Posts by Barry Parr (bio)

Barry Parr | April 22, 2008, 08:56 PM
I love Google's new primary reporting tool

Google's new primary tracking map is amazing. The level of data-intensity is amazing and I love the sparkline-inspired charts for each county. This is a wonderful example of how to illustrate a massive amount of information in a a simple way.

It's churlish to want more, but what I really want is something that allows me to analyze the results, and not simply to report them. But I guess that's why I'm doing this job.

Barry Parr | April 21, 2008, 05:57 PM
Limitations of street view

I'm not sure what this means, but I used the Internet is a new way today. Sort of.

I was trying to remember the name of a restaurant where I had dinner the last time I was in New York, and couldn't find it in Google Maps or any of the obvious yellow pages applications. So, I zoomed in on the street view in Google Maps to get a look at the sign in front of the place.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I discovered a great, big truck sitting between me and and the restaurant's sign.

Barry Parr | April 07, 2008, 03:47 PM
What newspapers can learn from radio

Tribune's hiring of executives from Clear Channel is an interesting idea, but hiring programming executives seems like a mistake.

The competitive instincts of radio might do the newspaper industry some good. But no media industry treats its audience with more contempt than does commercial radio. Then there's this:

Meanwhile, at Tribune, the hirings suggest that Mr. Zell, who himself owned a radio broadcaster for a time in the 1990s, may put more emphasis on the broadcasting side of Tribune, a side of the business that generates higher profit margins and doesn't face the same rapid falloff in advertising as the newspaper business.

Yes, and oranges are juicier than apples.

Not to mention the fact that broadcasting is being teed up for its own day of reckoning.

Where could radio's cutthroat competitive instincts do newspapers the most good? Radio advertising executives understand how to sell locally and competitively in ways that newspaper ad teams only talk about in PowerPoint charts.

Barry Parr | March 31, 2008, 08:45 AM
Thinking hard about social media

Bloggers already have access to some excellent tools for content management, but are falling behind in community-building. That's why I'm excited by Chris Pirillo's announcement that he wants to build an installation of Drupal that is optimized for social media. Even if you're a big media company, or never use Drupal, this project could affect the way you run your site.

I don’t want a social network, I want a socially *RELEVANT* network (both on-site and beyond). I don’t want a community platform, I want a participation platform where members are rewarded and ranked appropriately. I don’t want a place where people can just blog, because I’m going well beyond the blog. It’s not just about hosting videos, audio files, or any piece of random media - it’s the discovery mechanisms between them that make them more relevant.

It’s discovery - no matter the community, no matter the type of content. Imagine coming to a site and not just reading about what other people are interested in, but what interests they SHARE with you! Imagine coming to a site and seeing how someone ranks in answers pertaining to your own questions! Oh, I’m confident you may have seen these features elsewhere - but what about for your own site, what about for your own community, what about for your own ideas?

Media are becoming social and many bloggers know they will be left behind by the revolution they started if their tools don't get better. But competition is making everybody's tools sharper. The last time I was in the market for a content management system, I was intrigued by Drupal, but I knew that I didn't have the time or resources to build on its deep capabilities. There's a reason most Drupal sites look alike. It's difficult for the average site builder to transcend Drupal's profound dorkiness.

Chris's intense, well-thought-out description of the content management system he'd like to build is loaded with good ideas that every media company should consider for their sites and possibly demand from their vendors.

Barry Parr | March 28, 2008, 02:27 PM
A commonsense approach to moderation

Our research shows that the people who post in online appreciate good moderation. I also know from personal experience that writing and enforcing a moderation policy is a thankless job. But it's one that your users will appreciate, even if they don't know why.

Boing Boing's new Q&A-style moderation policy is a fascinating document. It ranges from straightforward to cranky and idiosyncratic.

Q. All the vowels have disappeared from a paragraph I wrote! What's going on?

A. We did it. Someone (a moderator, one of the Boingers) was expressing displeasure at your remarks. The technique is called disemvowelling. It deprecates but does not delete the remark. With work, the disemvowelled text should still be readable.

But it's also plainspoken and utterly appropriate to the tone of the site. At some point, we'll come to appreciate moderation as any other editorial function, and one that is essential to the site's editorial voice.

Barry Parr | March 10, 2008, 03:10 PM
No "Wire" spoilers here

I'm not going to tell you how "The Wire" -- arguably the best TV show ever -- ends. Not till next year: I'm watching it on DVD via Netflix. I think it's the best way to follow such a densely-layered, character-driven show.

I'm using Netflix to follow a number of HBO series on a Mac Mini with a 17" monitor in our bedroom. And we're using El Gato's Eye TV hooked up to the cable for regular TV. That's how I recorded and watched enough of "Mad Men" to decide to buy it from iTunes.

My wife got addicted to "The Office" buying it on iTunes. She has watched these episodes enough to have a disturbing command of the dialog. We were not happy with NBC's iTunes boycott, but it did give us an opportunity to try it on Hulu.

Meanwhile, our 15-year-old daughter buys "Gray's Anatomy" and "Lost" on iTunes and watches them in a window when she's on the computer or on her iPod when she's killing time.

The only person in our household who's watching much regular old TV (ROT?) these days is our five year old.

These new distribution media aren't going to eliminate ROT, but they can't help but have a profound effect on its business model. And it's already showing in the direction of network TV.

In the meantime, we're living in both a new (and improved) Golden Age of television, and its Dark Ages.

Barry Parr | March 03, 2008, 10:12 PM
Getting TV all of out of proportion

Television is in some kind of weird middle-aged adolescence. Everywhere you look, it's awkwardly proportioned.

I've become used to widescreen TV's electronics stores and public places showing regular old TV broadcasts stretched horizontally to fill the space. We wouldn't want to waste all those pixels we paid for -- or look like we're just showing plain old TV -- after all.

On a recent cross-country flight I enjoyed Virgin America's new in-flight entertainment system. It's very nice, except it insists on showing, say, The Office, in widescreen format -- making the entire cast look a little chubby.

And no one seems to notice. One can only imagine in how many homes expensive, high-resolution home theaters are showing TV as it was never meant to be shown. And America is left wondering whether Obama has put on weight.

Barry Parr | February 07, 2008, 07:36 PM
Think locally, act Googley

Google has announced that they plan to provide news by geography.

So far, what I've seen doesn't work very well. For example, Google only seems to find the zips that are actually in the text of the story and doesn't seem to reflect any actual geocoding on the part of the news organization. However, this is a clear signal to everyone in the news business to get their metadata in order.

All stories (or at least their database entries) should include all relevant location information, including all government districts, zip codes, latitude/longitude, etc. Publishers should begin the process of setting up their systems so that they can deliver this metadata with the story.

This leads me to two other big trends affecting the news business in 2008.

First, content producers should begin thinking of their content and systems as platforms for new applications. They will need to create new kinds of products and services on those platforms and open themselves up so that intermediaries like Google News can bring them into contact with new audiences.

Second, local content producers must now recognize that Google's main search bar (not local.google.com) is now a big player in their local market and that their customers are already adding zip codes to their Google searches. They must have a strategy for dealing with the coming impact of Google in their markets.

I've got two reports in production on these trends already, and I will continue to explore them in 2008.

Barry Parr | February 01, 2008, 02:22 PM
MicroYahoo's surprising beneficiary

The Microsoft/Yahoo mashup is a bad deal for consumers and advertisers, because it's ultimately about eliminating a competitor. But the big winner isn't Microsoft, it's Google.

Online audience growth in the US has been flattening for some time, and it's only going to get flatter. Couple that with a surprising lack of curiosity about new sites among online users, and you have a world where nearly everyone will have to acquire to order to grow.

But the twist is that Google has not had to grow through acquisitions. Their acquisitions have involved technology, not audiences. No matter how many pointlessly geeky lab projects come out of Google, they're also delivering great, successful products to their users. Even the unpolished Google apps have the sharp, bracing scent of morning about them.

Meanwhile, this deal smells a little desperate.

Does anyone believe that the combination of Microsoft's and Yahoo's online grab-bags will be bigger than the sum of its parts? Microsoft may be able to justify this deal if the combined position is significantly larger than their current position, even after the inevitable user and advertiser flight. But there's no way Google won't win customers from MicroYahoo.

If this deal happens, look for a period of stagnation, not progress, as Microsoft tries to rationalize and corporatize and synergize the resulting hodgepodge of assets--and liabilities. And look to Google for continued innovation in online services and advertising.

Barry Parr | December 18, 2007, 03:26 PM
What problem is the FCC trying to solve?

Remember the eighties, the decade when pop killed off punk, and when Jerry Bruckheimer got rich making loud and lame movies? OK, so some things never change.

Another loud and lame idea from the eighties has come back to haunt us. The Federal Communications Commission has loosened the rules preventing companies from owning television stations and newspapers in the same market.

What problem is the FCC trying to solve?

Allowing companies to get merge in order to increase the level of competition in a market always ends in oligopoly.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, one company (Comcast) owns all the cable systems and another (Media News) owns all the newspapers, with the exception of the increasingly Finlandized San Francisco Chronicle.

You don't need to be Marshall McLuhan to know that television, radio, and newspapers are such different media that there are no meaningful synergies among them. I've said it here before: The pursuit of false synergies has destroyed more shareholder value in the media business than any other boardroom fad of the last twenty years.

And you don't need to be Dean Singleton to know that there is only one way to make more money by merging two companies in a mature business.

You can either decrease costs, which means laying off staff, including in the newsroom.

Or you can increase revenue, by raising your advertising rates.

The FCC is serving the demands of its licensees here, and not the needs of the communities where they operate.

Barry Parr | December 03, 2007, 06:31 PM
One more way bloggers are like journalists

The other day I keynoted at a meeting of PR professionals. I threw around a lot of big ideas about how the Web is turning the media inside out in profound ways. But I received the most pushback on my suggestion that PR folks treat bloggers with the same respect they treat journalists. The objections were of two types:

• Bloggers don't deserve respect because they're, well, bloggers.
• "What makes you think we treat journalists with respect?"

Barry Parr | November 29, 2007, 04:56 PM
The dangers of sharpening blunt instruments

"Leading news organizations" are looking at updating the robots.txt file format so they can place new limits on what the search engines can index and how long they can keep the information. Good idea: robots.txt is a pretty blunt instrument.

However, there is no question that search engine referrals are more of an opportunity than a threat for "leading news organizations". I'm working on a report right now that will demonstrate how big that opportunity is and how badly it has been missed so far.

Take a deep breath. Now perform a thorough exploration of that bath water for hidden babies before you toss it out.

Barry Parr | November 28, 2007, 07:57 PM
Has Facebook creeped you out yet?

I got my first taste of Facebook's new Beacon advertising system this weekend. I'm still trying to get that taste out of my mouth.

I bought some tickets to a movie on Fandango and got a weird little popup on the bottom of the screen telling me that the details of my transaction were waiting on the lauchpad to be shot over to all my friends and (let's face it) marginal acquaintances on Facebook. It was up to me to tell them not to share this particular detail of my life. What was the the movie? None of your business.

My next stop was Facebook, where I signed the online petition asking them, essentially, "What could you possibly be thinking, anyway, Facebook?".

Beacon is a very cool idea in many respects. I know many people who would love for you and I to know all of the cool stuff they're buying. I can't wait to find out.

Barry Parr | November 20, 2007, 07:01 PM
Dumbing down the definition of paid

For years, the newspaper industry has excused falling circulation numbers, saying that it is getting rid of junk circulation. That was long overdue. It took a scandal that sent some newspaper executives to jail before the industry got serious about quality circulation, but it looked like they were ready to go cold turkey.

In the words of Homer Simpson, going cold turkey isn't as delicious as it sounds.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (which is owned by the publishers it audits) has decided to dumb down the definition of paid circulation from 25% of cover price to "a flexible pricing model where newspapers will be considered “paid” by ABC regardless of the price for which a copy is sold."

Whatever.

It is now officially time for the newspaper industry and its enablers to stop whinging about having to give away their valuable product on the Internet.

Barry Parr | November 07, 2007, 06:24 PM
Now I know why they're called broadcasters

It's not yet clear who will dominate the social media sphere in the local market, but local broadcasters seem like a long shot.

In my home town you can't get TV without cable. Comcast, meanwhile, provides an unbelievably poor signal for many local TV stations. Finally fed up with the mind-addling humming in the background of The Office every week, I decided that the most expedient solution would be to ring up my friends at the local NBC affiliate and have them bust Comcast's chops.

I'm not sure what I expected, but I didn't expect this.

Their "Contact us" page provides a phone number with an answer-bot. The only option for theoretically speaking to a live person is ad sales. Otherwise, you'd better know the name of the person you want to talk to.

Or you can use an email form (ick) to send a message to Newstips, Programming, Weather, or Web staff. I tried it, but apparently they forgot to hire an intern to actually read their mail.

Anyway, I've now sent an email to ad sales. They're the only ones with published names or email addresses, and they might even be opening their mail.

Barry Parr | October 03, 2007, 12:18 PM
Facebook wants to join your professional network

Facebook's announcement that you will be able to separate your personal and professional networks is a major threat to LinkedIn.

Facebook's strategic advantages are formidable.

• More people you know are likely to be on Facebook, which has ten times the unique visitors of LinkedIn. In August, they added as many users as visited Linked In that month, according to Compete.com
• Facebook is optimized for communication, increasing users' interaction with the service, time online, and likelihood of discovering one another.
• Facebook's opening up to developers has been a huge hit with developers and users.
• Facebook's popularity with college students means that likely networkers entering the workforce already have the networks there.
• How many social networks do you want to belong to? In 2008, everybody's going to be introducing social networking features in their sites. Users will limit the number of networks they cultivate.

LinkedIn is not without resources. The site is clearly optimized for exploiting professional networks and for making contact with friends of friends and searching for contacts by employer. Its large and loyal customer base will be reluctant to switch. Facebook's collegiate roots still show, and many of their applications are so silly and trivial that it sometimes seems like a MySpace for anal retentives. Many people I know aren't ready to move their professional networks to MySpace.

Inertia gives LinkedIn a small window in which to respond to Facebook's strategic threat. I hope they use it wisely.

Barry Parr | September 20, 2007, 02:28 PM
Waiting for the other shoe to drop in paid online news

Everyone is asking about the impact on the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times decision to release all its news and most of its archives from the bondage of paid access.

For those of you who may not have seen a copy, The New York Times is a newspaper that is popular with the elites in a couple of cities on the east coast of the United States. It is published by the same company that publishes NYTimes.com, one of the best and most-read news websites in the world.

The Journal's decision is more complex. It has printing plants all over the world, so that it can deliver its print product first thing in the morning. Most of its readers are not buying the paper with their own money, so it's not clear how elastic their demand really is. Or whether they're actually reading it, I suppose.

The Journal is able to get absolutely premium rates for its print advertising because it has an absolutely premium audience who can buy and sell the kind of nerds who read the New York Times. Especially the Times's Sunday readers -- losers who like crossword puzzles, long magazine articles, and the latest news about Richard Wagner. The dynamic money-makers who read the Journal don't have time for that nonsense. On Sunday mornings, they're reading their Blackberries, shopping for summer homes, and waiting for markets to open somewhere.

Does the Journal really want to reach the kind of riff-raff who want to read the news for free? Those people don't even aspire to owning a fine Swiss timekeeping instrument, let alone have half a dozen sitting in an automatic winder in their walk-in closet waiting for an appropriate occasion.

The answer, of course, is that the print edition of the Journal will fade away soon enough. Newsprint is getting more expensive. Printing plants are very expensive. And by the time you get it, the news in the paper is already beginning to rot on the page. And if Rupert Murdoch moves the paper to shorter, punchier stories, he'll have created a made-for-online product.

If the Journal doesn't come up with plan for a gentle transition to a free online service, that day may not come gently and it will be hastened by the likes of Bloomberg, Reuters, Conde Nast, a few hundred bloggers, and (yes!) The New York Times.

Barry Parr | September 18, 2007, 06:04 PM
If you love your information, set it free

The New York Times has finally put Times Select out of our misery. But wait, there's more!

The Times is also releasing its archives from bondage. At least, all stories after 1987 or before 1923. Stories published between 1923 and 1986 are still for sale.

This is tremendously good news for everyone:

Times Digital stands to benefit the most. I've been convinced for a long time that the only role for Time Select was to protect the printed newspaper from cannibalization. The Web is now free to compete with print to be the main platform for the Times's news.

Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, and plenty of other columnists whose work should be some of the most-linked-to material on the Web will find a new and enthusiastic audience. As well as millions of people who don't like their stuff, but can't bear not to link to it.

Bloggers will be able to freely and permanent link to important news stories and columns, as well as past stories that place today's news into meaningful context.

Web users will be more likely to read Times's archives from links in blogs than from the paper's database interface. The Times will become the most authoritative source for background information on a wide variety of topics. Not only will take some of that traffic from Wikipedia, it will certainly become an important source for Wikipedia. This is definitely not a zero-sum game.

And all these links will create a rich context of metadata that will add value to the the Times's content.

Other news organizations -- from community weeklies to national dailies -- should take this as a signal that it is now officially insane to keep past stories off the grid. It's not just selfish, it's bad business.

I'm excited about the role of intermediaries in the news business. In my research, I have found that the Times is missing out on a great deal of traffic from intermediaries ranging from Google News to the Drudge Report. Not only will the Times be able to make up for lost time, they have positioned themselves to take advantage of one of the most important strategic trends in online media.

Barry Parr | September 07, 2007, 07:03 PM
Being an intermediary is not as easy as it looks

Netscape.com was always the biggest wasted opportunity on the Internet. Somewhere in its history, it was a site for small an medium-sized businesses. At some point after AOL merged with Time Warner, its reason for being was to shill Time Warner media properties.

Still, according to Compete.com, five million people visit Netscape.com every month.

Last year, AOL launched a relatively bold experiment by turning Netscape into what some have called a "Digg clone" but always felt like somebody spilled a test tube full of Digg's DNA and never really cleaned it up properly.

Netscape.com is now a place where right-wingers and left-wingers taunt one another by voting up partisan diatribes: "Candidate Thompson Praised for Global Warming Views" or "Bush's Bogus Bailout" or "Upcoming Changes at Netscape". Actually, that last one was designed to taunt everyone who invested their time and energy at Netscape.com.

Meanwhile, news.aol.com (to continue the genetic engineering metaphor) is another weird hybrid. It doesn't really have an editorial voice, so it reads like an AP wire feed with comments enabled. Though I've grown to appreciate the core concept of a newsfeed that is optimized for interaction -- every story has a quiz, poll, in-page gallery, or wacky picture -- it's impossible to take seriously as a news source. No one is going to feel taunted or challenged by any story there.

In a world where intermediaries are becoming dominant sources of news and information, one of the world's biggest media companies still has no strategy for two of the best-known portals on the net.

Barry Parr | September 04, 2007, 07:11 PM
Google gives newspapers the gift of focus

Google's shift to hosting its own wire service stories is a notice to laggards that you can't succeed by providing the same information that everyone else is giving away.

It's one of my major themes that intermediaries (including Google) are increasing their role in connecting audiences with news (or all content for that matter). In an intermediated world, your particular copy of a wire service story adds little value to the mix. And at some point, adding yet another copy decreases the value of the whole mess.

In a world of networked media, news organizations need to focus on what they do best. For all but a handful of newspapers, that's local news. They should have been doing it anyway, but Google is making it a survival skill. They may want to aggregate some national and international news for their unique audience, but editors really have to reconsider the time and energy they're devoting generic wire stories. Expecially now that their readers can get them from Google.

Barry Parr | July 30, 2007, 07:56 PM
Interpreting an artifact from the future

Has any consumer product felt so much like it came from the future as does the iPhone? How about this quote from Business Week [via Daring Fireball]:

The most expensive component on the phone, [Portelligent CEO David] Carey says, is the touch screen, for which Apple tapped a little-known German concern called Balda. The estimated cost of $60 per unit is mostly an educated guess. "This screen is like nothing I’ve ever seen before," says Carey.

Sounds like a line from a science fiction movie.

If you're an online publisher and haven't already bought an iPhone, I'm about to do you a favor. I'm going to give you an excuse to buy one. Go ahead. You can thank me later.

I'm not an early adopter. I kept buying Startacs off Craigslist long after they were discontinued and hung on to my aging T616 long after pixel rot wrecked the display because the handsets we're (still!) being offered by the carriers are such irredeemable rubbish. I'm glad I waited.

Once you use the darn thing, you're reminded why WAP is so hoplessly lame and degrading. Of course, you already knew that. But -- admit it -- in your hunger to participate in the mobile future, you held your nose and did a little WAP.

Having access to a large, hand-held, responsive, high-resolution, touchable Web, you realize there's just no point to WAP any longer. WAP's adoption by consumers is grindingly slow, and now it's staring doom in the face. When you're using the Web on your iPhone, you don't need a carrier's "deck" to help you navigate. The ad model makes sense because it's the same one publishers are already using. No one has to create special lite pages for this device, although it might be a good idea for some producers to do so.

Mobile devices that don't compromise the Web are not the only problem for WAP. Julie Ask is working on a report about some other alternatives to WAP sites that don't require an iPhone.

I know some publishers are making WAP work. If you're not already one of them, you're unlikely to be one. But when you play around with this device, you'll wonder why you're dealing with all the middleware, special clients, pixel-poor ads -- and the carriers' hands in your pocket.

Barry Parr | July 24, 2007, 06:06 PM
Another view of GrandCentral

I've been using Grand Central since last October and overall I'm very happy with it. Michael Gartenberg says that he doesn't want to give them control of his phone number and doesn't like the interface for incoming calls.

GrandCentral solves a problem that I haven't been able to solve any other way -- I can't get cell service in my home -- and it solves it in an elegant fashion. My GrandCentral number rings both my cell and my home office. Its email notifications and message inbox are beautifully designed and easy to use.

I still wish that it had a more powerful set of rules (e.g. don't forward to my home number before 9am). I wish I had more control over the greeting. Like Michael, I wish I could turn off the "Press 1 to take a call" feature -- for selected callers. GrandCentral seems to fluster some callers, who sound confused by what precisely they're talking to at first. And I really wish I could use my GrandCentral inbox with my iPhone (It requires Flash, of all things). And although I've heard some complaints about call quality, there are so many steps in the telephone chain these days, it's really difficult to say how GrandCentral affects the quality of your calls.

I'm a lot less troubled than Michael about giving GrandCentral control of my phone number. It's a big advantage for me that I don't have to make my "real" numbers -- the ones I do plan to keep for life -- available to everybody. I use my GrandCentral number in my email sig.

Ever since I've been using GrandCentral, I've felt like I've had much more control of my telephone communications. And that's something I'd pay money for.

Barry Parr | July 06, 2007, 01:46 PM
NYT understands how to be a good host

The NY Times has posted a reader Q&A with Digital News Editor Jim Roberts [via CyberJournalist] that contains a lot of interesting information about the operation of the digital side of the paper.

I was struck by the following list of guidelines for readers posting comments on the site so they could avoid having their comments bounced by a moderator. You can see the full version over at the Times, but here's the shortened version:

• No profanity. No obscenity.


• No name calling or insults.


• Stay on point.


• Don’t bother sending press releases.


• Don’t rage and don’t SHOUT.


• Please use your real name.

These are pretty much the rules that I have adopted in forums I moderate after a few years of painful experience.

Every failure that I'm aware of involving reader generated content on a media site appears to involve a failure of moderation. I've come to believe that the biggest mistake that print media make when hosting comments is thinking there is no middle ground between their tightly-edited professional product and anarchy.

However, I also believe there's more than right way to do this, and it's a good time for everyone to share information on how to do it. One of my goals for the second half of the year is to come up with some best practices for hosting social media.

Barry Parr | June 20, 2007, 03:28 PM
Recovering value destroyed by "synergy"

McClatchy is thinking about selling its share in the online job site CareerBuilder. That's an idea worth considering.

I've come to believe that more value has been destroyed in the pursuit of false synergies than any other boardroom fad of the last 20 years. Imagine for a moment that (1) McClatchy could bank the value of its stake in CareerBuilder, and (2) McClatchy's newspapers were free to negotiate the best possible deal for employment classifieds. Monster and HotJobs are now eagerly negotiating deals with the newspapers. What would it be worth to CareerBuilder to keep McClatchy on board? How much value would that create?

It's enough to make you wonder how much value was created by CareerBuilder and how much was simply transfered from McClatchy's (and Gannett's and Tribune's) newspapers to CareerBuilder in the first place.

Intermediaries on the Web are going to be increasing their clout, and it's time for everyone to reexamine all their cozy corporate distribution deals to see if they're creating or destroying value.