commbasics

Whoo, what a morning. I spent about an hour listening to wire service bureau chiefs from the AP, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch and Reuters talk about what they need to do their jobs. Then Drew Lanza and I got together at the Morgenthaler offices on Sand Hill to discuss what's going on in the media. I'll be following up later this week and next with the Lanza discussion and a report on the wire services, but the good news is, when the guys with the money start worrying about the media, something good is going to happen. As Dan Rather use to sign off...courage.

I promised something before Thanksgiving. It was originally going to be a multipart text entry on where we are, how we got here and where we may be going, but Joe Basques and I started goofing around with our Apple technology and found that our discussion kinda worked better. So here it is... .

We've been getting a lot of questions about when New Tech Press will actually go live and I just got a definitive answer from the webmaster. It's next week. No, really. We are basing our tech primarily on Apple and, as most of you know, they recently had a pretty significant technology announcement. We've just finished incorporating the changes and our initial content is in the can. We also have several companies on the dock, waiting for the boat to come in so they can see what they might be investing in. I want to personally thank all the PR and news pros who have been cheering us on, providing direction and hoping we're going to break the pattern of decline in tech journalism. The revolution is about to begin.

OK, I'm just out of the box today. Trade shows are a communication medium, so this fits in the state of the media. I just got an email from the In-Stat folks saying they are shutting down the Microprocessor Forum in the US for 2008 and are replacing it with a series of, as yet, undefined, one-day conferences. Attendance at the MPF this year was abysmal so it no longer made financial sense for Reed to continue funding it. The MPF is supposed to be one of the more prestigious events for semiconductor companies to be featured at. Every year I get requests from clients to set up press meetings at the conference, which is one of the tougher places to get meetings. And now it's gone. Trade shows are showing the same strain as print, at least in the US and probably Europe. They took an enormous hit after the dotcom meltdown at the turn of the century and another after 9/11 (Everyone was afraid of flying). But I saw a couple of news releases tooting the CES horn that they anticip...

Check out Greeley's Ghost today and the video describing "new media douchebags." Hehe.

OK, so this is out of the ordinary for this blog, but it's still about media. There's been some media bashing of Radiohead's decision to allow fans to download the latest album for whatever they wanted to pay for it. The numbers showed that 1.2 million people downloaded the album but only 38 percent actually paid for it. And those that did paid an average of $5. That's been called a poor payday and reason not to ever to it again. So I may be off in the math here, but 38 percent of 1.2 million is 456,000 people. And if those people paid an average of $5, that's $2,280,000 that went directly to the band. Not to the Record companies. And that's the first time this has ever been tried. And that's for low-quality mp3 versions of the music, not the high-quality of the CD that will eventually be hitting the stores. Seems to me that recording companies should be shaking in their boots right now.

Colleen Taylor, the upwardly mobile contributing editor at Electronic News for the past couple of years left the publication Friday for a position at the Financial Times, SF Bureau. Taylor has been part of the team the covered semiconductors, equipment, EDA, and supply chain news along with Suzanne Defree and Ann Mutschler. Word is that Colleen won't be replaced. Prior to E News she worked in various capacities at Frommer's Guide to Europe and at CosmoGirl! as the political correspondent.

I get this demand from clients at least twice a year. We always try to explain that the process of getting that kind of coverage is not simple, short or based on a news announcement or event. But listening to a presentation by Gordon Crovitz, the WSJ publisher, in Atlanta recently finally gave me some validation. Crovitz said the way it works is that the Dow Jones gets news out first, then WSJ.com kicks in, then the print story provides context and context only. That's what he said. Dow Jones does run press releases, but they don't ever cover all the news releases as breaking news. What they are loking for is significant financial news. We're talking billions of dollars here. Once there is a significant trend being reported by Dow Jones, then the WSJ.com will start picking up stories. The WSJ print editors read what comes in from WSJ.com, as well as what is being reported on the larger issue in other publications in the trades and determines if the trend is big enoug...

OK and there this bit of news from Greeley's Ghost . CMP gets all nice and cozy with a new direction for trade media and then they guy who figured it out (Steve Weitzner) goes off to a new job having stepped down as CEO of CMP. Brian Fuller seems pretty bent out of shape over this but I'm actually hoping that it turns out as it did the last time Steve made a job change. Steve with the editor in chief of EE Times in 1984 and was instrumental in the dismantling of Electronic News as the premiere provider of electronics industry trade news. When he moved over to become chief operating officer for CMP there was widespread handwringing on the PR industry about what was happening to a great magazine and the loss of a great journalist. The move turned out great for the organization and, by the way, eventually gave us Brian Fuller as editor in chief. Steve is now in charge of international business development and CMP is looking for his replacement, but my optimistic side is saying...

News today out of GigaOM is MySpace signing onto OpenSocial from Google so they can open their platform to applications as in Facebook. One of the wonderful things about things like Facebook and MySpace is the lack of commercialism and an easy way for web novices to enter into the social technology without being bombarded with marketing material. Even the opportunity for indy bands to push their music wasn't a bad thing. But the drive to push social technology into the realm of big marketing is ultimately going to drive away the very people it is trying to reach. And all this just as the media is starting to figure out how to use the web. The wheel just keeps on turning.