Category: News Media

It’s about Time(s)

timesselect free
The New York Times announces in tomorrow’s paper that its experiment with charging for a portion of its content on the web has come to an end:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

You can read the whole announcement here and get Jeff Jarvis’ take here.

I used to echo the standard line that “content is king.” If that were true, the Times wouldn’t be giving it away. The reality is relationships and conversations are what matter, and the TimesSelect wall was cutting off those relationships.Content is nobility at best (since users can generate it, too), not royalty.

In the city where I work — Rochester, Minnesota — the Post-Bulletin has likewise opened all of its content to non-subscribers. The reason: it was losing online ad revenue.

As Jarvis notes, it seems much more likely that the Wall Street Journal will soon open its online content to non-subscribers, especially under its new ownership.

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Looking Forward to the Page Panel

Arthur W. Page Society
On Tuesday, I’m part of a panel at the Arthur W. Page Society‘s annual conference in Dana Point, Calif. The subject is The Rise of Social Networking and Its Impact on Business.

Members of the panel are:

  • Lee Aase, Manager, National Media Relations, Research Communications and New Media, Mayo Clinic (That’s me!)
  • Jeff Berman, Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and General Manager of Video at MySpace.com
  • Adam Brown, Director, Digital Communications, The Coca-Cola Company
  • Jonathan Taplin (Moderator), Digital Media Consultant; Adjunct Professor, Annenberg School of Communication, USC

I always enjoy attending and presenting at conferences, because the interaction and sharing of ideas stimulates me to new applications in my work.

But I’m looking forward to this conference more than any I’ve previously attended. The subtitle of this blog is “Thoughts on New Media, News Media and Productivity,” and much of what I write is about changes in the media landscape and what they mean for PR professionals and the organizations we serve. This whole conference is arranged around that same theme (and other global business changes.) And I’m going to get to hear first hand from panelists and speakers including:

  • Tina Brown, Author/Editor
  • Beth Comstock, President, NBC Universal Integrated Media,
  • Mitch Gelman, Senior VP and Senior Executive Producer, CNN.com
  • Ed Leonard, Chief Technology Officer, Dreamworks Animation SKG
  • Phil Rosenthal, Media Columnist, Chicago Tribune

Those are just the media representatives. Many of the other presenters and most of the participants are Chief Communications Officers for Fortune 500 corporations or are leaders of global PR and consulting firms.

The theme of the conference is Manage for Tomorrow: Corporate Communications in a Changing World. I expect it will be highly stimulating. Check out the Page Society web site for more background on the organization and this event.

I’ll share what I can from the conference as it happens to the extent it is consistent with the organizers’ wishes, but whether I “live blog” or not, I know that what I learn will affect my perspective and my writing in the coming months.

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Week in Review

Highlights of the last week:

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Blogs for PR Clip Reporting

Blogs for PR Clip Reporting

My previous post may have seemed a little off-topic, because it was essentially a recap of some coverage of a news release, with links to several of the stories. In reality, it was a concrete example of this PR tip, how you can use blogs for PR clip reporting. This is another way you can use social media tools to accomplish business objectives more effectively than through last-generation tools like email.

In my work with the National Media Relations and New Media team at Mayo Clinic, we regularly distribute news releases about findings of Mayo Clinic’s researchers as they appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Examples of these are general medical journals like Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine or Mayo Clinic Proceedings, basic science-oriented journals like Science, PNAS or Nature or others that are devoted to a particular medical specialty such as Circulation or Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

When we do a news release like this one on ovary removal and its correlation with an increased risk of dementia, we want to report results on the news coverage to the physicians and researchers involved, and to leaders of their department and staff members in our Department of Public Affairs.

Typically, if the story involves one major broadcast network or a newspaper like USA Today or the New York Times, we can just send an email with the link to the story. In this case, because of the extent of coverage, that would have been unwieldy.
When we get extraordinary response, we’re starting to use a blog on our intranet to communicate with our key internal groups. We can have links to some of the key stories, and can compile them all in one place to make it convenient for people who are interested to get a feel for the nature and extent of coverage. It also gives them a single link to a blog post that they can copy and paste into an email message to share with colleagues.

We have some key external groups we want to keep informed about the news, too. Unfortunately, because they don’t have access behind our IT firewall, they can’t get to our internal blog. So, here’s an external version of what we placed on our internal blog, which highlights some of the exceptional news coverage Dr. Walter Rocca’s study in Neurology received.

A blog is not an efficient way to produce a comprehensive PR clip report; other services are better for that. And it only works for summarizing on-line coverage. But to quickly do a “show and tell” report, sifting through and identifying key coverage and adding commentary and context, a blog is hard to beat. For this time I just assembled the highlights in my personal blog; we may want to consider developing an external blog for this purpose. It wouldn’t be hard, or expensive, to do.

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Mayo Clinic Study In Neurology

Here are links to some of the most prominent stories done in the last 24 hours on this research study on ovary removal and risk of neurologic conditions, which was led by Dr. Walter Rocca, a neurologist at Mayo Clinic:

TIME magazine

Here is the Associated Press story as it appears in the Washington Post and in USA Today.

Yahoo News has a video of the NBC News Channel story, which ran not only throughout the U.S. but also, as you will see, in Australia.

A story on the Ivanhoe newswire

The HealthDay newswire story as it appears on Forbes.com

The Bloomberg News wire story

The BBC News story

The Reuters Health news story

Here is the ScienceDaily story, which was adapted from the news release.

This is just a sampling; Google News currently shows 167 total articles. But it does reflect some of the breadth of coverage this study received.

Mayo Clinic Study in Neurology

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