Part of this post is designed to explain what we’ve done with www.myfootballwriter.com of late; part of it is designed to publicly thank both Neil Mason (@Neil_Mason) and Philip John (@PhilipJohn) for their invaluable role therein; and a part of it is designed to try and put our on-going experiences with MFW into a wider media setting as bureaucrats the world over continue to flounder…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/05/24/at-what-point-in-schumpeter-time-does-newmarks-original-heresy-become-network-orthodoxy-in-the-bureaucrats-boardroom/

That remains a lovely line from Bill Thompson’s pal Will Davies… 

‘He [Bill's friend, Will Davies..] points out that the creative destruction described by Schumpeter is, of necessity, destructive. Old practices are abandoned, old companies die, and new ways of being, doing and making money emerge to replace them.

‘This is not a weakness, not a failure, but an inherent property of industrial capitalism and those who complain about it simply do not understand the rules of the game they are playing…’

Which, I’d suggest, is an argument that you could easily apply to, say, the Commission Of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society and the notion that £100 million worth of ‘Google Tax’ could ride to the rescue of the provincial newspaper industry… the same industry that kissed goodbye to £500 mill in 2009…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/13/newspapers-internet

IMHO, to quote Davies again, they simply ‘do not understand the rules of the game they are playing…’

In the view of Marc Andreessen, of course, the rules of the game demand that the newspaper industry switch off their print presses now. Like tomorrow… take the hurt; ditch the legacy costs…

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/12/newsosaurs-extinction/

It is not a new call; he was making it in the autumn of 2008… exhorting newspapers to go on the ‘offense’ and not head for the nearest bunker to hunker down therein in the hope that this whole web thing would kind of go away… that someone, to quote Mr Shirky, would kindly invent a ‘time machine’ to transport them and their beleagured industry back to another century.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/11/10/somewhere-in-between-total-offense-and-fort-dunlop-like-defense-there-ought-to-be-a-way-forward-in-theory/

Of late, most of my waking thoughts and hours have been devoted to all things Addiply; my role within the relaunch of a Mark III MyFootballWriter was strictly limited.

And like all build jobs, we’ve still got a snagging list to do… certain frames ‘bust’; the #ncfc and #itfc Twitter feeds don’t push through as quickly as they should; we have a blocked pipe; frustrating on match days when the conversation is at its peak.

But, for me, there are parts of MFW ‘Lite’ that could point towards a way forward. For example, we now have an Ipswich site http://ipswichtown.myfootballwriter.com/ that exactly matches its Norwich ’sister’ http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/ … as much as the two siblings ever get on. We could deliver a Colchester (again) tomorrow.

We have two, part-time ‘curators’ of that site in Tom north of the Waveney and Dave to the south; we have long-form journalism in the form of the originally-sourced articles and short-form journalism in the form of our Twitter-led panels… we’re part of the conversation. We don’t deliver tablets of stone from on high; we – as journalists – have come down off the mountain top.

And, above all, we’re getting ever closer to the point of breaking even financially; by taking the platform ‘in house’ and onto a WordPress theme, we’ve stripped out £300 worth of monthly hosting and third party web house costs.

We’re masters of our own destiny now. And still picking up local web advertising on tenancy-based deals; helped, in no small part, by the fact that we deliver transparency; numbers… via our bespoke banner ad management system www.twadservices.co.uk and, ideally, www.addiply.com

Which reminds me, I need to practice what I preach and get selling…

We’ve not done away games for months now; on the slimline returns a non-networked web proposition offers, I can’t justify the travel costs to and from. In a networked offering of, say, 24 Championship clubs, I could simply swap content with our ‘man’ at the home game.

For now, however, I’ll do a better job of transcribing the BBC local radio audio than their content factory in The MailBox does of a Sunday…

Is it perfect? No. But can it work with scale? Yes. Then you syndicate your content into a BBC that claims to be on the retreat web-wise; then you drop national advertisers down the same networked platform that you find your local advertisers on.

And then repeat. For www.mybaseballwriter.com/NYJets or www.mybasketballwriter.com/Mavericks

Just as Mark Cuban suggests….

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/01/12/dear-mr-cuban-i-was-interested-to-read-your-thoughts-on-establishing-a-beatwriters-co-operative-in-the-united-states/

Ain’t rocket science. Whatever the bureaucrats claim.

It also found me, briefly, sticking little pins into LongShanks1980 for revealing a little trait that is becoming more and more apparent of late; this great divide between the way that the London mediarrati (?) view the world and the way that, say, Mike Rawlins at PitsNPots.co.uk might.

It is a walk that Sarah Hartley walked the other week… and with considerable aplomb to boot. It’s not easy to keep everyone sweet.

But as you read the reaction to Matt Kelly’s piece, evidence of this digital ‘disconnect’ between those who have been hanging around the comment boards of MediaGuardian for the last ten years and the real world is – for me – painfully clear.

That some of those comments don’t ‘get’ what Matt is on about at all.

The Mirror is trying to re-connect with its core readership.

And succeeding. By giving them what they’ve always liked in the print edition of The Daily Mirror – celebrity gossip and footie.

Right, give them that online and – surprise, surprise – the punters come.

And they come via their mobile phones; their FaceBook pages. And word of mouth.

They don’t come thanks to SEO.

This is the line that, for me, stood out…

“Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience.

“Counter to our expectation, audience on Mirror.co.uk has also continued to grow, meaning that across our portfolio of websites in the last three months our audience has increased by three million…

And this is the thing for me – a big thing. Making the web work ain’t rocket science.

Give people what they want, where they want it, when they want it. Simple.

And that goes straight back to Mr Shirky. All people ever want is a good read.

It is no more complicated than that. I’ve never paid a penny to an SEO house. We’ve got, what, 25,000-30,000 loyal readers to www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity More than the average nightly sales figures of the Evening News.

And how have we got there? Not by SEO. But by word of mouth. By message-board link and recommendations… by text. On a phone.

‘Seen wht tw*t Waghorn wrttn now?’

‘No. Where…?’

etc, etc.

My core readership has always been traditional, provincial city evening newspaper readers who – gradually, bit by bit – are drifting online. But they do it their way; slowly. With the odd stumble; the odd: ‘Twitter, wtf?’

But they get there. And they’re getting ‘it’.

And they don’t need SEO to do that. And my readership and that of the Mirror’s is probably exactly the same. Middle, provincial England.

Locals.

Cue the great disconnect between London Mediaratti and us ‘locals’; those of us who have always been working the streets of Norwich, Ipswich, Leicester, Liverpool, etc, etc… and not the coffee shops of York Way.

So here comes LongStreet…

‘The problem the Mirror will have is that their content (be it on the Daily Mirror, Mirror Football or 3am) is NOT unique. As a football fan I am not going to be paying for archive TV footage, I am more interested in contemporary stories and there is nothing in 3am that Perez Hilton doesn’t do, and better, already…’

So are you the Mirror’s target audience? Er, no.

Is their content designed for you? Er, no.

How many of the Mirror’s ‘core’ readership that Matt Kelly is driving at have heard of Perez Hilton? Heard of Paris… Perez? Nah, who she? That’s up-your-own-a*se London talking, to be frank.

That’s the disconnect; the fracture; the difference.

No, much of the Mirror content is not unique. What is? But there are whole swathes of traditional Mirror and provincial evening newspaper readers – and, note, traditional provincial evening newspaper advertisers - who are now following their favourite writers and brands online.

And what’s wrong with them sticking to who and what they know? Gradually, they’ll unearth new writers; fresh content; different sites. But for now they’ll go with what they know and trust.

And that’s what the Mirror are doing – going back to the audience that they know and trust will always be there for them.

They’re going back to their roots; keeping it simple. Giving people a good read. When and where they want it.

Simple.

And as the world and his wife race to suddenly to be all ‘hyper-local’, it is a simple lesson in the reality of provincial life that manages to pass some of us by…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=317

… about the so-called ‘link economy’ on whose foundations we all, somehow, hope to rest.

As mentioned before, I don’t do video. I am strictly a house of the written word. Podcasts, I like. Don’t mind being Radio MyFootballWriter; quite good fun. But I’m never going to be MFW TV.

That’s not what I do best… in my ‘umble little way, I’ve always thought I’d try to link to the rest; even offer someone my words in part-payment for their video. Always struck me as a decent ‘deal’ given, I suspect, we’ll get to the barter economy long before we get to the link one.

My peers in the provincial Press industry have played with video; and good luck to them… That’s their choice; I had no choice – never really had that cash to splash.

But I can see what the EDP/Archant are trying to achieve with this…

http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/edp24/sport/football/norwich-city/Lakey/default.aspx

Chris Lakey TV. Fine.

Of course, the EDP are not the only ones who put out a football ’show’. The BBC now have a ‘Football League Show.’ It’s on after Match Of The Day on a Saturday night. Somewhere around the midnight hour.

For whatever reason, whilst Match Of The Day is repeated early on a Sunday morning, The Football League Show isn’t.

But, heh, this is the Internet… And this is the BBC’s iPlayer. I can catch up with the goals from Hartlepool vs Norwich whenever I want; or whenever I want over the course of the next six days.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mfmt9

Of course, the iPlayer is now available to be embedded in external websites…

Mmm… OK, I don’t do video, but I know someone who does… I’ve got, say, 30,000-odd Norwich City fans passing through www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity on a good month…

… all of whom would probably have a look at The Football League Show; given that most of them might not be up at 1am when the League One goals are shown…

… so, if I embed an iPlayer in MyFootballWriter, I’m putting all that content – which I, as a good TV licence fee payer, have paid for – in front of just the kind of audience that the BBC would be looking for… driving their content to the right eyeballs… It’s all ‘branded up’. BBC.

Everyone knows it’s their footage; their content…

OK, it makes people come back to my site; it’s an added ‘attraction’ to a site that tries to make a journalistic living via locally-sourced digital advertising… but I think it’s a decent platform on which the BBC can offer up its video wares.

Just as the EDP’s Norwich City pages would be; or those of TrinityMirror… or of AND…

All of whom could bring 000s of relevant eyeballs to that licence fee payer paid-for content…

All of whom could then, of course, offer their expert football words back to the BBC by way of return.

And I would fancy that somewhere within the editing suites of Bush House, TV Centre or the MailBox, there is the ability to ’splice and dice’ those highlights packages into dedicated Norwich City video bundles that you then distribute out via MFW/NorwichCity or EDP/NorwichCity – just as you could do with Baggies coverage out of the BirminghamMail, etc, etc…

ie, you’re making sure that nothing’s left on the cutting room floor; that in your desire to make sure that the licence fee payer gets full value for their rights deal, that coverage is seen by the widest possible audience.

You would, of course, think that would equally suit The Football League.. that their brand is distributed as widely and as deeply across the web as possible.

That strikes me as a sensible way forward; that somewhere within that mix lies a new, state-supported eco-system for the survival of independent football coverage. Our words; for their video.

Actually when I say ‘their’; I mean ‘our’ . We did, after all, all pay for it.

Ask the question of the BBC and I think we all might be disappointed.

In that, I strongly suspect, such content is going nowhere; it’ll sit on the BBC site and go no further; that was part of the ‘deal’. No third party hosting for that iPlayer/FootballLeague combo…

Now, that may well be down to the rights holders – The Football League – being unwilling to see video content popping up all over the place and undermining the subscription TV servce run in conjunction with each of their member clubs…

Why would anyone pay £9.99 a month to subscribe to CanaryTV if its there, for free, on Chris Lakey TV?

Which is one large and vested interest that queers many a pitch. And, maybe, knocks all such fag packet thinking on the head. That as soon as the football clubs opened their own websites and became digital publishers like the rest of us, we were all f*cked.

We might now control the means of production and the means of distribution, but the control of the access to content remains at the behest of those that produce it… the football clubs.

That all said, it is an interesting arena; you can’t help but figure that it might serve the BBC’s own purposes rather nicely that such prime video content can go nowhere else but their own site; that the one thing that might be of genuine value [sports video content] to us all in terms of traffic and site ’stickability’ ain’t going anywhere other than Auntie’s lap.

One final thought. If OfCom needed something to do, the next time such a deal comes up for grabs why can’t they insist that goals packages are free to air – just as they might argue the case for the FA Cup Final, The Grand National or The Boat Race always being free to air on terrestial TV?

If The Football League want something for their clubs to ‘own’, they get to keep the interviews…

Like I said, just a thought.

Because in certain aspects, he is right. And some of what he is saying is long over-due.

And, I think, the danger is that we can get too carried away in our defence of all things Auntie; as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Equally, because Murdoch Jnr’s speech was made at a ‘TV’ festival, it is easy to assume that the two sides of the argument can be encapsulated by casting the division as one of Fox News to the right (sic) and the Six O’Clock News to the left.

That the debate is cast in pure ‘TV’ terms when, to my mind, the term is all but redundant.

We’re all broadcasters now; we all own a mobile phone. Indeed, the very fact that someone from The Guardian was wandering around an Edinburgh street getting the reaction from the great and the media good… http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2009/aug/29/edinburghtvfestival-television – saw The Guardian acting as ‘a broadcaster’.

Camera-work a bit shaky; intros, a bit DIY. But, in essence, there was what-was-once a print-only newspaper rolling a tank onto Auntie’s ‘TV’ lawn. Or rather a lightly armoured car; I suspect the only organisation with a ‘tank’ at its disposal these days is News International.

Otherwise, the BBC pretty much has the place to itself.

I suspect what’s now left of ‘Channel M’ in Manchester doesn’t exactly ruffle too many feathers with BBC North-West. You wonder if GMG had had access to a crystal ball five years ago, just how many digital TV studios they would have built into King’s Place…

But the point is that we’re all digital ‘broadcasters’ now; I can do a podcast… ergo I’m a radio station; can my content better that of Radio Norfolk’s one-hour ‘Scrimmage Show’ on a Thursday night as Chris Goreham and two guests talk Norwich City Football Club?

Occasionally. I’ve been talking about Norwich City Football Club for the better part of 17 years and at www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity we can ‘tow’ a more independent line; I can even swear if needs be… drop an ‘aitch; stray away from the Queen’s English.

So, we’re all in the same space. TV. Radio. Words.

But the point – I think – that Murdoch might be making when he draws the fate of newspapers into this debate, is that the ‘land grab’ he alludes to is that of the written word.

That’s where the BBC is treading onto other people’s turf; that’s where it is a one-way street.

That if somewhere in the midst of all our futures, Jeff Jarvis’ old maxim that ‘do what you do best, then link to the rest…’ holds true, it is the sight of the BBC morphing itself into a factory of the written word that is, indeed, ‘chilling’.

Murdoch cited the purchase of ‘The Lonely Planet’ travel guides in his defence; I’d add another… You look at the level of their written coverage that accompanies their new Football League TV rights package this season and that’s where another big ‘land grab’ can be seen.

They are churning out ‘live’ reports during the course of the game; come Sunday, what was once four pars and an audio clip are now full-blown, post-match quotes pieces – all timed, of course, to roll out on a Sunday long before any provincial newspaper hits the streets on a Monday.

Or, indeed, before The Sun’s ‘Goals’ supplement ever hits the news-stands.

And football sells. It’s the very foundation of Sky’s prosperity. And here is the BBC running amok on the traditional, written word fiefdoms of the newspaper barons.

Of course, it’s not all churned out by the transcribe teams that gather in the MailBox overnight on a Saturday. The live feed comes via the Press Association. It says so at the bottom.

So, that’s where my ‘TV’ licence fee is now going… paying PA for minute-by-minute, written Football League match coverage when – for example – a TrinityMirror reporter might be churning out exactly the same content at the same game via a CoverItLive ‘package’… Or, indeed, an Archant one.

I’ll defend my pals on the ‘circuit’ to the hilt.

Who knows more about Birmingham City, Norwich City, Bolton Wanderers, Ipswich Town… etc, etc… me or the bloke from PA? Who is churning out the homogenised stuff; and who, actually, knows both players and club inside-out cos this it is their expert field? Their passionate niche…

Cos they have been watching this club for years and years.

Now, as a BBC licence fee payer where would I like to see my money spent? On a middle man that is PA? As the BBC suddenly decide that they too can do words; or by actually sustaining independent expert opinions that are the rightful preserve of the written, provincial Press industry?

And how do they do that? They link. Because they don’t do that best. They can do video through their rights deal; they do audio through their BBC local radio commentaries, but when they start to do sentences, that’s when they are moving into areas that they don’t ‘own’…

Which is why that local video plan was fine by me; newspaper groups aren’t ‘video’ production houses; it’s not what they do best. They swap their mags court words for BBC’s local video; that’s the deal.

But if, say, GMG is struggling to re-invent itself as a digital video broadcaster, so the BBC should be very mindful of trying to re-invent itself as a house of the written word. And act all innocent when the charged is being made.

Particularly if it’s all being achieved at the expense of my licence fee.

Written words is not what the BBC does best; therefore, you link to the rest… while there is still a ‘rest’ to link to. You give people a chance.

That’s the deal.

http://savethemedia.com/2009/05/02/how-journalism-can-change/

… because as the third, full season finishes for MyFootballWriter.com – or, at least, the /norwichcity part of the deal – so Amber’s post provides a very useful ‘tick box’ as to what we may or may not have achieved in our time on the Carrow Road ‘beat’.

It is, of course, assuming that Jeff’s thoughts within ‘WWGD’ is starting to gain some level of orthodoxy; that his thinking is starting to ‘fit’ within what little we still know of this new, digital landscape of ours.

There are certainly lines that chime with the lessons we’ve learned… not least the notion that we all need to ‘act small but think big – and see the world differently…’

So, www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity remains, essentially, small; it is still a community of little more than 35,000 Canary souls – a figure that varies with both the mood and the month. Ironically, the bitter aftermath of relegation currently finds the punters out in force as they wallow in whatever comes next for the League One-bound Norfolk club.

But the point is that it can be big; you can bolt any team onto that single url www.myfootballwriter.com and create a bigger network; all of which – in their turn – can be small.

Whilst we were running it at full tilt, www.myfootballwriter.com/colchesterunited was small – and yet it was a big thing for the good people of [then] Layer Road who had never had so much editorial attention lavished upon them.

And all without the need for a paper boy.

‘Old way of thinking

Readers got their news when the paper hit their doorstep, or soon after it rolled off the presses.

‘New way

‘Readers don’t wait for the presses to roll but expect the information immediately…

This was the point; that all we [still] ever hope to achieve is not to become a brewing giant of a Budweiser ilk, but just to create an elegant network of micro-breweries that can, together, be big by being small.

And, hopefully, give a fewer micro-brewers within that network the chance to make at least part-time living out of provincial football reporting.

So, that’s one box ticked. Or, at least, the theory is.

Thereafter and we were into Amber’s lengthy list…

‘Old way of thinking

‘The newspaper was a product.

‘New way

‘News organizations provide a service.

‘Old way of thinking

‘Readers became known as “the audience” in the early days of the Internet, describing a one-way relationship wherein readers sat still to observe a performance.

‘New way

‘Readers/users are participatory.

‘Old way of thinking

‘Newspapers attempted to be all things to all people, serving a mass geographic audience.

‘New way

‘News organizations strive to serve a mass of niche communities that already exist, (some geographic, but most based on interests.)…

We’re a very real ‘niche’; that if we are about to witness the great ‘unbundling’ of newspapers, those boys and girls who have earned themselves a ‘brand’ off the back pages of their local newspapers are – to my mind – some of the first that need to be re-bundled up into something more befitting our networked times.

One thing I think we got very right – perhaps more through luck than being fully versed in Jeff-type theory – was to build that RSS box; giving what was once our old newspaper audience a ’service’; in that we were bringing together, aka aggregating, other people’s Norwich City news and housing it in one place; on ‘MyFootballWriter… but all beneath their logo, their brand…

From the start, we admitted we weren’t the only show in town; you can get Norwich City news here, here and here… but, in a way, that’s a cost-saver. You know what, I can’t be everywhere at once; on some days, people will get a better story then me… Fair play to them, and here it is… give me a morning off…

‘Old way of thinking

‘Newspapers were hesitant to even mention competitors in the newspaper.

‘New way

‘News organizations do what they do best and link to the rest, as Jarvis says, and yes, that means even if the link leads to the competition…

But – and this is luck – I can now see that in building those RSS boxes and giving people the chance to customise their own choice of feeds, MyFootballFeeds, we were starting down the road towards ‘participation’; we were empowering them with choices… something that, with the help of 4iP, we did again with ‘backchat’…

That’s not perfect; it was built to be ‘platform agnostic’ in that you could join me in the conversation from a Jaiku stream; but as Google appeared to tire of the Finnish Twitter, so that all-but broke down and we became a Twitter-feed only… one enabled by the simple application of a little #ncfc thinking.

But we were starting a conversation; we were opening ourselves up for comment, for feed-back; we were joining their conversations as imposing on them ours…

Mr Dennis has all sorts of conversations going on today…

http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/full_article.asp?i=4693&w=12&a=0&part=1#clist

And, clearly, we’re not unique in that; the world and his wife are doing that; this isn’t about being big or clever; it’s about trying to find some sort of consensus as to what does and doesn’t work; and coming down off our ivory towers and thinking of ourselves as somehow less than special, does…

What does work, I have to say, is a Twitter-feed without moderation. In six months, two derby games with Ipswich and now one big, relegation I think we’ve had about three swear words… I could still let my 78-year-old church-going mother roam over MyFootballWriter without too much fear of offence.

Ditto my nine-year-old.

Perhaps the more main-stream it moves, the more Twitter will slip into old, messageboard ways. Perhaps. Right now, however, as free and unmoderated UGC content goes, it works. Punters are giving good talk. And I feel confident enough to let their Tweets trundle through unchallenged.

As for the hoary old chestnut of making money that will only come properly with a network.

That way you can complement local advertising with national advertising; complement local content syndication with national content syndication.

A local BMW car dealership ad complemented with corporate BMW branding cascading down from above; small being big.

Content still being king – and all punters want is a good footie read for ‘whenever I get a mo…’ – you syndicate locally into the BBC in return for their Football League TV; nationally into a pan-regional sports portal that will never in a month of Sundays staff a Championship football club and its twice weekly Press conferences, but will happily take a rolling digital news and reports feed off a network of trusted local writers…

Which we did in a small, but potentially big way last summer with The Daily Telegraph.

And we give people numbers; small numbers for our small advertisers, but no more smokes and mirrors.

‘Old way of thinking

‘Newspaper ad rates were based on circulation, how many people bought the newspaper, and advertisers had to hope readers would notice their ads.

‘New way

‘Ad rates can be based on the number of page views, or clicks, so advertisers know more precisely how many people see their ads; and, the ads can be targeted to those niche markets…’

Which is www.twadservices.co.uk.

Trouble is, as a fledgling media brand, we had little choice but to go ad first, invoice later…

Wrong.

We kind of figured that www.itvlocal.com/anglia would be a natural partner to content share.

Wrong.

We hoped that www.addiply.com would be niche-enough and self-feed enough that we wouldn’t have to do too much marketing on www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity to get some postcards in our Post Office…

Wrong.

And when it all began – as one, unholy scribble on the back of one, battered team-sheet in the Walnut Tree Shades pub in Norwich – we kind of figured that the winds of global, ecomonic change would gently fill the sails of any new media start-up…

Wrong… Very, very wrong…

�

Or rather what @craigmcginty and @vagueware were.

This… http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_reboot

I must admit I’ve skimmed through the last three or four pages.

There was enough lines in the opening page to keep me amused on a Wednesday night; to even drag me away from Grand Designs.

The one about ‘caveat vendor’ replacing ‘the old doctrine of caveat emptor…’, for example.

‘In other words, ‘Let the seller beware as well as the buyer.’ In other words, there is a definite, positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth.”

And this…

‘We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations.

‘The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

‘The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful.

‘We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page.

‘The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear…’

Apologies for cutting and pasting at such length. There is, I hope, a method in such copying madness.

Because, for me, all the above gives a grander theory to everything that we try and seek to do with Addiply.

As opposed, I guess, to You-Know-Who…

For those who have not followed the life and times of our DIY, self-service advertising system – as now championed by the People’s Republic of South Devon…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=246

.. it was, in part, driven and developed by the thinking we installed in our banner ad management sytsem for www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity

www.twadservices.co.uk

… in which we gave every one of our advertising clients a unique log-in code; empowering them, in an instant, with the ability to check our numbers for themselves.

For little, local businesses brought up on being told that their £750 half-page ad on P17 of the Evening News was seen by 75,000 potential customers – honest – this was something of an eye-opener.

Now, all of a sudden, ABCs, readership figures as opposed to circulation numbers – the ‘reach’ beloved by The Newspaper Society – is replaced by one password; and there it all is… their very own click-through rate in all its 0.02% glory.

Oh, boy… isn’t that click-rate crap? Er, yes. By and large people don’t click through to a carpet wholesalers website when reading their footie… but look at the number of times your banner has been seen this month…

Because wittingly or not, from day one we’ve felt this need for a spot of ‘caveat vendor’.

That we owed it to our little local advertiers to tell the truth; that we felt there was a ‘positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth….

That what we were doing was ‘giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations…’

In our case, it was the ‘financial machinations’ that came with buying banner, sky or button ad space on a newly-launched local football website… What am I actually getting for my money here, Rick..?

Here you go… Here’s the ‘tools’ you need to find out the figures for yourself.

It is an in-built logic that continues to work its way through the DNA of Addiply… You want to place a text ad on one of our beta triallists… Fine, here you go… Here’s our list of publishers; here’s the rates they themselves have decided to charge.. and here’s the traffic that they are currently driving…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69

Caveat vendor. Caveat vendor. And it’s my use of the bold… because spot the terms that, hopefully, have started to become familiar on OWAB of late…

‘The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

‘The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful…

Sign up for an Addiply ad and you get the data; the click-throughs, the views… the works. You know exactly what every advertising buck you spend on Addiply is delivering; because of caveat vendor… because in selling our advertising space to you the hyper-local/niche buyer we have decided to be open and honest from the start.

No smokes and mirrors.

‘Only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear…’

Exactly. In these troubled economic times, my little NR2 hyper-local advertiser might only have £20 left by way of an ‘advertising’ budget.

To my mind – and, I suspect, to the mind of many out here in small-mediaville – he deserves to know exactly what he’s getting for his £20.

And we tell him.

Caveat vendor.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=70

But, with hindsight, I think me and Neil ‘got’ where they were going…

And the impact it could have upon those of us who actually made it to the journalistic coal-face and dug out fresh quotes for themselves, as opposed to those who figured they could re-hash, re-nose and repeat for a living…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=73

And having scuttled off in the midst of last year’s www.2gether08.com gathering to meet Martin Moore for a coffee, that initial conviction that those two could really be onto something merely grew.

All of which chimed very, very easily with the ‘kitemark’ thinking that lay at the heart of this story…

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=42875&c=1

Which doesn’t look a million miles away in its thinking to ‘The Transparency Initiative’ that Martin, Sir Tim and the Media Standards Trust continue to pursue with their Knight News dollars…

http://www.mediastandardstrust.org/projects/transparency.aspx

What is fascinating, now, however is how that might equally ‘fit’ with any Government thinking on how digital advertising – centrally sourced and perfectly targetted – might act as a revenue reward for locally-based independent websites; not straight subsidy; not a hand-out… but a way of both messaging specific, online communities and supporting the new, digital delivery platforms that they rest on.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=225

But if, as you would expect, a queue a mile long starts to wind its way through Whitehall in serach of said Central Government advertising, how are they ever going to distinguish who is deserving of their advertising grace and favour?

For whilst I initially saw Martin’s ‘Fresh from source…’ labelling thinking as proof of my content’s value – and thereby enabling me to sell-stroke-syndicate my content on all with the buyer’s knowledge that the quotes therein were straight from the horse’s mouth…

Now that same ‘labelling’ thinking – be it kitemark, digital watermark or whatever – could equally serve as signpost to Central Government; that Will Perrin was, indeed, the one that spoke to the put-upon busker outside King’s Cross tube – just as much as I was the only one to speak to new Canary first team coach Ian Crook before he boarded his plane home to the UK…

http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/full_article.asp?i=4476

There’s my ‘value’; evidence of me being at the quotes coalface; working my journalistic beat.

For which, IMHO, I deserve a kitemark rather more than any of the re-hash and re-nose shops out there.

So as we start to think ever more about what kind of ‘tools’ do we need to make a platform fit for a 21st Century journalistic living, I’d weave Sir Tim and Martin into my thinking from the start.

Whatever is popping out of the end of their ‘Transparency Initiative’ I’d bolt into www.mylocalwriter.com/loddon/nr14 – just as we’d always hoped to weave it into www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity

It proves that ‘I was there…’

And that’s a big, big thing if we are ever to make sweet music from all that noise of the web.

So in a bid to turn over a new leaf, that is fascinating.
http://blogmaverick.com/2008/12/24/why-pro-sports-need-newspapers/

Before we start to dissect Mr Cuban’s thoughts on where next for networked sports reporting in the US, a brief bit of background… he’s 50, an ‘entrepreneur billionaire’ who happens to own the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team.

As in www.mybasketballwriter.com/mavericks

He also owns NDNet – a cable distributor; so, therefore, should have a vague idea of how networks run.

Anyway, the piece is very interesting illuminating on a number of fronts; not least how, say, Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday fans might ever get their Blades and Owls news if the Star ever went to meet its JP maker.

And, of course, the Football League’s reaction to that event – given that they would then enjoy near monopoly status on both the access to and the distribution of football club news contant via their own FLi/PremiumTV news portal…. ie/eg http://www.sufc.premiumtv.co.uk/page/Home/

Just as the NBA has its own, huge ‘official’ site – all ’sanitized and sanctioned’, according to one of its own club owners.

“Bottom line is that despite the huge volume of sports coverage, the local coverage of teams for the most part sucks,” he continues, displaying the kind of enlightened web-type thinking that, presumeably, comes with owning a networked distribution model. And being a billionaire.

He’s also clearly never met Ken Bates.

“There is little depth and certainly not the consistent coverage of a newspaper with a team beatwriter or 2. Thats a bad scenario for sports leagues.

“Teams in every league need as much local coverage as we can get. The more stories that are written by sportswriters and columnists, the more opportunities for fans to connect and stay connected to our teams…”

Which was the traditional role of the ‘beat reporter’ – be it he Mavericks reporter on the back pages of the Dallas Morning News or me – as and when my ugly mug used to pop up on the back of the Norwich Evening News.

Only one problem, of course. Cuban has now twigged that the Dallas Morning News etc are going down the pan…

“The problem of course is that newspapers are pushing themselves to the point of irrelevancy.

“They have cost structures that dont support they business they think they are in. They don’t have a vision on what a profitable future might look like.

“They are getting crushed by disappearing advertising revenues. They are doing what anyone in their position would do, they are cutting every penny they can and praying for divine intervention.

“Professional Sports Leagues and teams, if we want to continue to connect to our local casual sports fan, needs to work with our local papers to try to keep them alive as long as possible.

“The question is how ?”

Or why. But let’s let Mr Cuban do his how…. and the answer is an out-source deal. Kind of like the one that was on the table between me and Archant in the spring of ‘06 before we went our, ahem… separate ways.

“My suggestion to the powers that be in the leagues I have spoken to is to have the leagues work together and create a “beatwriter co-operative”.

“We need to create a company that funds, depending on the size of the market and number of teams, two or more writers per market, to cover our teams in depth. The writers would cover multiple teams and multiple sports….

Mmm. So if they did, say, www.mybasketballwriter.com/mavericks in the morning, they could do, say, www.mybaseballwriter.com/mustangs in the afternoon and roll them both into the Dallas Morning News overnight… and what we could do for Dallas, then the same ‘beatwriters co-operative’ could do the same out of, say, Philadelphia…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=121

What a great idea…

“The leagues and teams depend on quantity and quality of coverage. We need to recognize the weaknesses of those we depend on and start addressing them today,” he concludes.

Suits me.

For given that we’ve got our hands full with www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity and would love to be able to put our ideas behind www.mylocalwriter.com in motion, it’s been crossing my mind of late to see if I could offload www.mybasketballwriter.com www.mybaseballwriter.com and www.myhockeywriter.com to some interested party in the States.

With the best will in the world, it’s never going to happen from my kitchen table in Loddon.

‘Dear Mr Cuban,

‘My name is Rick Waghorn. I used to be a beat ’soccer’ reporter on the Norwich Evening News…’

He might have once-upon-a-time ‘run out of track…’ but, boy, does he know where the world is going. He remains firmly on the right track.

So, if I was being lazy, I would do nothing more than commend each and everyone of you to read the following three posts from Mr Mark Potts… and then insert the UK landscape into the imploding world he’s observing across the Pond.

How his thoughts tally with what we’re trying to practically achieve via MyFootballWriter and, ideally, sometime in the dim and distant future MyLocalWriter, I’ll leave for a minute…

First, as I say, take the following in and ponder… Long and hard, if you get the chance.

On the future of newspapers…

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/09/for-sale-newspaper-runs-good-driven-daily-and-sunday-for-decades-leans-slightly-to-the-left-fully-loaded-includes-press.html

and this one…

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/09/–30—on-wall-street.html

On ‘local’ and the future of hyper-local sites as a potential saviour of local news provision…

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/09/hyper-about-local.html

And, finally, on the power of the ‘link’; the whole Jarvis mantra… ‘Do what you do best, link to the rest…’

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/09/thinking-of-linking.html

… which is, of course, a subject very dear to our hearts here as me and Neil continue to tinker away beneath the bonnet of MFW and gear ourselves up for the long, hard winter ahead…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=132

Three posts within a week… Bang, bang, bang… Nail after nail smashed firmly on the head.

Having chatted to one or two people before about whether or not you can draw straight comparisons between the UK and US newspaper markets, their feeling was that you can’t… the two are very different beasts.

I’ve been less than convinced; besides in the case of NewsQuest the two are one in the same effectively given the ownership of the Brighton Evening News, etc…

But, for me at least, the same laws of the banking jungle ought to apply just as much here as it does on Wall Street…

Still at least today’s events on the stock market have given all at Trinity and Johnston a vague hope as their much-troubled shares enjoy a 30% and 20% ‘bounce’ on the back of various rescue plans.

Or rather, they weren’t left behind as everyone else surged back in a positive direction. That would, indeed, have been a hammer blow if those two had missed the bounce.

But there is one difference between newspapers either side of the Atlantic, that Mark and I have pondered via e-mail. That – by and large – the US versions don’t come with large pension funds attached. That particular mill-stone has long been dropped from around their neck… along with adequate health care provision, etc, etc…

There is no Mirror-style pension fund to concern any potential buyer. Not that they need any more than the sight of a print press to make them think twice, but they don’t have that particularly liability staring them in the face.

In the UK, it is something that will smack most potential white knights right between the eyes as another of our top bloggers, Pete Kirwan of MediaMoney, has long muttered about… and was rightly reminding everyone of again yesterday…

http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/mediamoney/2008/09/18/what-lies-ahead-for-the-media/

And, in particular, these two points…

• More pressure on media companies with big pension liabilities (Trinity Mirror, ITV). A few months ago, there were murmurings that Trinity’s pension trustees were overweight in equities (shares). Hopefully, that has changed.

• As predicted below: more pressure on debt-laden media companies (Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press, Informa and private equity owners, too). Rights issues are unthinkable any time soon. Job cuts will intensify. Tim Bowdler and Sly Bailey have their work cut out. Likewise, the NUJ.

We’ll leave the NUJ to man the barricades at Fort Dunlop for another time, but for today Potts is the man. On local, link and the future of newspapers; three subjects upon which we’ve long been fretting away…

Openness, transparency, honesty, humour, warmth and humility – these are the kind of words that here at OWAB and MFW, we feel have come to define the new way that the web should be lived; our audience is one from whom no secrets should be hid…

So, in that spirit, www.myfootballwriter.com/colchesterunited has ceased to be. It is an ex-site; we brought the curtain down yesterday.

No, it’s not an ex-site. That’s wrong; it’s just having a rest, a breather. But it has closed down. For now.

Why? Well, the reasons are many and varied, but mostly financial.

Traffic-wise, it’s been a good summer; in that same spirit of openness and transparency everyone can see the numbers for themselves; that’s what www.twadservices.co.uk is all about… letting both punters and advertisers alike see which way our numbers are head.

And courtesy of a long and busy summer on the transfer trail and a steady organic growth of MFW that continues to defy our current nil marketing spend, we’re on course for a third million ad impression month in a row… divide by three or so for the number of page impressions and that’s somewhere round about the 350,000-400,000 page mark; around the 70,000 uniques.

Editorially, MFW continues to kick ass. As it should; deadline free, geography-lite, big, sticky, web-savvy reads… yep, we continue to spark informed conversations among our network of passionate niche communities.

A network that till Tuesday extended down the A12 to the mighty U’s. Who – I have to say – have been as good as gold; not a hint of a Hartlepool chairman to them at all.

And with our Nick being straight out of the top drawer writing-wise, that was a good little site.

Alas our local advertising network never caught up; never made it that far. In fairness, it hasn’t got too far into Ipswich either; we’ve employed three different sets of ad sales teams – none of whom have delivered either the contacts or the commitment to the MFW cause that we need.

In fairness to them, advertising – even of the bright, new, shiny digital variety – is hardly hanging off trees these days. It’s tough enough with a grizzled, 25-year veteran up your sleeve in Norfolk; for ‘clean skins’ and new products in Suffolk and Essex, it’s even harder.

Which is why we pursued a tie-in with at least two regional newspaper groups this summer; local advertising already in place; local football reporters in place… it’s just a re-route-our-existing-content job into a more elegant network; one that starts to break those old, geographical barriers down…

There were, of course, other discussions to be had; hopefully, every bridge remains intact; we’ve be mindful of saying our pleases and our thank you’s lest anyone should have a change of heart.

So we came close. Very close. We proved that the network opportunity is there; that if you can do one, you can do two, you can do three… but me, Neil, Kev and Ian can’t do 24 from our respective kitchen tables. We need bigger friends in the media to turn the full-blown dream into a digital reality.

If we can’t find them, then it’s down to private individuals; too small for VCs; too beyond NESTA’s ‘expertise and experience…’; too, er, anything for the banks, it’s a minefield out there. And one just went ‘Bang!’

Did we roll-out too soon? Should we have waited for the baggage column that is the ad dept to arrive alongside us before pushing headlong into North Essex suburbia? Possibly, but you have to have a ‘live’ product to sell to an advertiser…

He’s got to see the horse before he’ll stick his brand on the cart. He wants to see numbers; traffic; there is a need to speculate to accumulate – or, rather, speculate in the hope that you’d catch a passing media empire’s eye.

But, heh-ho. Time to review, re-think and, basically, dig in for a long, hard winter.

The fact that our Nick has an offer to travel the world this autumn with his best mate makes the parting slightly easier; he insists he’s enjoyed the ride – it’s given him a platform, a responsibility and an opportunity that few 24-year-old’s are granted.

And, in fairness, he rose to the challenge superby. The kid’s good; he should have a bright future ahead of him – provided any of us have a job left to offer him come the spring.

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