My stock..

Name Symbol Last price Change Shares Gain
Google Inc. GOOG 588.61 1.1 18 10594.98
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. MHP 30.6 0.26 5 153
Yahoo! Inc. YHOO 15.25 -0.06 14 213.5
Archos JXR 4.24 -0.76 7 29.68
HTC Corporation 2498 365.5 -2 7 2558.5
ASUSTEK Computer Inc. 2357 63.6 -0.2 8 508.8
Hewlett-Packard Company HPQ 49.29 0.31 8 394.32

Portfolio value: +13.47 (0.12%)

Okay, buy technology products, don't buy their stocks

Why can't we adapt to the Moore's Law?

The first day I went back to KXAN this semester, the only task I had was change the archive date of several pages. By default, all of our story pages will be archived one year later. This model works fine with stories, but not for our subindex pages. Therefore, we spent around half day simply to change the archive date of tons of pages so that they wouldn't be automatically offline soon.

We changed the date to 2016, which isn't really far from now. However, all of us know that we will NOT be using the same system at that time. We definitely will have new pages for that time. Four years doesn't sound like a very long time, but on web, it's like forever.

Thanks for the short life cycle of desruptive technology, nothing will be the same after two years.

But isn't everchanging also part of Journalism's nature?

Why can reporters deal with news, that's different everyday, but not techonology, which changes significantly only every two years? I know this is not a fair analogy, but think about it this way. News industry should have most information to understant and predict the movement of technology development. And maybe, just maybe, if the resource is used well, news industry can be better prepared for the technology evolution, which never happened.

Why?

Is Google really gate-keeping?

When we were talking about that Google is acting "psuedo-gatekeeping" today in class, an idea came to me. "How scary! Even though I don't want my taste of news be decided by computers, I'm still too lazy to look for news outside Google news!" True, Google is not really setting a gate and block information, but the impact is similar in terms of what users receive eventually.

So I'm getting curious about how great the impact is. If we can pick some stories from a news organization, and see how much Google news contributes in terms of traffic when the story is on Google news, versus when it's not on Google news. I think Google news has turned the competition between news organizations more bloody. If your story doesn't beat all other similar stories, the story will lose most of the traffic from Google news. (If we can track how many users do go to news stories other than the one Google picked, that will be even more interesting because we can really see the difference.)

Anyways, getting stories onto Google news will be important if the revenue comes from traffic. (KXAN has been trying to get its news onto Google news, but ... And Statesman is always there!)

Will Google pay Journalists, too?

For some reason, I think a lot of people try to copy the model of music industry to news industry. True, there are some similarities.
1. Long time ago, people could only paid for it.
2. Not too long ago, people learned how to receive it for free, legally or illegally.
3. Both industries want users, or somebody else, pay for them, and are working on this direction.

The key point might be, it was illegal to download mp3 for free, and it is illegal now. (Most of the case.) But news articles, video, photos are now legally free online. (And you don't even need to search for it, they are just everywhere.)

There for, from downloading illegally to legally, users' utility rised. As long as the price matches the marginal utility, people might pay.

Then how can we add some value to online news, so that users will pay?

Better way of selection and organization? Google does it well, at least a great number of users think so, but Google doesn't care if it gets paid from users.

I'm still think the mp3 downloading example in China. Will Google pay news organizations, too? (Then Sung Woo's topic will be popular!)

Too many newspaper too little profit

For some reason, reading these two articles reminds me of a story about China's economic. This is going to be an awkward analogy, but maybe the revenue of online news is just like China's economic: growing rapidly, but from a very low point.

Will the idea of subscription work? For laptop or PC, I don't think so. Just think of how tedious it will be when you need to login to read any news story that you're interested in. Even though the cookies can be stored in your computer, you still need to login again and again when you switch computer. For example, when you want to use the computer in CMA lobby to check today's news just real quick. Besides, will you really store every login? That's something going to cost you money. Can you really trust everyone who might use your computer?

But for mobile device, I think that's possible. Because the hardware itself can be used as a identification. Actually this is already happening in Japan. Japanese can be said as heavy cellphone users, generally. They can buy almost whatever you can think of with their cellphone. And, most important of all, their system has be so sophisticated that websites can be designed that only certificated cellphone can browse. (In fact this brings a lot of negative effect, say, Internet bullying among teenagers.) Base on this technical reason, I think charging for content on mobile device will work.

However, charging users for content might work on books, music, movie, but I really doubt if that will work on news. I hate to say that, but there are just too many substitute. As long as there is one, even if only one, news organization offers their content for free, users have 100% reason to switch to free content.

Of course you can argue that if one offers news story with higher quality, people will still buy. The problem is, how many people appreciate and will pay for a "better" story? Given the quantity, and the amount they are willing to pay, can the revenue cover the cost of producing better stories?

I think arguing "we have better content" is relatively weak. If the content comes along with better service, then that might be more attractive. This is totally based on personally experience. I'm subscriber of KKBOX, a music content provider. I paid 20 dollars for half year, and I can listen to all the music on their site. I can also download the music, but the downloaded file can only be played in their software.

I've been using this service for 3 years. The reason I started buying it is because their interface saves my effort of organizing files in my computer. If I download private music, I need to create different folders and organize them in a way that I can remember. (Usually I couldn't find them right after I downloaded them.) But if I use this software, I can just do search. And I know a lot of users subscribe base on similar reason. Their content is fine, but we won't subscribe if that's only content.

So what service can newspaper offer? Search function that can help college student finish their final project? Adjust the length of different story base on users taste? I can't really think of many. But I do think news stories should be provided along with better service.

Why do people need journalist when information is over-supplied?

Sorry for being late again. (I begin to hate ACL now...)

The idea of information surplus is really frustrating. I feel like no one likes it. While people enjoy the free content online, they also complain about the declination of quality. Journalism practitioners, of course, are always whining about the difficulty of producing "good" content with limited budget.

Nobody likes it, and nobody has the control to stop the trend.

I don't think the information scarcity will ever come back.

Then, what's the journalism value now? For example, can we still hold the idea that we're going to "educate" our audience, when they already hold all the information that we have?

Last year the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan began putting all the meeting video tape online. My boyfriend thus asked me, then why do people need to read news since they have the access now.

I said, I think in the future journalists should serve as secretary. I think there are too many information that normal people can access. (Of course the accessibility is still limited.) No one can really digest all the information. I think journalists should serve as re-organize information and present in friendly format.

If friendly format for the audience is video, then we should do video. If the audience prefer other format, then we can do, too.

So I want to defense for Apple Daily here. I know a lot of people criticize Apple Daily for its fewer text and more pictures. However, this is what we need now. Who will have the leisure to spend one hour reading one newspaper now? Give audience some infograph, tables, and charts. A juicy story doesn't necessarily need to be told in words.

And, last part. I think the reason that newspaper circulation is still high in Asia lies in different life style. Take Tokyo in Japan for example. Most of the people work in Japan lives in suburban. They spend two hours to four hours everyday on subway. Many of them thus read newspaper on the train. (I wonder if this is the reason that the newspapers in Japan are still very intense. Because it needs to offer content for readers to read longer than one hour?)

Hong Kong and Taipei are also cities that mass transportation is widely used. I only buy Apple Daily when I need to spend several hours on the train.

And here in the U.S., people spend a lot of time on driving, which is impossible to read newspaper. That's why NPR is popular, I guess?

Is new media study more laggard than new media industry?

The reading this week is here.
Survey: New media, The Economist (2006)
Gauntlett, D. (2004). Web studies: What’s new. web.studies, 2nd edition

Last week, or the week before that, we just learned that news industry has fallen behind other industries in regard to new technology adoption. Media studies 2.0 seems to imply that media study is even slower than media industry. But why?

1. The intrinsic characteristic of media study.
As you know, I have engineering background. The major difference I found between the research in engineering and journalism is that the research of engineering always leads the innovation of new technology, while social science is to study what has already happened. (Of course I might be wrong with my limited experience in both areas.) I don't think Journalism is a special case, because my friend majors in sociology commented in the same way, too. If we can do any brand new research to lead the industry, then we won't be scholars. We'll be launching our own media. So I'm not surprised by the fact that media studies are kind of old, I thought that's how social science research works. (And that's a good news for me, because I have techniques to conduct research with new study method.)


2. Demographic of scholars.

No offense, but most of the scholars in university are either experienced journalists or experienced scholars. For experienced journalists, the definition of "new media" was "TV" when they were in the industry. How can they learn how news organizations now function after they left so many years? And for pure scholars, they spent so many years on writing paper/books/journals, they probably have never been a journalists in their life. I think there are just too few young scholars who know new media and research. (Iris, you're an outlier, so you're not under my discussion.) I don't really expect to learn anything about new media from old faculty, seriously. I mean, I think we will all agree that new media is something still changing in a crazy speed. If we wait till someone organizes the material and teach us, the information will be out of date by that time. And this is exactly what my advisor in EE taught me. He said, if you can find a book about your research topic, then your topic is too out of date. I think this is universal for all the researches.


3. Some personal complaints- you may ignore this part :P

About the email Iris shared with us on Tuesday, I actually feel the same way. When I was in Taiwan, I took a communication program. To get the certificate I need to take 20 credits, and almost every course I took has a final project of making a video or website. Seriously, I was so tired of new media at that time. Because it's like every professor knows new media is important but he doesn't know how to teach. So they put some premiere/Dreamweaver/Frontpage project to make themselves feel happier. "Oh! We have new media in this course!" I didn't learn anything about how to report using new media from them. In some sense I think that's the case that article trying to say. But I think as long as we can teach students how to use new technology to "report" with traditional journalistic value, that will be the industry and students need. (I basically think UT is working on this direction?)

Ads or no ad? Can it be so arbitrary?

Ads or no ad? Can it be so arbitrary?

All right, I'm kind of confused here. HMF explained the reason why the retail price will be lower and quantity will be higher with advertisement. However, the success of craigslist is base on no-ads. Then I'm kind of confused now.

So does advertisement attract more eyeballs or push eyeballs away? I was trying to discuss with my roommate, who majors in advertisement. She said if the amount of content remains the same then advertisement won't really hinder readers. So I think the key is the ratio of content and ads, and I'll probably assume users prefer higher content. (I was trying to develop a math variable to HMF's graph, and then I found it's going to be too complicated.)

Wait, I buy Sunday newspaper simply because the coupon. Isn't that an example of ads raise the quantity? (Even though the causal relationship is different from the one in HMF.) I'll rush to a website if there are coupons that I need, too. But that's coupon rather than pure ads. So should we discuss coupon and ads together or separately?

And readers seem to hold different tolerance of printed ads and online ads. The ads on a newspaper seem to be less annoying than website banner ads, at least that's how I feel. But why?

Still have no idea about the relationship between advertisement and news media.

Irrationaly consumer: I still love google more!

Again, the reading is here

I guess economists will have a word on my title. You prefer google because that's different tastes, so you enjoy more utility. Come on, I know I'm being irrational!

For:

• Microsoft's conspiracy: I guess Microsoft won't really do it so ostentatiously, but they might make their system support their search engine better than support google. This IS happening. Microsoft developed ActiveX. It's totally not standarized and MS is the only company using it. Other browser can support it, but never as good as I.E. does. (So if one developed a page with ActiveX, user can almost only use I.E.)
• Google is only making money on Ads. (They also do source out actually.) Well, silly stuff like google calendar, igoogle are not really profitible for Google. But that's why google is cooler than other company! Maybe they're not makeing money on it, but isn't it a good way to form the company's reputation?
  

Against:

• Google's 20% policy: When I was an engineer-major student, I always dreamed entering a company like google, because at least I have more possibility to do what I'd like to do. Google's 20% policy might sounds silly, but that's how google absorb smart engineers

Digital native and immigrant

During the discussion today, I used the terms "serve" and "educate." Then I thought about this article that I read in other class. It's discussing that children nowadays grow up with higher digital exposure than their teachers did, and thus have different thinking pattern from the teachers. The author was arguing why computer-aided instrument/games should be developed to help children learning, and how to design.

I think this one is interesting because I first thought it's funny that the teachers will need to "please" children to help them better learn. But later I thought, why not? If that can really make children learn better.

Maybe Journalism is facing more or less similar challenge? Should we adjust for the digital natives? And ... how?

Oops, here is the article link.

Time to panic? No, it's time to be creative.

For readers outside our class, this is the articles we’re reading this week.,
Maybe it's time to panic
30 Years Till Online Represent 50% of Total Newspaper Revenues

I read the first one, ”maybe it is time to panic.” It’s really long, but I LOVE it! The quote is so awesome, “What can we do that people are willing to spend something to get, even if it’s just time?”

I have a friend who is a crazy fan of Nintendo video games. He once told me that when economic people first began to predict the consumer behavior of entertainment consumption, they made a mistake. They assumed that a household would spend a fix amount of budget on entertainment like watching movies, travel, or buy toys for kids. It turns out that people don’t really spend certain amount every month. Instead, people only begin to think about buying something when they’re attracted. For example, how much does a wii console cost? 250 dollars. That’s not cheap at all. Under the model of setting certain amount of budget over entertainment, only very few household would buy a wii console. However, it’s overwhelmingly successful, because people will buy went it’s thrilling enough. On the other hand, nobody would spend even one cent on a terrible movie, even if he still have money in his wallet. I think news industry nowadays face the same destiny, people either read it, or don’t read it at all.

I know it’s a awkward analogy comparing games to news. But we need to take the young people who use iphone, ipod, pda, or laptop to retrieve news information. Besides reading news stories, what do you think she is doing? I tell you what, she is using gtalk to chat with her friend, checking her email on gmail, a browser shows that somebody just added her on facebook, and there is a small tiny browser hidden below called “NY times.”

This is the way people now retrieve information. We turn on our laptop, check email, face book, and our RSS read. If there are some news titles that we’re interested in, we might open the window. Otherwise, we turn off the laptop, or just linger on facebook.

It’s not as a lot of media thought, that people will put their website on “My Favorite,” and check every day. No way, everybody just bookmark your website and forget it. They will google your company name next time when they think of your newspaper.

The fact is, everything online is trying to get as much attention as possible. Our competitor is not the other news organization, but all the websites online. The amount of audience is unlimited, but their time is. If one spends one more minutes on facebook, he/she is going to spend one minute less on your news story. News stories need to be attractive enough to compete with other online application. It’s hard, but I guess Journalism is never a easy industry.

I hate to say that, but I guess it’s time for media to think about how to please their customer, aka the audience. For a very long time, journalists never thought about pleasing the reader, and took the readers’ appreciation for granted.

The expense may not be the accuracy of news stories, but the length, the size of pictures, or the effort spent on copy-editing. The core value of Journalism can be kept, but the form needs to be changed.

I’m not happy with the fact at all. I jump into this industry because I want to write in-depth news, investigative report, and feature writing. (Well, I’m a good writer in my first language, if you believe.) Now web has pushed everything toward faster, shorter, and easier. Lengthy stories are just too expensive.

Well, I guess as long as we can find creative business model for news industry these costly stories can still run somewhere. But before that, we need to stop complaining, panicking, and be creative.

Adapt or die? Definitely adapt. [Alice]

Last semester, I took a course and the instructor spent a lot of time criticizing how terrible it is that readers are not paying for news, citizen journalists producing stories without in-depth thoughts, or less people now appreciate hard-copy version of newspaper. The list can go on and on and on. Believe or not, sitting there listening to this kind of preaches is like a nightmare. As a future journalist and a kid grew up in digital era, I think it’s hard for me to say how much journalists deserve being paid. I’d never want to jump into a low-pay occupation. However, I know that I wouldn’t spend even only 75 cents on a newspaper everyday when I can read it online for free.

Do journalists deserve low pay? I guess no. But the problem now is nobody is willing to pay for intangible information. We’ve been so used to retrieving information for free. If some news organization, say NY times, decided to charge users online, we switch to other newspapers. I have no idea whether journalists, or their work, deserve low pay. But I’m sure that as long as there is free online information with acceptable quality, nobody will pay.

To put what we learned in economics here, I’ll say the demand curve is extremely sharp. No matter how the supply curves look like, the price will remain low. The chief editor of Texas Monthly once came to our class and he said, “The business is gone, and it will never come back.” (This is the direct quote.) I guess that’s the situation we’re facing. We can only adapt or die, or waste our time trying to “teach” audience that they should pay us.

This is actually the reason I became interested in marketing and economics of news media. Before I came here, I was so anti-business. I didn’t even finish my two-semester economic class. Now I think marketing and economics are the only solution for newspaper. News media is losing ground. Old people can complain and stay in nostalgically “oh-the-good-old-days” mourns. Young people, like me, can’t. It is us formed the anti-fee generation so we should be able to find out how news industry will be tomorrow. Well, I might sound silly or naïve, but I guess I’m young enough to be silly.