Nearly five months after News Corp announced it was launching a product billed as a “generous aggregation” of news and the antidote to Google News' monopolistic position, the company debuted Knewz.com on January 29. Its launch didn’t generate much consumer-side buzz, despite it having an ad-free model that includes 400 national and local publications. It did, however, get the attention of people like myself whose job it is to pay attention to stuff like this. And rather than savage the branding and the site design, which is frankly too easy, instead I think it’s important to talk about the very nature of these news aggregators and what they actually offer the publishing community. Digital media has commoditized news to a point where local outlets are in grave danger to stay alive as advertising and subscriptions dwindle, and mass-media companies require insane volumes of daily inventory and pageviews to generate modest returns. Compounding this for publishers seeking lots of pageviews is the tech duopoly. I know most of us are all sick of talking about “them,” but the reality for most is that Facebook and Google are still driving the bulk of the traffic to news sites. So those digital dimes many have been complaining about for years have actually become pennies after everyone gets their cut. So this brings me back to aggregators—these great democratizing saviors that will save hyperlocal news and put the consumers first by forging symbiotic partnerships with a large... Continue reading at 'Folio Magazine'
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-02-13 17:20:50 UTC ]
Written By: Benedicte Page Publication Date: Tue, 24/05/2011 - 08:38 Annie Mauger, chief executive of CILIP, is to call on the Women's Institute to campaign for public libraries when she addresses the organisation's annual general meeting in Liverpool on 8th June. The WI, which has a 210,000... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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