Abstract Edge: Brand Interactivism

Long Form Journalism Doesn't Work Online

So says Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of Time.com.

Josh's message is that long-form journalism does great in a magazine where the reader has made a commitment to tune out the world for at least several minutes to read through an article, but not so well online where attention is in much shorter supply and the majority of readers are trying to squeeze in their news fix during a short lunch break at work. As a result, roughly 95% of all content on Time.com is exclusive to the web.

The lesson for publishers is to realize that the web is a different medium than print, with different opportunities. Perhaps print isn't dead after all - it's just more specialized.

Posted via email from Thinking on the Edge

Gartner's WCMS Magic Quadrant is Unfair to Open Source

This week, Gartner released their "Magic Quadrant" study of the web content management system market.

"This Magic Quadrant will help CIOs, and business and IT leaders that are analyzing their Web strategies to assess whether they have the right WCM offering to support them."

While acknowledging the "increased popularity and traction for open-source offerings," once again Gartner has failed to include any open source CMS's in the report. The reason, Gartner claims, is:

"Open source still accounts for less than 4% of the revenue by which Gartner defines the size of the WCM market. This percentage is growing slowly, based on the inherent licensing models used for the offerings. This year, no vendors offering open-source software (OSS) have reached the revenue threshold for inclusion in our formal analysis."

Later in this article, Gartner clarifies the revenue threshold, stating:

"WCM total software revenue (including new licenses, updates, maintenance and/or subscriptions, SaaS, hosting and technical support) for 2008 must exceed $8 million. The software must be available as a stand-alone product or offering."

The thing is, this is entirely unfair. One of the major advantages of open source software is that licenses are free, as in $0, as in no revenue whatsoever. So basically, Gartner is punishing open source software for this. For the most part, open source software only costs money for maintenance, hosting and technical support. Licenses and updates, which in the CMS world can cost a small fortune, cost nothing at all when using open source software.

In my opinion, vendor revenue is a particularly poor metric for evaluating whether businesses "have the right WCM offering to support them."

What do you think? Anyone from Gartner care to comment? Is vendor revenue a reasonable measure in a software market where there are an abundance of open source solutions?

Reuters vs. AP (or Free vs. Closed and the Future of Journalism)

Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, blogged about his view on the Associated Press' move to start charging $2.50 per word if you want to quote five or more words from one of their articles. This is partially in response to the Ian Shapira article at the Washington Post about how Gawker ripped him off and how that's causing the "death of journalism." Mr. Shapira's view is, it seems, fairly widespread in the journalism world. Last week I watched a debate on Twitter started by Bart Hubbuch, the Mets beat writer for the New York Post, who was supporting Mr. Shapira.

The money quote from Mr. Ahearn's blog post (which Reuters will not charge me for):

"Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions."

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is going to start charging online for ALL of News Corp-owned content fairly soon.

Now, I'm going to quote from an AP article, but only four words... "would bring liberal bias". Whew, I don't owe them any money for that. If I had used just one more word though...

What do you think? Will it work to charge online for content? Is there a way to make it work?

Posted via email from Thinking on the Edge