COM 140 - Reading week 3
Where’s the Innovation in Business Models?
Chris O’Brien
“Last Friday morning, I was one of many Mercury News employees who carefully watched their phone for two hours waiting to see if they got a call informing them their career was done. And make no mistake: In this day and age, getting fired from a newspaper for most people means your journalism career is finished.
What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.”
Citizen Huff
“Success on the Web is defined by spotting niches and serving them well,” said Micah L. Sifry, the editor of the blog TechPresident.com. “Will people go to The Huffington Post for great sports blogging? They’re certainly not going to go see what Arianna says about opening day,” he added.
A number of people have ungracefully departed in the past year, a situation Mr. Lerer attributed to the difficulty in transforming “old media” employees.
The site has other challenges. Despite its number of visitors, it still has a high “bounce rate,” referring to users who visit one page and then leave the site. Drudge still records seven times the monthly page views of The Huffington Post, meaning that readers are frequently refreshing for the latest headlines.
A Radio Host Tries His Voice on Television
I’m a big fan of his radio show:
“We want to do people on a human scale without a lot of shouting,” Mr. Glass said. “The subjects don’t need to be exemplars of some national trend. They can just be people with interesting stories.”
joel