It has been a tough year for The Boston Globe

Last week’s announcement (more here) by the Boston Globe that they’d be splitting their news content across two properties, one of which would require a paid subscription, drew oodles of attention from the media industry. Though it’s certainly not the only attempt to resurrect the slumping newspaper business, the Globe’s strategy charts an unknown course in the new media landscape.

The plan, slated for rollout in the “second half of 2011,” will effectively split the Globe into two online brands. The current online iteration, Boston.com, will remain online with a more limited content base, while a new site, BostonGlobe.com, will host all the content produced by the newspaper’s staff and require a subscription to access. Prices for the subscriptions have not yet been announced.

In light of yesterday’s Future of News event, hosted by our crew here at BostInnovation and Pinyadda and part of FutureM, here are three theoretical scenarios the future might hold for the Globe and its two-brand strategy:

1) Tempered Success

If things go as the Globe hopes, traffic to the Boston.com domain will remain relatively stable, leaving advertising revenues for that property intact. As the editorial focus shifts more toward local communities and breaking news, increasing numbers of people will feel connected to the site, increasing community engagement, opening up new opportunities for local advertising, and increasing the amount of time people spend on the site. On the flip side, a small but dedicated customer base who appreciates more in-depth analysis and investigative reporting will slowly start to pony up for BostonGlobe.com content, along with another minority that simply must have their favorite columnist or reporter. The key to the success of this approach, in my opinion, is the Globe’s ability to provide content and services that create very significant differentiation between the two products. If a subscription to BostonGlobe.com gave me a visually appealing, ad-free reading experience and free access to a great mobile and iPad application, I’d at least have something to think about.

2) Stabilization

In the second best scenario, the change causes Boston.com’s traffic and subsequently, its ad revenue, to decline. Parts of this revenue decline are made up for by a small influx of paid subscriptions to BostonGlobe.com. The paper experiments repeatedly with a different mix of content on both properties, trying to get the subscription revenue gains to exactly offset the ad revenue declines. The result is a stabilization of revenue, but a dampening of user experience on both properties as the paper keeps turning knobs and dials trying to balance the equation. The major question in this scenario is whether or not the increased cost and resources of running two different destinations will ultimately add to the burden or product enough revenue to lessen it.

3) Continued Decline

In the nightmare scenario for the Globe, traffic to Boston.com drops sharply and BostonGlobe.com’s potential subscribers, uncertain about the value of the new destination, trickle in slowly and defect over time. The increased overhead of managing two domains and still continuing the print edition leads to a widening revenue gap that places still more pressure on an already shorthanded newsroom. Mobile experiences become victims of cost-cutting measures and overall readership continues to trend downwards as upstarts like Patch and independent bloggers take local news market share. If the outcome of the planned split is two independently good products that people like, this scenario can be avoided. But if the split produces two mediocre properties in place of the current one, the results could be dire.

Certainly, there are innumerable scenarios that could play out, and the ones above are meant to illustrate some broad reactions that could affect the Globe’s future. No matter what happens, the Globe deserves credit for its willingness to step outside the box and try something new. The company’s decision in 1995 to brand the online version separately has come full circle in 2010, and only time will tell if the attempt is successful.

For more on the Globe’s impending split, check out these great links:

Double, double: More on the Boston Globe’s new Two-Site Strategy – Nieman Lab

Boston.com’s New Strategies: Retention and Switch – Newsonomics

Make Like Boston.com and Split – Columbia Journalism Review

The Globe Mates With Itself – Bostonist

Beard leaves, paywall goes up: R.I.P. Boston.com, 1995-2010? – Boston Phoenix

Publisher Chis Mayer on the Globe’s new pay model – Media Nation

What are your thoughts on the Globe’s new model? Genius innovation, moderate improvement, doomed to failure? Leave a comment and let us know!

Featured Panel Participants

Panel 1: Content-Side

Panel 2: Business-Side



As print media continues to decline and more consumers turn to digital technologies for their daily news, publishers are reinventing the way they create and distribute content. Pinyadda and the leading digital publishers, content creators and strategists above will discuss the evolving news landscape and future of this rapidly changing industry. Factors such as location, search, new media, and a socially enabled world will all be discussed.

Panel Details

The first panel will cover how the editorial process has changed around gathering news, creating community, and user-driven content creation and aggregation. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s product lead, Austin Gardner-Smith, will moderate. Themes include: Changing distribution structures; New consumption platforms; Content and demand.

The second panel will discuss new business models for digital content and opportunities across platforms such as mobile and tablet. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s Co-Founder and CEO, Chase Garbarino, will moderate. Themes include: Revenue glut; Paywalls and subscriptions; A way forward.

NOTE: This event is sold out. If you would like to attend, we have a limited number of reserved spaces. Please contact cheryl at pinyadda dot com.

Vote below which should be crowned headline of the week!

So as you peruse your Pinyadda feeds going forward and get that feeling of finding a gem of a headline, pin it to Cheryl Morris and we’ll include it in the vote at the end of that week!

Here are the links to those headlines if you so fancy to read them:

1. Snorting-Coke-Off-Boobs Scene Is Staying In The Facebook Movie!
2. Snake report delays Green Line train
3. Control-Self-Delete
4. Onlookers delighted as alligator emerges from New York sewer system
5. Blind man’s device helps him shoot gun
6. 49% of Men would rather get beat up than order Chardonnay
7. Top 10 Lessons on How Not to Die
8. BlackBerry Torch Corners The “My Company Gave Me a BlackBerry” Market

Do you want your blog to get found? Are you looking to drive new, loyal readers to it? Do you want to expand your thought leadership? Are you tired of your tweeted links evaporating? Do you want to create conversation around your content?

Whether you’re blogging for yourself or your business, Pinyadda’s platform allows you to connect your content with the people interested in it and create community around it. Here are the top 5 reasons you and your blog should be on Pinyadda:

Reach new readers

When you publish a post on your blog, Pinyadda places it into topic-based feeds. People choose to follow these topic feeds so if, for example, your post covers mobile and social media, anyone following those topics will see the post in their feeds. Many people discover new sites from posts they read in their topic feeds and in turn follow that site. While the average online news reader visits 2-4 sites regularly, the average Pinyadda member follows 12-16 sites!

Users also discover new sites by visiting the Newsstand on Pinyadda, an interactive way to connect people with the content, sites, and people who match their interests. For example, users can find recommended sites related to a particular topic. The Newsstand is also the first place new users are dropped when they register for Pinyadda, so it is one of the most frequented visited pages by the community.

Curate your posts

You actively curate your content within the Pinyadda community by sharing it (we call this pinning), perhaps asking a specific question about the content or summarizing what it is about. When you pin an article, everyone following you on Pinyadda will see that you shared it (similar to a tweet on Twitter) and they can then pin and discuss the article too, passing it along to their friends and followers. These pins also hit a community feed that people visit to discover what’s currently being pinned and discussed on Pinyadda.

Reward your top readers

People who pin and discuss your blog posts regularly can become the Ambassador of your site. This is part of what we call value mechanics on Pinyadda, automatically rewarding your top users, and allowing them to boast the status on their profiles. Knowing your Ambassadors also allows you to get to what other content they follow and the people who follow them.

Establish influence

Another part of Pinyadda’s value mechanics are topic Mavens. You become the Maven of a topic that your blog covers by pinning and discussing news and blog posts related to it. Mavens and Ambassadors are featured heavily in the Pinyadda community – from feed pages and the Pinyadda Newsstand to our weekly newsletter and blog posts where we promote all the top people and influencers on Pinyadda. Being featured in this way means more people will follow you on Pinyadda and find your blog’s content.

Create community

As you begin to pin and discuss your posts as well as other articles, you will begin to create community around your content. Regardless of whether you are discussing your own blog posts, other content on the same topic your blog covers or general news, this activity on Pinyadda is inbound marketing for your blog. Once people feel that they have a connection with you and see you as a real person, they’ll be much more likely to help evangelize your content and come back for more. As any social media pro will tell you, it’s all about conversation!

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How do you use Pinyadda with your blog? Let us know in the comments!

The ongoing net neutrality debate hit a fever pitch over the last week and Google and Verizon released a “joint policy proposal” that laid out their vision for the future of the internet. It wasn’t as “open” as most people had hoped for and foreshadowed a future where large companies and content providers create – brace yourself – other internets that may or may not be subject to regulation of any kind.

While this is troubling to all of us who support an entirely open internet, it’s especially important for publishers and bloggers to understand the possible repercussions of a scenario like the one outlined by Google and Verizon.

I needed to catch up on the conversation, so I did quick Pinyadda title search for “neutrality” and was greeted with a great stream of relevant content. Here’s a roundup of some of the best links. Be sure to come and join the conversation if you’ve got something to add:

• Understanding Verizon, Google, and net neutrality - Yahoo! News
• Facebook Criticizes Google Verizon Net Neutrality Pact – Information Week
• Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey – Wired.com
• Net neutrality and the Google-Verizon compromise – Christian Science Monitor
• Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Pact: 5 Red Flags – CIO
• Here’s The Real Google/Verizon Story: A Tale of Two Internets - Wired.com
• More on Net Neutrality: Parsing Through Google and Verizon’s ‘Policy Announcement’ – ProPublica

Most of coverage is fairly negative on the prospect of shadow internets that might allow corporations to control (and charge for) access to certain destinations or services. For some in the news industry, this might sound like a great way to protect their web-based content and differentiate their brands. But the truth is that measures that hamper frictionless distribution of content on the web lead to decreasing revenues, not increasing ones.

The creation of proprietary networks for content delivery leads us down a path that ends up like cable television – expensive, slow to innovate, monopolistic – with one very key distinction: there’s an alternative.

So while the command and control structure of alternative internets might be appealing to some, it belies the simple truth that internet publishing has almost no barriers to entry. When there are alternative choices (read: abundance), the power of a barrier to access simply moves people in different directions: in this case, toward different content.

What do you think about the proposed modifications of net neutrality modifications? Let us know in the comments.

A few weeks ago The Business Insider, one of my favorite news sites, published an interesting piece about digital media and the future of the newspaper business in honor of the site’s third birthday. Henry Blodget, the site’s founder and CEO, has some great data about The New York Time‘s revenue and overall business that I recommend you check out – it is a very interesting read.  Blodget’s post got me thinking about the NYT’s business, and I decided to throw together a quick list of things that I believe could help save the Time’s business in the long run:

1.  Develop a plan to shut down the printing presses in a MAX of 3 years - As Blodget points out, the costs of the print business are incredibly high and print is obviously on its way out.  There is no denying that NYT will need to slim down their staff over the next few years as print subscriptions decline.  If I were in charge, I would push this transition through in the next three years, grabbing some revenue from the print side, while either retraining some of the staff to produce more short term content along with longer form editorial/column pieces or hiring some young up and coming new media types on the cheap to fill the spots of the dinosaurs. Harsh? Maybe, but necessary for survival.

2. Spin-out particular blogs and contributors into their own properties - NYT is such a massive property that they have successful media properties and blogs living inside of their domain such as the Bits Blog and Media Decoder, two of my favorites.  These properties would increase in value and would be able to drive more revenue if they lived both inside of NYT but also as their own properties on their own domains.  This would allow NYT to basically double up on advertising real estate while enabling the Bits Blog to further develop a micro-community, provide deeper informational resources, and still leverage the main domain for traffic referral.

3. Move out of New York – I don’t exactly mean physically, but NYT needs to start to build a strategy to get into the local news space in order to get their digital revenues up to those of their print levels.  This could either come from launching new properties by hiring their own people in different locations or buying up promising local new media properties and providing them with editorial/sales resources and expertise.

What do you think NYT needs to do to ensure the success of their business in the digital world?  Let us know in the comments!

If you like NYT and want to help them out, tweet this article at them or email to someone over there!

1. Cache your pages: First off, what does cache mean?  Simply enough, it means that your blog or site saves a version of a certain page for faster delivery to viewers.  For example, check out Bostinnovation’s About Page, which is cached.  Instead of different viewers asking Bostinnovation’s server for the same text and the same images, Bostinnovation delivers a saved version of this page which makes the page load more quickly.  If you are using WordPress, there is an awesome plugin called WP Super Cache, which I highly recommend
2. Compress your CSS:  The less lines of CSS the better.  With this in mind, check out Icyboard’s CSS Compressor tool.  Simply copy-and-paste your CSS and it will reduce the size of your CSS.  A couple of notes: First is to keep an uncompressed version of your CSS somewhere as well.  Making changes to compressed CSS is not pretty.  Second, always check out your site in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.  CSS is handled a little differently by these browsers, so it is best to check all of them right after a compression
3. Reduce the Amount of External Javascript:  Google Analytics, Facebook plugins and Twitter follower widgets all use javascript code inserted into your blog’s code.  For example, check out the Yadda Blog’s Google Analytics and Disqus source code here.  These plugins can be extremely useful and quite necessary, but they can also degrade the speed of your site.  When Twitter is down, it’s javascript code in your blog can stall, thus affecting your readership’s ability to use your site.  If you must use these external javascript calls, be sure to place them in the <footer> of your blog.  This ensures that the rest of your site loads properly before getting to these external plugins.
4. Compress your images: Like CSS, a compressed image is quicker to load than an uncompressed one.  An uncompressed image usually looks better, but if you can withstand a little image degradtion, then definitely compress the image.  Here is a pretty decent tutorial on how to compress an image
5. Add forward slashes to your internal links: Believe it or not, clicking “http://blog.pinyadda.com/” is actually faster than “http://blog.pinyadda.com“.  Basically, the forward slash clarifies that the current link is the end of the road and doesn’t look for more stuff.  Notice how links without a “/” will redirect to the same link but with a “/” appended. It’s a small change, but a professional one.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment, where I’ll go into server-side changes you can make to open-source languages like PHP and MySQL as well as must-use tools to monitor your site’s performance.

The race for local news online is on.

The Boston Globe wrote yesterday about Patch.com and its efforts in the local news space, which spurred a discussion over at Media Nation about the working conditions for its editors. Patch is pursuing an aggressive strategy here in Massachusetts, with 13 local sites now up and running and 4 more planned to open shortly. But as the Globe points out, Patch is hardly alone the race to go local. The scene playing out here in Boston is indicative of a much larger battle for position in the local news space across the country, as established media outlets fight with startups and independent bloggers for the eyes of local readers – and the potentially lucrative ad dollars that come along with them. Here are five key points to think about when looking at the shift toward local news online:

Boots on the Ground

As the Media Nation piece and its considerable comment thread shows, it’s really important to find the right people for a local news site. Having a qualified and dedicated editor who’s willing to set the ship in motion is likely the hardest, and most important, aspect of creating success at the local level. He or she needs to be connected to local officials and tastemakers, understand the specific culture and mood of the locale, and have a genuine interest in keeping others informed. Every place is different, and without a thorough understanding of its ins and outs, even the most sensational content runs the risk of falling on deaf ears.

Blogging Isn’t (Always) Reporting

While incorporating posts from local blogs is a great way to embrace the existing content infrastructure and fill gaps in coverage, people still want hard news form local outlets, because it directly affects their lives. If people can’t find out about the changes in their town’s excise tax rates, or the date of a hearing on a new shopping mall, or the latest restrictions on lawn-watering, they’ll go somewhere else. It’s not sexy and it won’t make any money, but it’s what brings the audience in every day. Feature pieces and opinionated blog posts have their place, but there’s just no substitute for facts – and it takes more than one person to go out and find them.

Your Dry Cleaner Doesn’t Have an iPhone (Yet)

The potential market for local advertising is enticing, and more and more small businesses are finding innovative new ways to use the web and social media to their advantage. But not everyone gets it yet, and it’s going to be difficult to convince Mom and Pop that they should pay you to put some silly picture up that internet thing. Pageviews? CPMs? Huh? The web is creeping into small towns all across the country, and as more local newspapers shut down the presses, more businesses will go there to advertise. In the meantime, I think that lots of local news sites are going to find that the projected market numbers for local ad sales don’t match up with what they see on the ground.

Social, Meet Local

The real power of online social networks lies in their ability to connect people. As the social web matures, we’re seeing more and more melding of the online world and the real world. Services like Meetup are helping people use the web to facilitate physical interaction in the real world. Local online news outlets are in a prime position to do much the same thing. The ‘community’ that so many publishers strive to create on the web comes built-in to a local news site. Those who are successful will take full advantage of this and find ways to use their content to enable real-world connections between readers.

Location, Location, Location

Location-based services may seem to be springing up by the dozens, but we’ve only yet seen the tip of the iceberg. With HTML5 comes a whole new set of geo-location tools built right into the browser, and GPS functionality in mobile devices is quickly becoming a standard feature. The ability to determine the location of a reader opens up a whole range of opportunities for forward-thinking local news sites; everything from location-specific ads and offers to reader reviews and photos to interactive traffic maps. The possibilities are literally endless.

As we watch the battle for local news on the web unfold, it will be interesting to see how different entities approach the problem. Bigger companies and existing media outlets have more dollars to throw at the issue, and that capital will certainly help them to establish a presence. Smaller upstarts and local independents will have a harder road to walk initially, but if they can break they might just be able win the day with a more personalized feel and voice.

In the meantime, at Pinyadda we’re looking at lots of way to enable discovery of local content for our users, and we’re really excited about the possibilities that an API can make available for local publishers. As always, if you’ve got any suggestions, be sure to let us know.

Here are the amount of articles that mention “paywall” or “paid content” in the title since June 1st, 2010:

(click image to enlarge)

• The massive peak around July 1st and thereafter has to do with 3 Gannett papers throwing up a paywall

Below are the publications with the most amount of paywall-related articles since June 1st, 2010.  These sites on Pinyadda are sure to publish more paywall stuff, so I suggest following them to get your paywall fix:

• Techdirt mentioned Rupert Murdoch in 3 of their 13 paywall articles (see below).
• Nieman Journalism Lab is no surprise to be in the top 5.  If you are not following it on Pinyadda, stop reading this and follow it now.

Here are the most popular paywall related articles on Pinyadda as determined by the amount of pins the articles received:

• Yadda Blog: How Gannet’s Paywall is Sucking the Life Out of Its Content (And It’s Not About the Money) (12 Pins).  Austin’s piece walks through the paywall as a product.  A must-read.
• GigaOM: Rupert’s Paywall is Meant to Keep People In, Not Out (8 Pins)
• The Guardian: Clay Shirky: ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up‘ (5 Pins).  Clay Shirky has his own principle named after him.
• The Atlantic: Can a 99 Cent Paywall Make Online Debate More Civil? (5 Pins)

There is a lot of paywall info here if you need to catch up to speed quickly. If you are fiending for more, check out the below articles from the top 5 most prolific paywall sites:

Techdirt:

• Writer Splits From Murdoch’s Times Of London To Avoid Being Hidden Behind The Paywall
• Because One Paywall Sorta Worked Very Briefly Many Years Ago, Free Is A Joke
• Financial Times Looks To Put Its Blogs Behind Paywalls Too
• Dear Rupert: Before Putting Up A Paywall, It Helps To Have Your Staff Check The HTML
• Newspapers Having Trouble Reporting On Their Own Paywalls
• Guardian Picks Up Blogger Who Escaped From Murdoch’s Paywall
• Newspaper Has ’Stories Worth Sharing’…. Hidden Behind The Paywall
• Time Magazine’s New Paywall? Buy The Paper Version Or The iPad Version To Read
• Newspapers Doing Well With Membership Clubs Instead Of Paywalls
• A Paywall… For Obituaries?
• Early Indications Say Paywall For The Times Is A Dreadful Failure
• Report Claims Only 15,000 Signed Up For The Times Paywall
• Debunking The Logic In Favor Of Paywalls

PaidContent:

• @ CM Summit: Sulzberger: Social Sharing Will Be Outside Paywall Meter
• Gannett Tries Out Paywalls At Three Papers
• Publishers Need Popcorn, Not Paywalls
• Facebook Puts To Rest Any Paywall Rumors
• Earnings NYTCo’s Robinson: Paywall Enters Developement Phase, Pricing Coming Soon

MediaBistro:

• If NYT’s Paywall Won’t Impact FiveThirtyEight Fans, Who Will It Impact?
• New York Times: Paywall Won’t Affect Social Sharing Either
• Starbucks To Serve Up Free Access To Paywall-Protected Sites
• Barry Diller: NYT Paywall Will Work, Someday
• Gannett Tries Paywalls on Three of Its Newspaper Sites
• Times Blogger Avoids Paywall, Jumps to The Guardian
• The Ticker: LeBron on Twitter; Time’s paywall?’ PepsiCo ScienceBlogs; Business blogging; Women on Facebook
• NYT Co. Expects to Spend More on Salaries, Newsprint, Paywall Promotional Campaign
• New York Times Paywall Enters ’Active Development Mode’
• FT’s CEO Ridding Talks Paywalls and FT Tilt
• WSJ’s Alan Murray Explains What You Need to Know About Paywalls

Teleread:

• The Financial Times looks at Murdoch’s paywall plan
• The Times paywall: Three points of view
• Paywalled London Times ’an empty world’?
• The Times’s paywall: figures, purpose, and defiance
• The Financial Times’s paywall proves more successful than the London Times’s
• Rupert Murdoch still likes iPad, paywall; more evidence permissive paywalls work better

Nieman Journalism Lab

• Links on Twitter: Apple says targeted ads okay, International Paywall Day, Pew’s new survey
• Time Magazine putting up a paywall to protect print?
• Time shifts online strategy, lays first bricks of paywall
• This Week in Review: Time’s non-pay paywall, free vs. pay in Britain and what to do with content farms
• This Week in Review: WikiLeaks’ new journalism order, a paywall’s purpose, and a future for Flipboard
• AdSense for online subscriptions: Meet MediaPass, the platform that wants to put pores in your paywall

YaddaBlog: So what is ProPublica?

ProPublica: ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

YaddaBlog:  Tell us where ProPublica is headquartered and a little bit about your history.

ProPublica: ProPublica is headquartered in Manhattan. Its establishment was announced in October 2007. Operations commenced in January 2008, and publishing began in June 2008. In April 2010 ProPublica became the first online news organization to win the Pulitzer Prize.

YaddaBlog: What types of readers need to know about your content?

ProPublica: We look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power, in areas ranging from product safety to securities fraud, from flaws in our system of criminal justice to practices that undermine fair elections. But we also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and on the media when they constitute the strong exploiting or oppressing the weak, or when they are abusing the public trust. If those kinds of things matter to you, ProPublica could be for you.

YaddaBlog: How is your site/content different from those covering the same topic?

ProPublica: We address one of the occasional past failings of investigative journalism by being persistent, by shining a light on inappropriate practices, by holding them up to public opprobrium and by continuing to do so until change comes about. In short, we stay with issues so long as there is more to be told, or there are more people to reach.

YaddaBlog: Tell us a little bit about your team.

ProPublica: ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is ProPublica’s managing editor. Richard Tofel, the former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is general manager. We have a full-time news staff of 32, plus some of the most talented interns in journalism today.

Follow ProPublica on Pinyadda here.  Hopefully, we can get ProPublica to talk a little bit about the future of investigative journalism soon as well…