regardless of what we call the people who do that.

I think we have to resist the temptation to restrict our definition of journalism, just because there is some bad journalism out there (something there was plenty of before the internet and blogging came along). As Jay Rosen argues, journalism gets better when more people do it, and we should think about how to make that easier, not harder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Yan Arief Purwanto and Petteri Sulonen

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Now, on a surface level this might seem intuitive considering how many apps are available on the two platforms. But the figures show that the top two operating systems account for a bigger chunk of app downloads than their relative footprint would logically suggest. Competitors also have apps, but these two are the leading destinations for people who are eager for mobile software.

That shows why it’s hard to break into the top of the smartphone market, which is dominated by what the New York Times‘ David Pogue calls “app phones.” It’s not enough to have elegant hardware, you have to bring a very vibrant and broad app market to consumers, too. That’s partly why iOS and Android are sitting pretty: they offer a lot of very compelling apps that make money for developers, more so on iOS but increasingly so on Android.

For competitors like BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 to compete, they need to really bring the app heat as well. Both are working hard on doing so, but it’s hard to close the distance when iOS and Android have such a lead. And that lead also benefits Google and Apple through app lock-in, in which consumers may be reluctant to leave a platform because they have a lot of apps and data tied into one operating system. Getting someone to switch to a new platform requires a big commitment from a user, who has to know that the apps they want will be waiting for them on a new platform and that the transition, which may involve losing data, will be worth it.

Of course, the app market and the growth of the platforms are somewhat intertwined. Developers like to place their bets on the biggest and most profitable platforms and a big library of apps can help sell a platform. For someone who’s starting behind on apps, or whose device sales are fading or sluggish, it’s tough to break that cycle after it’s well under way. I think Windows Phone 7 probably has the best shot at escaping the downward spiral and gaining some momentum, but looking at the competition through the lens of the app advantage, I think it will be a harder road for Microsoft then the rosy projections painted by Gartner and IDC, who predict WP7 displacing iOS by 2015 as the chief rival to Android. The app ecosystem is a key factor to achieving that uptake.

Nokia chief Stephen Elop said as much when he announced that the move to Windows Phone 7 for Nokia smartphones was led by the need to compete on ecosystems. But I think it’s tough to keep building that ecosystem when you’re not selling that many phones. Nokia’s introduction of new phones will certainly help, but consumers are still going to see more apps on Android and iOS. And developers are going to need to see a lot more momentum before they really support WP7. There is hope for WP7, based on a recent Appcelerator/IDC developer survey, which found that WP7 was pulling away from BlackBerry as the third most popular smartphone option for developers. But WP7 will also have to vie for developer attention with the Kindle Fire, which is now the top Android tablet in the minds of Appcelerator developers.

I still hope that we’ll see more than just a two-horse race in smartphones. And it’s certainly possible we will see WP7 and BlackBerry rise to the challenge. But they’re going to have to offer competitive app marketplaces for consumers and developers. The emergence of HTML5 web apps might offset some of the existing advantage, but even if it does, it will likely take a while to really get going. For now, Android and iOS, with their app advantage, are enjoying the view from the top, without much fear of tumbling from their perch.

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Those early shares of Nanosolar that Hoffman bought are likely worth a decent amount at this point. Other seed investors at the time included Spring Ventures investor Sunil Paul, Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Benchmark Capital.

Nanosolar was reportedly worth billion at one point in 2008 when it last raised money, but I’m not sure how the company is valued now. As the demand for solar panels, particularly one’s not made of silicon, has dropped dramatically this year, and thin film solar companies have struggled, I wouldn’t be surprised if that valuation has dropped, too.

Back when Hoffman made that investment in Nanosolar, then colleague at PayPal Peter Thiel bought a Ferrari with his earnings, says the New York Times. Thiel has gotten a lot of attention recently for calling cleantech investing “a disaster.” 

So who was right back then: Thiel or Hoffman? Will Nanosolar struggle like its peer Solyndra has, going bankrupt partly due to cheap Chinese solar panels, and making Hoffman’s seed investment worthless? (And idealistic compared to Thiel’s sports car splurge). Or will the company be one of the solar leaders and add more cash to Reid’s coffers if it gets bought for a high amount of goes public?

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Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package, although most are trying hard to build an online readership as well, or experiment with iPad and Facebook apps (not to mention paywalls). But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today  appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking “open platform.”

USA Today has had an API (an “application programming interface,” which allows outside developers and services to access its content) for some time now, as many other newspapers such as the New York Times  do. But like most of those other media outlets, the terms of the USA Today content API said it could only be used for personal or non-commercial uses, which meant the range of applications that could make use of the paper’s content was extremely limited. Now, the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that the newspaper has changed the terms of its API, and will allow commercial licensing of its data, with no rate limits or data caps for these “premium” licenses.

Opening up a relationship with outside developers

The paper’s APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data — which is made up of public data, but has been collected by USA Today and made available in a more usable format than the original government version (although most of its APIs require non-commercial use, the New York Times allows commercial use of its government-info API, which is also made up of public data). Stephen Kurtz, VP of digital development at USA Today, told the Nieman Lab that most of the developers interested in using the paper’s APIs for commercial use are “mom-and-pop” shops, or a couple of guys in a garage, mashing up the content they get with other sources — such as combining USA Today movie reviews with data from Netflix. Said Kurtz:

We encourage that, and they give us good feedback of what they’d like to see and how they would like the API to grow. So for us, it’s very symbiotic.

This is a smart way to think of what an open API accomplishes. It’s not so much that it’s going to generate huge sums of money for a newspaper that offers it, but it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself — and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback. For The Guardian, which launched its “open platform” approach last year, the opening up of its API was very much an extension of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s belief in what he calls a “mutualized newspaper,” one in which readers and those outside the publication help on both the journalistic side and the development side.

Those outside the paper have good ideas too

As Chris Thorpe, then the Guardian‘s developer advocate, described in an interview with me last year when the open platform launched, the paper’s API allows for access on several levels: one is the original free level, which allows anyone to use the data for personal or non-commercial purposes; the second is a commercial license, which allows developers to make use of the API provided they agree to accept advertising within the content; and the third is a “bespoke” arrangement, in which developers can request specific data and work with the paper to build a service or app — and then share in the revenue generated from it.

The British paper has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. For example, Thorpe has a prototype of a site he calls the “Later Today” Guardian: the site takes the newslists that the newspaper recently made public, which detail which stories it is working on for a particular day, and then maps them against the stories that the paper actually produces. Not only that, but it also notes which ones are in the process of being updated, so readers with useful information can contact the author via Twitter or email.

It’s great that newspapers like the New York Times have “labs” like Beta620, where their staff can experiment with different formats and services based around their content. But one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API? That’s a worthwhile attitude that more traditional media outlets could benefit from. Embedded below is the video interview I did with Thorpe when the open platform launched.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Arvind Grover and George Kelly

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Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” — in which apps from services like Spotify and publishers like The Washington Post  can post a user’s activity to their wall, without asking for permission for every item — has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is a worthwhile addition or a massive invasion of privacy. Consumer advocacy groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center are arguing the latter, and have even asked the government to step in, while some users have deleted their Facebook accounts in protest. But there’s an argument to be made that Facebook isn’t forcing anyone to share; it’s simply adapting to the increasingly social way that we are living our lives online.

EPIC and the American Civil Liberties Union seem to be making the case that even if users get the choice to share a continuous stream of their activity through one of Facebook’s new “social apps,” they will either forget that they have done this or not understand the consequences of their choice, and therefore will wind up sharing more than they should — sharing that the advocacy groups argue benefits only Facebook, since it gets more personal data. Said EPIC director Mark Rotenberg:

The main point is that Facebook is encouraging users to ‘share’ information in ways that they do not truly control because it is Facebook that ultimately determines who will have access to the information users provided

To some, “frictionless sharing” has more than a few echoes of Facebook’s ill-fated “Beacon” project from 2007, which posted a user’s activity at third-party websites and services to their Facebook wall, but was eventually shut down after criticism over the privacy implications. According to former New York Times  developer Michael Donohoe, the newspaper initially worked with Facebook on a social app similar to the one launched by the Washington Post and The Guardian, but decided the “frictionless sharing” concept seemed like an invasion of users’ privacy, even though users would get full control over whether they chose to share their activity through the app.

The inevitable privacy backlash

Gizmodo writer Mat Honan and others are protesting by either deleting their Facebook accounts or saying they will never use any service that requires Facebook Connect, and longtime web-programming guru Dave Winer says he is also scared by what Facebook is proposing. Spotify, meanwhile, has had to roll out a private-listening option after an outcry over its new frictionless-sharing features, and the fact that users can’t join the service unless they have a Facebook account. I’ve even noticed an uptick in people trying out would-be Facebook competitor Diaspora as well, although it has had little traction since it launched last year.

While it’s tempting to see frictionless sharing as just another cynical attempt by Facebook to get more personalized data that it can use to target advertising (based on the principle that if you aren’t paying for the service, then you are the product that is being sold), there are some clear benefits for users from this kind of sharing. Has Facebook moved too quickly, or overstepped what some feel are the boundaries of privacy? Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it is going in the wrong direction.

As with many other features of the network, seeing what Facebook calls “lightweight” activity in the Ticker, such as friends listening to songs or reading articles or watching movies, is a way of staying in touch — however briefly — with those friends and connections. It may be noisy, and much of it may be uninteresting, but it also exposes you to serendipitous experiences. I’ve already found music and video clips I’m interested in just by watching that activity. It also fits right in with the concept that underlies Facebook and most social networking, which is what user-interface designer Leisa Reichelt has called “ambient intimacy”: the idea that there’s something to be gained by having transient and lightweight connections to people in your life.

The news feed was controversial too

That concept was also behind another Facebook feature that caused a huge outcry of criticism and led to people quitting the network in droves — namely, the news feed. It seems so obvious and commonplace now that it’s hard to remember when the news feed didn’t exist, but there was a lot of backlash to the feature when it first launched in 2006. Many users seemed uncomfortable with the idea that their activity on the site — whose status they “liked,” whose photos they commented on, etc. — would be broadcast to other Facebook users all the time.

In a lot of ways, that was Facebook’s first experiment in “frictionless sharing,” and it proved to be hugely popular and successful. The news feed is the core of what makes Facebook so virally popular with many users — and what makes them spend longer on the network than virtually every other social website combined, according to a recent survey from Nielsen about our online social behavior.

That kind of success, along with Facebook’s rollout of other features that also push the sharing envelope, has undoubtedly convinced Zuckerberg that his “law of social sharing” — that the amount of data people share doubles every year — is a good predictor of what people will do, regardless of what they say they will do, or how much they criticize features like frictionless sharing from social apps. And soon, the idea that apps are sharing a continuous stream of our activity will seem just as commonplace and uncontroversial as the original news feed.

So is frictionless sharing good or bad? The answer, as with most things that involve Facebook, is a little of both. Some people will probably never accept that the network is pushing them to share more, and will always be suspicious of what might happen to that data, and there will no doubt be incidents when the data is used improperly or leads to something embarrassing. But social sharing online isn’t going away any time soon; it’s not just the core of Facebook, but the organizing principle of the modern web — Facebook is just a symptom of that change, not the cause.

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As most media watchers know by now, the industry is going through an unprecedented upheaval, with newspapers in particular being disrupted by the shift to digital and what Om has called the “democracy of distribution” created by real-time social tools like blogs and Twitter, which make anyone into a publisher.

So while news used to be a tightly-controlled product from a few mainstream sources, there is now an explosion of content from virtually everywhere — some of it good and much of it not so good. At Google’s recent Zeitgeist symposium, legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel suggested that it is somehow Google’s duty to fix this problem, and CEO Larry Page seemed to agree. But relying on Google to choose what news we should read is a very slippery slope.

According to a report in the New York Times, the topic came up when Koppel — a former long-time anchorman for ABC News — said that too much of what passes for news nowadays is trivial and sensationalistic, with networks and media outlets spending all their time covering things like the Casey Anthony trial instead of more important topics such as war in the Middle East or famine in Africa. The NYT report paraphrases Koppel as saying that people are being “fed the news they want instead of the news they need because that makes news organizations money.”

Asked by New Yorker editor Nicholas Thompson whether Google should tweak its algorithms to focus on important news instead of the trivial, Koppel apparently said “that wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Later, Page said (although not in direct response to Koppel’s suggestion) that he thinks Google should filter and present the news so that people focus on “the real issues.”

I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media… we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about. And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of that at all.

Do we need Google to tell us what to read?

As the NYT points out, Google already edits its search results — both news-related and otherwise — for all sorts of reasons: it removes sources that it believes are scraping content, for example, or that are not producing “journalism” broadly speaking, such as a site that posted rewritten press releases from the California water authority. And it undoubtedly chooses to favor certain popular sources of content (including the New York Times, in all likelihood) over others. As Reuters digital editor Anthony De Rosa noted in a tweet, almost all algorithms are to some extent human filters that make choices to include or exclude certain things. And Google has added ways for media outlets to help filter — such as the “author” tag and the new “standout” tag for breaking or important news.

That said, however, do we really need Google (or Ted Koppel, for that matter) to tell us what is important, or what we “need” to know? That would just be exchanging one information gatekeeper for another — and one that would be using criteria that are a mystery to users, just as Google’s search algorithms are a mystery. Does my clicking +1 on a search result matter more because I have a Google+ account with lots of followers? I have no idea, nor will Google probably ever tell me. How exactly is Google going to determine what news topics or stories are ones that I “should” read?

One of the main benefits of the web from a news standpoint is the fact that the number of sources have expanded by orders of magnitude. Are there too many outlets obsessing over Casey Anthony, or the Kardashians, or the size and shape of a specific phone that may or may not be coming from Apple? Sure. But getting Google to hide some of them and promote others doesn’t seem like a great solution.

Getting Google to choose topics and/or sources that are “important” suffers from the same problem that licensing journalists does. That’s an idea that Britain’s Labour Party and some other jurisdictions have proposed, and one that some professional journalists have supported in a short-sighted response to hacking allegations against News Corp. (and an attempt to build a wall around their jobs). Who is going to choose the criteria such licenses are based on? And what about those who don’t get a license? They would wind up being silenced or relegated to some kind of journalistic ghetto, presumably.

Journalism gets better the more people there are doing it

I’m a firm believer in journalism professor Jay Rosen’s argument that journalism gets better when more people are doing it — whether those people have licenses, whether they are committing what NPR’s Andy Carvin calls “random acts of journalism,” and whether they even think of themselves as journalists or not. The rise of blogs and Twitter as tools for publishing news (however you define that term) is fundamentally a good thing. And we get to create our own filters now, instead of someone else doing it for us.

As for Koppel’s criticism that people are fed the news they want and not the news they need, this complaint is as old as the industry itself. There have been many periods when newspapers and other dominant media outlets tended towards the sensationalistic, with little regard for things like the truth, or what was allegedly important about the world. Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, for example, was famous for this kind of coverage. His practice led to the coining of the term “yellow journalism.” Hearst was also famous for telling a reporter covering the Spanish-American war: “you provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”

There will be times when people want to read sensationalistic stories about trivial episodes involving Hollywood celebrities, just as there are times when people want to watch movies or TV shows filled with vapid blather and sophomoric writing. Does that mean we need Google to control which shows we watch or what movies we enjoy? Hardly. So why would we want a search engine to filter the news for us? Yes, the news is more important than TV or movies — which is all the more reason why we should be careful about who is telling us what to read.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Yan Arief Purwanto

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As the New York Times  reported on Monday morning, micro-blogging platform Tumblr has closed a massive round of new financing:  million from existing investors including Greylock Partners and Union Square Ventures, as well as new backers including Virgin mogul Sir Richard Branson. The funding comes amid continued meteoric growth for the platform, which has gone from just 2 billion page views a month to 13 billion in less than a year, and now hosts 30 million blogs. Just as the rise of blogging did several years ago, Tumblr’s success contains lessons for media companies of all kinds, and the main one is that social sharing can be an incredibly powerful force if you make it as easy as possible.

Earlier this month, Tumblr said it had racked up more than 10 billion blog posts, and recent figures from comScore showed it had 13 million unique visitors a month in the U.S. — up more than 200 percent from the same period a year earlier — and Quantcast stats show it has close to 300 million unique visitors a month worldwide. By comparison, the WordPress blogging platform (please see disclosure below) has close to 60 million blogs using the service, and about 2.5 billion page views a month on WordPress.com, where about half of those blogs are hosted, and draws about 300 million unique visitors.

So while WordPress has more blogs, Tumblr is far bigger in terms of page views, and those numbers are continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate: Founder and CEO David Karp told angel investor and Hunch founder Chris Dixon in an interview earlier this year that the Tumblr network was adding more than 250 million page views every week. And the traffic-measurement service Royal Pingdom recently noted that Tumblr is seeing close to 40 million posts daily, which works out to more than 400 every second.

Tumblr is like blogging and Twitter combined

As we’ve described before, Tumblr isn’t really a blogging platform in the same way that WordPress and other similar services are. Or rather, it’s more than just a blogging platform in some fairly crucial ways. In terms of how people use it — and I have two teenaged daughters who are devoted to “tumbling,” one of the service’s biggest demographics — it’s more like a cross between Twitter and a blogging tool than it is a simple blogging platform. While you can create a blog and just post content to it the way you would with WordPress or Blogger or Squarespace, you can also use it just to “re-blog” posts from those you follow, in the same way that some Twitter users just read and retweet.

Tumblr CEO David Karp

As some media outlets have discovered, this aspect of Tumblr can make it a powerful tool for distributing and redistributing content — just as Twitter can make something “go viral” in a short space of time as people tweet and retweet a link. The National Post, a national daily newspaper in Canada, posted a graphic comparing a new size of Starbucks coffee  to the liquid capacity of the human stomach and watched page views skyrocket. According to a recent survey from Nielsen, Tumblr is the third-largest social-media tool in terms of time spent, just behind Facebook and Google’s Blogger platform, and it is still growing at a tremendous rate.

When blogging on platforms like Blogger and WordPress first started to become mainstream, they showed media outlets that web tools could provide the same kinds of features that were once only available to the mainstream press: the ability to publish content quickly and easily and have it read by a broad readership, thanks to RSS and other technologies. As blogging became more popular, companies like TechCrunch and The Huffington Post (and GigaOM) showed how powerful these tools could be, and eventually some media companies started to take advantage of them internally.

Make it as easy as possible and people will do it

What Twitter and tools like Tumblr (and Facebook, of course) have shown over the past several years is that if you make content creation — and even more importantly, the sharing of content — as easy as possible, you will get even more people to do it. So while the number of people who want to maintain a full WordPress or Blogger blog is relatively small by comparison, the number of people who are happy to use Twitter or Tumblr primarily to share the content of others is huge. And as we’ve described before, that kind of social-sharing activity is becoming an important signal of intent that advertisers and search giants like Google are looking at as the social web grows.

In a sense, Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook have taken the same kind of insight that Amazon used with e-commerce and applied it to media and content — so just as Amazon was able to lower the barriers for buying things online by implementing a one-click purchasing process (among other things), so Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook allow users of those services to share things with a single click: retweet, reblog, like, etc. That is driving a huge amount of social activity online, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. If anything, Facebook’s rollout of “frictionless sharing” and other features means it is going to increase even more rapidly.

If you’re a media company, how easy do you make it to share your content, not just with a Facebook like button, but on other social networks as well? Tumblr’s growth shows that the easier you make it, the more people are likely to do it — assuming your content is worth sharing in the first place.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Gabrie Coletti

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There are some great strategy discussions about what Yahoo can do — notably from Jason Calacanis and Reid Hoffman.  However, as insightful as these assessments are, very few pundits see the real structural issue at play, which is Yahoo’s fossilized organizational structure. When turning Yahoo around the first time, Terry Semel implemented a classic matrix structure to manage the company. Products like Front Page, Messenger, Mail and Flickr are on the verticals, while organizational functions like PR, legal, privacy, branding, etc. are on the horizontals. This structure is used by most large organizations in the world, and it’s great for managing growth as well as for checks and balances.

But it is terrible for accountability or speed. Whenever you launch or change a product, you have to get clearance from legal, PR, branding, privacy etc, which inevitably takes time. The matrix structure also prevents any real risk taking. The legal department, for example, wants the same ToS across all the products. Brickhouse was created to circumvent this issue. Set up outside and away from the mother ship, we hoped to be the tugboat that pulled the big tanker around. It worked for a while, but the Microsoft bid pretty much derailed that effort. The company had to focus all its energies to fend off the bid, which was necessary but incredibly disruptive to morale and productivity.  In addition, the Matrix had woken up and was attacking our unit (the best analogy I’ve found for this is that whenever you do corporate incubation, the immune system of the company will come and attack you — but that’s a whole other post).

The matrix structure works great in older, slower industries, but on the Internet, the two attributes you must have are speed and risk. Very simply, Yahoo’s organizational structure is antithetical to the industry they’re in. Over time, that structure has calcified and today, Yahoo is a 14 year old dinosaur in the industry it helped form.

Inevitably, the people get blamed.  However, the fastest NASCAR racing team cannot win if you take the car off-road against ATVs on sand dunes. What needs to happen at Yahoo is a deep restructuring to strip out the org structure and push accountability, control and risk back out to the edges.  Let a product manager have full control and put themselves on the line in exchange for flexibility.  For example, at Brickhouse, we could choose whether or not to launch on Yahoo’s servers or avail ourselves of other internal or external services (in theory, at least. But this restructuring is a massive task and essentially requires major surgery on the company.  That is simply not possible while Yahoo is public and its constant focus is the hamster wheel of the quarterly numbers. The only option for Yahoo is to take the train off the tracks.

Importantly, this issue is not unique to Yahoo; it’s a structural mismatch between control systems needed at any large, public company and the high metabolism of the consumer internet. Google was also falling into that structural trap, and Larry Page’s first steps were to reorganize to try and avoid that fate.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan has a good analysis of the numbers, which shows that Yahoo, despite having as many users as Facebook, is worth just 1/20 of Facebook, despite being profitable and having higher revenues.

There is clearly a tremendous upside to play for, and like many ex-Yahoos, I bleed purple on the inside.  I hope someone steps up and does the right thing — Yahoo is an important foundational piece of the Internet; it deserves to be saved from the Matrix.

Salim Ismail is the founding Executive Director and current Global Ambassador at Singularity University, based at NASA Ames. He’s a former Vice-President at Yahoo and ran Brickhouse, their internal incubator.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Sudhee.

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