I’ve Said Too Much

This was one of those “I’m gonna blog this even though I’m so in agreement with it it’s actually boring for everyone else” moments. But Tom’s post on the pace of change (plasticbag.org) really resonated:

My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren’t paying attention. Because if we’re honest, if you don’t want or need to be first and you don’t need to own the platform, it can’t be hard to see roughly where this environment is going. Media will be, must be, transportable in bits and delivered to TV screens and various other players. And there will be enormous archives available that need to be explorable and searchable. And people will create content online and distribute it between themselves and find new ways to express themselves. Changes in the mechanics of those distributions and explorations will happen all the time, but really the major swift is not such a surprise, surely? I mean, how can it be!? Most of it has been happening in an unevenly distributed way for years anyway. And it’s not like it’s enormously hard to see what you’ve got to do to prepare for this - find a way to digitise the content, get as much information as possible about the content, work out how to throw it around the world, look for business models and watch the bubble-up communities for ideas. That’s it. Come on, guys! There’s hard work to be done, but it’s not in observing the trends or trying to work out what to do, it’s in just getting on with the work of sorting out rights and data and digitisation and keeping in touch with ideas from the ground. This should be the minimum a media organisation should do, not some terrifying new world of fear!

The operative words here are “hard work.” If you’ve got the money and the people willing to do the job, this stuff can be conceptually easy, even if it’s a lot of work. Just look at the BBC.

There’s an interesting snippet in the announcement of Steve Berkowitz’s appointment as head of MSN and some other stuff:

Steve’s management experience, deep functional knowledge of the search and Internet space, and understanding of both the offline and online publishing worlds make him a great choice to lead the Online Business Group. He is a proven leader, and is excited by the opportunity to take the assets we’ve built in MSN and drive our software services vision forward.

This isn’t an earth-shattering thought, but don’t you think it’s interesting that many, many Web companies are now being run, at several levels, but people who really understand how the Web hangs together? It seems to me this is very different from five years ago, when a lot of managers came from marketing or sales or business development backgrounds and really struggled to connect their ambition with the capacities of their companies. I don’t know Berkowitz, but from interviews I’ve read with him he really seems to get the mechanics of search. If that’s true, MSN just made a very smart hire.

Channel 4’s new media news team is to triple in size under its new £100 million five-year contract with ITN, expanding blogging, podcasting and interactivity on its digital publishing platforms.

Under the new deal, which was announced earlier this month, the TV news service will continue to be produced for Channel 4 News, More 4 News and News at Noon as well as enhanced web and mobile news services until the end of 2010.

The new contract also includes plans for a new Beijing bureau, extra correspondents in Africa and Asia, more than 20 additional newsroom jobs and a new newsroom at ITN in London.

From journalism.co.uk.

I admit to being rather underwhelmed at the first glance of the new BBC blogs portal. It seemed an odd thing to do, really - combining blog posts from disparate parts of the sprawling BBC network and then put them into one place when all they have in common is that they’re, well, blogs. Who cares?

But that was before I spent some time digesting the welcome message to the portal:

Welcome to the new home for all of the BBC’s weblogs. Although we have had blogs for a number of years, most notably our Scottish community site; Island Blogging and the excellent Ouch, this is the first attempt at bringing you a complete list, some news of new launches by journalists, DJs, and radio shows, as well as links and tips to help you find your way around.

That said we appreciate we still have a lot to do which is why we’re grateful for your feedback. We’re already collating comments on all of our existing blogs, scouring bloglines, technorati, google blog search and the like. So we’ll spot if you are talking about Nick Robinson, Paul Mason or Peter van Dyk on your own blogs. But you can also email us about what we’re getting wrong (or hopefully right).

Our biggest challenge over the next few months will be to reflect and engage with the millions of you who are already having conversations about the BBC online, about the stories and issues we cover. This site is a really small step. It’s only a list after all. More to come.

So it begins to look a little more like an exercise in organisation - a step towards something much more ambitious, which will reflect the breadth of commentary on BBC content out there in the world. If that’s the ambition, it’s very exciting (if somewhat scary, in the same way that starting to open up BBC message boards was scary). Good luck to them (oh, and use Yahoo! blog search, chaps, it’s better than the Google version).

Do bloggers need to be filtered before traditional media organisations will incorporate them? One company seems to think so:

Pluck Corp., a blog-technology outfit, has launched a service that pulls together the posts of 700 bloggers and makes them available for traditional publications. Already, some big name traditional outlets, such as The Washington Post (WPO), Gannett newspapers (GCI), and The Austin American-Statesman, have signed up to give the service a whirl.

I admit my first response to this was “how odd, and how unnecessary”. Why can’t newspapers and other media players just do their own aggregation deals? But my second thought was different - maybe this is an early sign of the new kind of aggregation business model which Simon mused over a couple of weeks ago. Maybe Pluck could become a kind of PRS, paying royalties to creators and negotiating on their behalf. In this light, it begins to make a lot more sense. Worth watching.