Jacqueline Marino

Journalism students are different than they used to be. They’ve become increasingly entrepreneurial, intellectually adventurous and skilled in content production, technology and social networking.

Those are skills publishers – both legacy and the new media ones – need to survive. Yet, according to a 2009 University of Georgia study, only six out of ten 2008 journalism school graduates had a full-time job six to eight months after graduation. That’s the lowest rate of employment reported in the study’s 23-year history.

This troubles me because I teach at a journalism school. It should trouble legacy publishers for a different reason.

Journalism school graduates who would have started out working for them 10 years ago – perhaps as fact checkers or entry-level editors – are going to be competing with them instead.

The New York Times columnist David Carr recently wrote, “For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.”

Can we at journalism schools take any credit for this? I think so. Over the past few years, journalism education has become more than relevant to the digital age – it’s helping shape the digital age. We used to train worker bees. Now we’re training risk takers and boat rockers.

In the three years I’ve been teaching journalism, many schools have gone from ruminating about teaching multimedia storytelling to doing that and much more. According to a Northwestern University Media Management Center study, news organizations need to develop six competencies in order to survive. Since these competencies emerge from general media technology trends, I think they will be as important to niche publishers as they are to news organizations.

In order to get a quick gauge on how journalism schools are teaching these competencies, I emailed subscribers to a national listserv of magazine journalism educators. What innovative courses were they teaching in mobile journalism, social networking and other emerging new media?

The following list, organized under four of the six competencies identified by Northwestern researchers, is only a sampling from the deluge that hit my inbox (as well as a few others I couldn’t not mention). Many schools are in a perpetual state of updating curricula and courses, trying to prepare students for the evolving media world.

The Platform Strategist

“To capture and keep eyeballs, it is vital to engage audiences over multiple platforms.”

How it’s being taught: Much of the time, we don’t have to teach students to use multiple platforms. Students are increasingly platform agnostic. Once equipped with basic reporting tools and storytelling prowess, they become nimble, enthusiastic creators of content on multiple platforms. We do need to teach them the capabilities and how to reach and keep audiences.

Interesting courses: Last year at the University of Missouri, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute held an iPhone application student competition. (Other schools are also teaching students to create iPhone apps, including the University of Iowa.) This year, students are coming up with ways to create news content while reducing costs by using Adobe’s Flash Catalyst. Peter Young’s New Media course at San Jose State requires students to produce audio podcasts, videocasts and websites that comply with mobile screen and distribution standards. By the semester’s end, the students have all produced a range of products on the topic they chose at the beginning of the semester, such as “Cooking for One” or “Nightlife of San Jose.” Ball State’s iMedia course has students developing interactive news and advertising content for television broadcast and touch-screen mobile devices.

The Community Builder

“News organizations can sustain audience by aggregating communities.”

How it’s being taught: Thanks to social networking and the millennial generation’s join-in attitude, journalism students today are often engaged in many communities. They’re often taught to look beyond their personal interests, however, to connect groups and shape conversations.

Interesting courses: In Social-media Skills for Journalists, Sree Sreenivasan teaches Columbia University graduate students to use social media to “find new story ideas, trends and sources; connect with readers and viewers in new ways; and promote their own work to new audiences.” Sreenivasan noticed how many news organizations were hiring social media managers and started gathering best practices. He doesn’t just teach the tools of social media in this five-week, one-credit-hour course; he teaches strategy.

At Point Park University, Heather Starr Fiedler teaches “Citizen Journalism and Building Online Communities,” which focuses on “building interactivity between a media source and their audience including social media postings, promotion and discussion, building message boards, encouraging participation in comments and even some crowdsourcing.”

At the University of Kansas, Simran Sethi teaches Green Reporting, Green Building, Green Justice, a service-learning course that embeds students in green jobs and has them report about this movement from the inside.

The Complete Storyteller

“Understanding the way people experience media is key to developing deeper engagement with consumers.”

How it’s being taught: In journalism school, students often learn how to produce the kind of rich multimedia stories that complement major news and feature stories online. However, a growing number of schools are teaching beyond the basic Web, video and slideshow skill set.

Interesting courses: Students in Advanced Editorial Presentation at Ball State, for instance, create “instructional diagrams, narrative animations with audio, journalistic & persuasive games, data visualizations and explorative packages.” Rutgers teaches a multimedia reporting class focused on sports.

The Entrepreneur

“To remain viable, news organizations must think like entrepreneurs to identify new models for engaging audiences.”

How it’s being taught: It’s being taught in many places and in many ways. Arizona State has the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. In 2009, two students won $95,000 to develop a web and mobile-based service to inform and entertain those using the city’s new light rail. At other schools, students often participate in the grant-supported projects of their professors. Schools across the country have won tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands for start-ups. (See New Voices or Knight News Challenge for examples.)

Northwestern’s graduate journalism program debuted an Interactive Publishing concentration last fall, specifically for “students interested in running, starting or helping to lead digital publishing ventures.” They develop one or more new media products by the year’s end.

Interesting course: In Jeff Jarvis’s Entrepreneurial Journalism class at the City University of New York last semester, graduate students pitched their ideas for “sustainable journalistic enterprises” to a jury of investors, journalists and other media types. Last semester, four new businesses were awarded $57,000. (See Jarvis’s report on BuzzMachine.)

At the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference last summer, I heard Mequoda founder Don Nicholas address several of these key competencies. Smart positioning of content across platforms and building solid relationships with consumers are among the components of the Mequoda Media Pyramid.

“Life is not over for print, but if your print publication is not part of a larger media strategy that includes a very robust online strategy, and you’re not using online to power the acquisition of new subscribers, whether they’re print magazine subscribers or whether they’re Kindle subscribers, we would say you’re probably in trouble,” Nicholas said. “So, real synergy back and forth here . . . it’s not about one platform, it’s about being on many platforms and using them appropriately.”

Who can help you do this? New J-school graduates. They can fact-check, too.

Jacqueline Marino is an assistant professor teaching in the magazine sequence at Kent State University. She writes about evolving storytelling forms and magazines’ migration to the Web. Her students work on the multimedia aviation project, Stories That Fly, winner of a New Voices grant from J-Lab: the Institute for Interactive Journalism.

Last March, Twitter told Reuters that they would be rolling out an “expanded range of services” to “certain customers.” Twitter founder Biz Stone stated he believed these services would be available by the end of 2009.

In other words, Twitter appears to be adopting the “freemium” model, much like other Web 2.0 companies, notably Flickr, Skype, LinkedIn, and Pandora.

The freemium (a portmanteau of “free” and “premium”) business model is simple: offer a service for free, but offer an enhanced version of that service to a small (sometimes tiny) subset of your users, and charge them (sometimes a lot) to use it.

The freemium model works very well because it doesn’t chase away users who are unwilling to pay. The social nature of services like Flickr and LinkedIn means that simply having more users increases the value of the service. But the problem with simply attracting as many users as possible is that most users don’t use the service enough or don’t perceive it as valuable enough to open their wallets.

There will, however, always be a subset of users who see extreme value in a social networking service. These are usually the users who are going to use the service for marketing purposes. They are also the users who are willing to pay. In fact, these users are usually willing to pay enough to offset the cost for all the other users.

I’ve been waiting for Twitter to adopt the freemium model for along time. Any kind of social networking is usually a prime candidate for the freemium model. When Twitter announced their Verified Accounts feature, I was shocked they weren’t charging for it. It’s the perfect example of a freemium feature: most people don’t care and therefore won’t pay, but those who need a Verified Account care deeply about it and likely have the resources to pay for it. Twitter could easily have gotten away with charging $100 a year to have your account verified, and would have made a killing.

2009 has come and gone, however, and Twitter still isn’t collecting anyone’s credit card information. However, there was one big change that happened to Twitter as the end of 2009 drew near: Project Retweet, announced in August and rolled out in November.

Retweeting is an interesting feature for Twitter to be putting so much focus on. Once upon a time, the Twitter homepage asked you “What are you doing?” Today it asks you to “See what people are saying about…”

Twitter has shifted from being about the individual Twitterer to the Twitter community at large. As such, the Twitter team has improved Twitters ability to spread information across many Twitterers. With the new built-in retweet engine, it is easier to do two important things: control the retweets one receives, and track a tweet as it propagates throughout the Twittersphere.

Both of these scream “viral marketing!” to me. The “expanded range of services” What Twitter was talking up back in March is probably the equivalent of an analytics engine for Twitter which will allow companies using Twitter for marketing to hone their tweets to specific users and lists of users (another recent Twitter feature) more effectively than ever before.

This is just another form of freemium. I don’t really care who is reading my personal tweets, but anyone doing any form of marketing on Twitter (i.e. basically any content-driven website on the web today) would find additional information about their followers to be extremely useful. Twitter could charge a very small amount of Twitterers handsomely for Twitter analytics and more than cover their costs.

It’s not as straightforward for charging for Account Verification, but in the long run, it’s probably more profitable. If Twitter really does intend to have revenue by Q3 2010, this “expanded range of services” is probably only a few months away.

The iPad seems to be exactly what we need to move computing forward. But the internet verdict is in: iPad will be a flop. All these complaints sound just like “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” comment made about the iPod when it debuted eight years ago.

The internet is always quick to lampoon new Apple products because those who are vocal on the internet are big nerds. The nerds are focused on the technical limitations of the device (no Flash, no access to the filesystem, no multitasking, no webcam) while completely missing it’s strengths, and therefore, the big picture.

The big picture here is that iPad, like iPhone before it, is a massive step forward in usability. It brings us closer to computers as appliances and therefore makes them easier to integrate into our everyday lives.

The Third Generation of Computer Interfaces

A touch interface is fundamentally easier to use than a point-and-click interface, or even a stylus-driven interface. We interact with the world by using our fingers, why wouldn’t we want to interact with our computers in the same way? A touch interface, because of the size of our fingers compared to a pointer, forces everything to be bigger and therefore easier to find and manipulate. An infant can use an iPhone. Think about the first time you used an iPhone or an iPod touch. Did you have to read the manual? You probably didn’t. The way the interface worked with your fingers made everything easier to find, and reaction to your inputs made the experience seamless and intuitive.

A touch interface sacrifices the precision and power of a point-and-click interface for intuitiveness and flexibility. In nerd terms, it’s a new level of abstraction. Abstraction hides the details of how something works in order to make it easier to use.

Years of failed Windows tablets have taught us that trying to paste a touch interface over what is meant to be point-and-click interface is a recipe for disaster. Your fingers are far too cumbersome to replace the precision of a mouse and keyboard which are required to interact with a traditional desktop operating system.

iPad is a reinvention of personal computing, designed to make “computing” so easy that it isn’t even really computing anymore. You can pick it up and use it without all the headaches of using a “proper” computer.

With iPhone OS, many things have been abstracted away from the user, much like an automatic transmission abstracts the need to shift gears away from the driver. This means less power, but it also means that the entire thing is easier to use and gives you less headaches. There are many people (myself included) who prefer a manual transmission because it provides more power and control than an automatic, but most cars sold these days are automatics. Most people aren’t interested in the filesystem, multitasking, etc, just like most people aren’t interested in clutching and shifting. They want their car or computer to just work and more often than not, the things that enthusiasts want to give them more control over a device add unwanted complexity for the average user.

The nerds, of course, don’t get it, because they are so adept at dealing with the headaches brought on by complexity that they don’t even register anymore. (This is also why engineers make horrible UI designers.) But this doesn’t mean the snags created by complexity aren’t significant. They are very significant and tend to get ignored by the very people who have the power to fix them.

iPhone OS excels at abstraction. It gets the computer bits out of the way so you can use it as a phone, web browser, game device, or more than a hundred thousand other things.

Why It Matters in the World of New Media Trends

iPad is the computer so easy to use that it can do anything. And although iPad appears to be lacking in some places, it’s much, much better to add features to a product in the future than it is to pack them in too early and risk making the product too complex.

iPad (which builds upon iPhone, of course) is nothing short of the third generation of computer interfaces. First we had text interfaces, which were really only suitable for nerds; users who truly grokked what was going on underneath the hood of their computer. Then Apple popularized the GUI interface which brought computers to the masses, but not quite everyone. Even a GUI requires training, experience, troubleshooting and maintenance.

The touch interface is an entirely different beast. Almost anyone can use a well-designed touch interface because it requires you to be familiar with nothing more than your fingers.

The original Mac was considered to be nothing but a toy by power users in 1984. Today, I don’t know a single person who doesn’t use a GUI as their primary interface. Even users like myself who are comfortable using a command line interface prefer the GUI because it is easier to interact with on a day-to-day basis. It does a better job at getting out of your way when you need to do something. A point-and-click interface makes the same tradeoffs over a text-based interface that a touch-based interface makes over a point-and-click interface: precision and power for intuitiveness and flexibility.

For this third generation of interfaces, the leap forward is less extreme. The point-and-click interface has almost completely replaced the text interface; only programmers still need to use a command line. In contrast, touch interfaces and point-and-click interfaces will live side-by-side.

But, if the task you are trying to accomplish doesn’t require the power and precision of a point-and-click interface, there is no need to deal with the associated overhead of the point-and-click interface. You don’t need a mouse to read a book. You don’t need a mouse to watch a movie. You don’t need a mouse to look at a map. Hell, you don’t even need a mouse to surf the web. Why deal with the additional complexity when you don’t have to?

The portability and connectivity of iPad is the other piece of the puzzle. You will use iPad to do things you would never use a computer to do because a proper computer would be too cumbersome. Read a book or watch a movie on the go. Use it as a map in an unfamiliar city. Use it to draw with nothing but your fingers. Use it on the couch, the classroom, or the meeting room. With the App Store, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Why You’ll Want One

iPad is the “magical” third device that finally moves our consumption of all media types”written, spoken, and watched” into the digital realm, and will even begin to blur the lines between the different ways of consuming media. (Imagine an issue of Sports Illustrated with pictures that, when tapped, become videos.) Some people argue that there’s no room for such a device, and the failure of Windows tablets proved this. I argue that the key to success for a device such as this is simplicity. A device designed for simple tasks needs to be simple. It needs to do what you want it to do, it needs to do it fast, and it needs to do it without you having to put any thought into how you are going to do it. iPad is this device.

Removing this complexity means we finally have the device we need to move away from dead trees for good. The only options we had until yesterday morning are inadequate. The laptop computer is too cumbersome. The smartphone is too small. The netbook is small, awkward, and slow. The Tablet PC is too complex. The eInk reader doesn’t do color or video. The iPad, however, is perfect.

iPhone, of course, can do these things already. But iPhone is and always will be hindered by a small screen and slow processor. A bigger screen and a faster processor makes for a better experience, but even if the next-gen iPhone has a bigger screen and faster processor, it won’t be on the same level as iPad simply because iPhone needs to be pocketable. These two enhancements make the device more intuitive and flexible than even an iPhone, and that’s the entire point of this third generation of interfaces.

As we march forward into the future, iPad will become both cheaper and more capable, and other players will enter the market. iPad computing is computing for the 21st century. It will integrate technology with our daily lives like science fiction has been predicting it would for decades.

iPad will be huge because the abstraction it provides simplifies the computing experience in a way that allows it to be integrated with our daily lives. At $499, this thing is going to fly off the shelves.

I recently saw the new George Clooney film, Up in the Air.

This is a movie that will make you think about your life and what is important in it and about it. Up in the Air will make you think about what you are good at doing, being and why. At least it did for me.

Becoming a Master Flyer

Ryan Bingham, who Clooney plays in the film, travels more than 300 days per year. He is good at air travel. He is a Master Flyer who through an elite status has a travel experience unlike the average occasional airline passenger.

In 2009, I spent 168 days away from home (work and holidays) and earned more than 200,000 air miles. I am a Master Flyer, too. On average, I spend about 10 hours a week in airplanes and airports. This adds up to about 500 hours a year. I started my Master Flyer apprenticeship in 1983 when Greg Jones and I founded Lighthouse Software. I continued that pace through 1988 when I founded MagazineWeek and my travel dropped back to business normal.

I hit the road again in 1995, two years after Laura Pittman and I founded Blue Dolphin Direct. I continued through 2000 when we flipped Blue Dolphin Direct into Blue Dolphin Magazines and my travel schedule once again dropped back to business normal. Then Laura and I founded Mequoda Group in 2004 and my travel schedule kicked into high gear one more time. That is, more or less, 17 years of very frequent travel or about 8,500 hours in airports and airplanes. By the end of 2012, I will pass 10,000 hours at my current pace. And like Ryan Bingham, I am good at air travel, and I enjoy being good at it.

Malcolm Gladwell: 10,000 hours to achieve mastery

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that 10,000 hours of dedicated practice is the number required to gain mastery over any complex activity. In the book, he demonstrates that for hockey players, rock stars, violinists and others, 2,000 to 5,000 hours of practice brings competency.  Those who rise to the top of their game or profession have raw talent, and they hone that talent with more than 10,000 hours of practice. And not just marking time practice, but 10,000 hours spent pushing themselves to be the best at what they do. Gladwell concludes that humans simply must have 10,000 hours of practice to master any complex activity.

You are what you do: Is that all there is to life?

As I thought about the movie, and did the math on my quest to become a Master Flyer, I asked myself what other activities have I gained mastery over in my 54-years on the planet. And what activities might I still be in the running for the coming years. The latter being the more important question.

I first thought about sailing. I joined a sailing club in 2008. I took the courses in classroom and on the water to be keelboat and coastal certified on boats up to fifty feet in length. Once I hit the 40 hours of time on the water required to be let loose with the boat on my own, I made runs from Boston to Marblehead and Newburyport and back. In two years, I have accumulated just over 200 hours on the water. At this pace, I can hope to become a Master Sailor in another 98 years.  Competency looks to be the more reasonable goal for this lifetime.

Mastery in 21^st century digital media strategy

My thoughts then turn to my 34-year career in media. Have I gained, or will I gain, mastery in some aspect of my profession?  Here is my napkin math on three roles I play today:

Media Consultant: First the math… The frequent flying has been tied to consulting. I have spent 17 years of my 34-year career teaching other publishers to discover and reach their goals, first at Lighthouse Software, then at Blue Dolphin Direct and now at Mequoda Group. On average I consult with about 15 clients at any given time and dedicate about 60 hours to each over the course of a year. (I will leave out the 1,000 hours a year I spend researching, analyzing, teaching and writing about new media trends, as that is not pure consulting). Nine hundred hours per year for 17 years adds up to 15,300 hours of consulting. So by Gladwell’s 10,000-hour standard, I may already be a Master Publishing Consultant.

Now it’s true that publishing in 2010 spans a vast and interrelated set of platforms and skills. Mastering the Media Pyramid, which I study and teach as a Mequoda System core concept, is not the same as mastering the creation, production and marketing of all the different media within it.

I don’t know anyone who has spent the time I have spent helping others understand their digital media business and their goals. And still it makes me ponder all that I do not know of which is knowable, and still more that is unknowable, in the digital media space.

And so I do the math for other activities that occupy a big part of my professional life…

Teacher: I began teaching for Computer Craft Learning Centers back in 1982. I taught Apple DOS, Wordstar and Visicalc. I was asked to develop and pilot a new program. In 1983, I was named Computer Craft Teacher of the Year. In 2010, I will lead more than 50 full-day programs. It seems that teaching and consulting go hand and hand for me. So let’s estimate that I have taught 300 hours a year for about 20 years, or about 6,000 hours of classroom teaching. No mastery here… just competency for now.

Writer: I love to write. For me, like every student, writing begins in school. I started taking writing seriously in Mr. Baldwin’s 8^th grade English class, which I began in fall 1969. Since then I have written dozens of short stories, hundreds of papers, hundreds of articles, several books and thousands of emails.

Side note: I am a hunt and peck typist who averages about 20 words a minute. This fact almost got me kicked out of journalism school. My professor kept mumbling something about the world belonging to those who can type. Personally, I am still holding out for the speech-to-text recognition software I saw on a Star Trek episode back in 1967.

So let’s say I have spent an average of 10 hours per week writing since fall 1969. With time off for bad behavior, that would equate to about 2,000 weeks or 20,000 hours of writing.  I will leave it to you, my readers, to decide whether Master Writer is a title I deserve.

Mastery in my personal life

I did the same math for my personal life. Time spent working at being a good husband, father, friend and, now, grandfather.  Suffice to say that I have met the 10,000-hour requirement for three of the four, yet mastery is not a word I would use to describe my skills or status in any of those roles. These roles are complex and always changing as loved ones age and situations change. So little is repeated. Again, it appears that competency is the best I can hope for in my personal life.

My hope is that this post might inspire you to think about how you spend your time in the years ahead. I know it has done just that for me. If you see Up in the Air, post a comment and let me know what you think and how you feel about the film and its message.

Webinars are very profitable ancillaries that are perfect products to promote via email because they are timely and are delivered electronically. Although almost exclusively used by B2B publishers for several years, we’re seeing more special-interest B2C publishers moving into this format.

If your company has taken a hit this year and you’re looking for new ways to bring in revenue, you might consider live digital events like webinars and audio conferences. We’ve seen numerous publishers successfully launch free and paid webinars and audio conferences.

Depending on whether you are product-driven (making money through product sales) or ad-driven (making money through ads), most publishers can identify several areas in their business where a live online event fits their content.

Even more, it doesn’t need to be difficult. You don’t even have to be an expert on every topic that you present.

For example, in our upcoming Audio Conferences and Webinars: Proven Strategies to Maximize Profitability webinar, we’ve gathered speakers from many areas of production.

SPECIALTY: MODERATING

Kim Mateus leads the Mequoda Research Team and is responsible for content development for all Mequoda events, seminars, workshops and in-house training programs. She manages content development, production and marketing for all Mequoda white papers, webinars and live events, and co-hosts the twice-a-year, two-day Mequoda Summit, which explores current best practices for online publishing and marketing.

Kim will be moderating the webinar, so if you have any particular questions or issues you’d like to see covered, please email her at Kim@Mequoda.com.

SPECIALTY: CONTENT CREATION AND PRODUCTION

Justin M. Clark is Director of Operations for The Dark Intelligence Group, Inc., which publishes The Dark Report and Dark Daily. These publications serve the clinical laboratory and pathology testing industry.

Justin has primary responsibility for all the The Dark Group’s audio conferences, including acting as liaison for speakers, tracking daily statistics, supervising arrangement of continuing education units (CEUs), creating and sending marketing, arranging content for all web pages, coordinating collaborative marketing agreements, soliciting sponsorships, and much more.

Justin also oversees and manages the day-to-day activities of the organization, with a focus on the systems and procedures required to accomplish the company’s missions.

Justin will highlight how he recently spearheaded the creation of an automated system to handle all monthly audio conference registrations, a customized tool that allows DarkDaily.com to seamlessly accept and track registrations, process payments, and issue confirmation emails with invoices attached.

SPECIALTY: MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT

Leslie Davidson, president of Davidson Direct, specializes in audio conference and webinar production and marketing. She has managed these conferences for a diverse group of specialized information providers, including Bulldog Reporter, Inside Mortgage Finance, Modern Distribution Management, The Dark Report and Elsevier Business Intelligence, to name just a few.

With 27 years in publishing, she knows what it takes to make money in this industry. Based on her experience producing and marketing hundreds of audio conferences and webinars, Leslie will provide best practices that will help you create and manage a profitable program of your own.

Leslie will reflect on her experience in managing webinars and will expose the best practice strategies she has executed.

SPECIALTY: SOLUTIONS AND PLATFORMS

Scott Bradshaw is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at BeaconLive, which offers audio & web conferencing with full event management services.

Scott combines his deep sales experience with his passion for customer service. So many of BeaconLive’s customers see Scott as their internal advocate. As Scott says, “My philosophy is to not just talk the talk, but to walk the walk.”

Scott will speak to the technical aspect of webinar and audio conference production, explaining multiple event style options, including audio, web, streaming, video and on-demand solutions.

Join us NEXT WEEK on September 2nd at 2pm to discover the secrets to creating and marketing webinars and audio conference programs that address customer needs and generate healthy profits during our 90-minute Audio Conferences and Webinars: Proven Strategies to Maximize Profitability webinar.

As Beacon Live states in their new white paper on new media development, Which Content Delivery Medium is Right for Your Business, “in our global 24/7 world, it’s becoming harder and harder to get “face time” with prospects, current clients, or even all of your employees. Still, it’s imperative that you deliver content to these groups.”

Luckily, when you’re a publisher facing new media challenges, it’s good to know that we have the control to choose how we deliver our content.

Cindy Carter of FDAnews has told us in the past that audio conference encores, audio CDs and transcripts account for 25 percent of FDAnews’ business.

Her pricing strategy is stringent. Ms. Carter has stressed the importance of the integrity of their content. “It’s the content that’s valuable,” explains Ms. Carter. They rarely offer a discount based on the media it is accessed on. The user will pay the same price regardless of whether they purchase a live audio conference, the 24/7 encore presentation of that audio conference, or a CD & transcript package.

Even more, Carter’s audio conferences have become the driving force for all of their content products. “Our management report business is driven by our audio conference business,” explains Ms. Carter. “Management reports are basically repackaged audio conferences, with additional content from the company’s editorial files.”

We’ve talked to other publishers like HubSpot, who have created week-long “universities” that include two webinars a day for an entire week. These universities weren’t paid, but were rather for lead-generation and were presented by dozens of respected outside inbound marketing professionals.

Beacon’s white paper Which Content Delivery Medium is Right for Your Business, offers a comprehensive list of pros and cons for new media development with audio conferences and webinars that I wanted to share with you in light of our upcoming webinar: Audio Conferences and Webinars: Proven Strategies to Maximize Profitability on September 2nd.

Conducting Audio Conferences

Audio conferences require no visual stimuli and are presented over the phone. As Beacon puts it, “everyone in business has access to a phone. And considering these days that more and more people have cell phones, Blackberries, iPhones, etc., people can be part of a call from almost anywhere at any time: the corner coffee shop, the airport, even the beach.” This makes audio conferences possibly the most convenient way for a new media business to present material that doesn’t rely on visual prompts.

Audio Conference Pros:

• Convenience–everyone in business has access to a phone.
• Perfect for “technically challenged” audiences.
• Works well when you need to get information out quickly since there’s practically no setup (much easier than communicating login info, URLs, etc).
• Variety of access methods, such as Operator-Assisted (OA) and PIN.
• Post call reports are available showing dial-in times, duration, etc.
• Ability to record calls and make accessible for those who couldn’t be on the call.
• Can be part of a “hybrid” solution with webinars (see #3 below).

Audio Conference Cons:

• Lose out on nonverbal gestures and “seeing” people’s reactions, posture, and other revealing nonverbal behavior.
• Difficult if working with/looking at documents while on the call.
• Audio makes for a more challenging learning environment since most people are visual learners.

Conducting Webinars

Webinars are generally one-way conversations with an audience that is listening to audio over the phone and watching your presentation over the web. They might also be listening to audio over the web, but still advocate the “one-to-many” model where a presenter (or presenters) conducts the webinar for an audience that could include hundreds of attendees.

Webinar Pros:

• More than 84 percent of all people are visual learners.
• Webinars are a one-to-many system, where visuals and audio come “streaming” through the computer.
• Can easily create a “hybrid” with audio conferences, meaning attendees can choose webinar option or audio-only option; both groups would hear the same presentation.
• Webinars are an interactive medium, and the more interactive the medium, the better the satisfaction and the higher the increase in repeat customer rates, which can often translate to more revenue for your company.
• Recorded video clips can be easily added.
• Simple and easy to use, with no downloads required.
• The best webinar services provide useful features, such as instant polls, live chat (perfect for Q&A), live desktop share, and the ability for several users to control slides. Live chat and Q&A allows you to screen questions and only answer the ones you want. Still, you can capture all the questions, which provides you an additional marketing opportunity: you can communicate with the audience by sending an email with the answers to all of the questions after the event ends.
• Post call reports are available showing log in times, duration, etc.

Webinar Cons:

• You’ll need more prep time than you would need for an audio conference or even a web conference; slides and other materials need to be dynamic and polished.
• Rehearsal time is critical.
• A polished presenter or speaker is a must.

If you’re looking to build a new revenue stream using audio conferences and webinars, or are looking for new ways to promote, structure and market your existing digital events, attend Audio Conferences and Webinars: Proven Strategies to Maximize Profitability on Sept 2^nd at 2pm.

Podcasting is a portmanteau blended from iPod, Apple’s popular digital audio player, and broadcasting — specifically audio broadcasting via the Internet. Ironically, podcasting does not require using an iPod.

Podcasting is a form of online media delivery in which digital media files, either audio or video, are available for downloading from a website or delivered via an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed over the Internet.

You are podcasting if you publish selected media files via the Internet and allow users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically, downloading them to a personal computer or other audio or video player.

Podcasts, or individual broadcast programs, are generally syndicated and delivered as “webisodes” on a regular subscription basis.

Podcasting can be considered the audio equivalent of blogging, providing a platform on which you can promote your business or simply express your opinions.

My personal experience as a Wall Street Journal devotee

My favorite newspaper has been The Wall Street Journal ever since my first journalism course in college, where it was required reading. It may be the world’s best newspaper — global, well resourced, unbiased, focused on its audience, and very well written. I’ve been a subscriber for more than 30 years.

The Wall Street Journal website (WSJ.com) is one of the largest Mequoda System Best Practice online publishers, with content delivered on numerous platforms.

I subscribe to The Wall Street Journal four different ways. First, as a print subscriber — the Journal is delivered to my home six days a week.

Second, I subscribe to the Journal on the Amazon Kindle, where I can enlarge the type size to accommodate my aging eyes and read it on an e-ink display screen that can show up to 16 shades of gray.

Third, I can access all The Wall Street Journal premium content online.

Fourth, I regularly listen to The Wall Street Journal This Morning as a favorite podcast via iTunes.

You can listen to The Wall Street Journal from your phone or handheld device using Apple’s free iTunes application to subscribe and automatically download WSJ podcasts including WSJ This Morning, Tech News, MarketWatch, Walt Mossberg, and more.

The Wall Street Journal This Morning is my favorite iTunes podcast.

Of all of these, not surprisingly, my favorite podcast is The Wall Street Journal This Morning, which has its own website at http://www.wsjradio.com/WSJAM.html. Host Gordon Deal and news anchor Gina Cervetti deliver a lively blend of news and other intelligent information, plus humor and expert analysis.

The Wall Street Journal This Morning is a magazine style news program with about 30-40 headline and feature stories daily. At the website you can listen to (but not download) a streaming audio of the five most recent episodes.

I’m not certain when it is originally broadcast as a live radio program, but guessing it’s 5 a.m. Eastern. Surprisingly, in the New York City area the live program is not available on a Big Apple radio station, but can be heard at 5 a.m. on WNYM-AM (970 AM) in nearby Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, and at the same hour on WGCH-AM (1490 AM) in Greenwich, Connecticut. The content is distributed as a nationwide syndicated program that can be heard on more than 140 stations.

Available as an audio podcast download on iTunes, The Wall Street Journal This Morning generally gets high customer ratings for content, but chalks up frequent complaints that it needs to be available earlier in the day (or else the name needs to be changed). It appears to be posted for daily download as early as 7 a.m. Eastern some days but as late as about 10:15 a.m. Eastern, or later, on other days, which is too late for many users.

The hour-long program actually times out to be about 40 minutes, after the commercial ads have been edited out. On the podcast, you can hear Mr. Deal say, “and the time now is 10 minutes after the hour,” so we know it’s in real time when it’s recorded at The Wall Street Journal studios in New York City.

So how does The Wall Street Journal make money podcasting a syndicated radio program if 20 minutes of commercials have been edited out? After all, iTunes is free, which means, like the other podcasts iTunes delivers, The Wall Street Journal This Morning is free.

If Rupert Murdock and his marketing experts think that The Wall Street Journal This Morning is helping drive traffic to paid print or online subscriptions, it isn’t working for me. Just the opposite is true. I’m spending more time listening to The Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast, and would probably quit the print edition of The Wall Street Journal if my wife didn’t enjoying reading it. If push came to shove, I’d quit the Kindle edition, too, in favor of the podcast.

Perhaps because it’s a nationally syndicated radio program, and globally syndicated as a podcast, the producers of The Wall Street Journal This Morning decided it was inappropriate to include New York commercial content. More likely, it’s a requirement of all Apple iTunes podcasters.

A podcast becomes a blog

But recently I began to notice embedded advertising messages in The Wall Street Journal This Morning. Reminiscent of the late Paul Harvey’s conversational style, Mr. Deal says something along the lines of, “And now, turning to the small business news front, sponsored by our friends at Cadillac…”

Then the announcer plugs Cadillac the way Paul Harvey used to plug Ace Hardware.

Suddenly, The Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast takes on a characteristic of a blog. The contextual advertising unit has replaced interruption advertising (normal radio and television commercials). This conversational message, casually but deliberately inserted into the editorial content, is the equivalent of an embedded text ad.

Sometimes there is one of these contextual ads. Other times there are none. This morning there were two — for Cadillac and Lending Tree.

So, The Wall Street Journal This Morning podcasts go out with all the regular commercial advertisements (interruption advertising) removed, but the conversational contextual ads (inline sponsorships) remain intact.

The Wall Street Journal is steadfastly holding to its paid content business model online and on the Kindle. But radio is a declining medium, just as are newspapers are declining and even dying.

Faced with a diminishing radio audience (owing in part to podcasting), The Wall Street Journal marketers have decided that The Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast cannot prevail with 20 minutes of interruption advertising. The young, hip iTunes audience does not want to hear it. The 20/40 ratio of commercials to editorial or entertainment content is unworkable on a podcast, even if iTunes permitted it.

But The Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast can withstand three or four conversational contextual ads (inline sponsorships). So the producers have cut back the interruption advertising commercials, and replaced them with higher-priced embedded ads.

And by returning to a radio broadcast reminiscent of the 1940s and 1950s, they are using the gravitas of the announcer to add substance to the commercial messages.

Are you old enough to remember Arthur Godfrey? He was one of the first on-air superstars of radio and television, and is considered to be TV’s first great master of advertising.

Mr. Godfrey regularly ignored scripted commercials and ridiculed the advertising agency people who wrote them. Instead, he found that one way to enhance his pitches was to extemporize his commercials, even poking fun at the sponsors (while never showing disrespect for the products themselves).

Today, in the tradition of Arthur Godfrey, Mr. Deal is promoting the new Cadillac STS luxury sedan. And Mr. Deal is endorsing a home loan, mortgage refinance, home equity loan, or auto loan from the Lending Tree network of lenders, “who compete for your business.”

What is the lesson for Mequoda System Publishers?

One exemplary Mequoda System Publisher, Knitting Daily, has launched Knitting Daily TV, a new, public television how-to program that covers a variety of needle crafts, from knitting and crochet to stitching, felting, spinning, and weaving, and guides viewers in learning to make fun yet stylish knitwear patterns and projects.

The program is syndicated by the Public Broadcasting System to more than 200 PBS stations nationwide in 45 percent of the U.S. market. For this service, Knitting Daily pays nothing, but simply provides the content.

Knitting Daily TV is sponsored in part by Signature Needle Arts; YarnMarket.com; Fiesta/Ironstone Yarns; Blue Sky Alpaca; Ashford Handicrafts; Bagsmith; Berroco; Blue Sky Alpacas; Classic Elite; Colorful Stitches; Harrisville Designs; Lorna’s Laces; MyHandworkStudio.com; Prism Arts; Signature Needles; Spinning and Weaving Association; Tutto-Opal Isager; Trendsetter; and other manufacturers of custom products for a growing audience of knitting consumers.

Almost any B2C publisher with good content can expand its brand to a broadcasting medium, including podcasting, just as the The Wall Street Journal and Knitting Daily TV demonstrate.

Knitting Daily TV is an instructional television program, but it could also be a podcast using the iTunes distribution platform and selling inline sponsorships. In this model, iTunes would be the smaller, more affordable delivery vehicle, analogous to PBS, and the new podcast medium would be analogous to the old radio.

Podcasting is an ad-driven medium, with either advertising-supported or traffic-supported webisodes. The alternative to podcasting is streaming media, i.e., charging users for digital events such as recorded webcasts. In this model, the programs are originally produced as live events, and subsequently sold as one-shot DVDs, CD-ROMs or digital downloads.

Additionally, in the subscription or membership website model, a publisher can sell unlimited, online access to all its digitally recorded programs, and deliver them via on-demand viewing.

That’s the business model we are using to promote Mequoda Pro, our exclusive membership website enabling you to discover the ultimate online audience development system using SEO, PR, link-building, email newsletters and your existing editorial content.

Download our new white paper, Tips for Creating a Successful Podcasting Series, which includes this case study and more!

BLR.com is a Mequoda “best practice” multi-platform content publisher, and its creator, Bob Brady, has been setting a standard for excellence and innovation since before we coined the term “Mequoda.”

What are the characteristics of an effective, profitable, Mequoda System Website? There are four elements of primary importance.

First, a Mequoda System Publisher is content-driven.

Content-driven means you are an online periodic publisher who has committed to publishing news and information on a regular frequency to build reader trust and brand authority.

Second, a Mequoda System Publisher is Google-friendly.

Google-friendly refers to search engine optimization, or the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your website by making it easier for search engines to find and index the site for the appropriate keywords. SEO involves selecting targeted keyword phrases related to the website editorial content, and making certain that the site ranks high in the results returned from a Google search of those keyword phrases.

I used to think that being Google-friendly was the most important characteristic of a Mequoda System, but I’ve come to realize that there is a least one very successful B2B Mequoda System Publisher whose highest priority is not about being found by Google.

Cindy Carter’s FDANews.com is not particularly Google-friendly, and doesn’t need to be, because she doesn’t rely on website traffic to build and maintain her email marketing programs.

Being Google-friendly is of utmost importance to most online publishers and marketers, but not all. That’s because Google is often the largest source of inbound traffic for a Mequoda System Website.

For Mequoda Daily, 58 percent of our website traffic comes to the site organically from the search engines, and 80 percent of that traffic is driven by Google. That means almost half (46 percent) of all arrivals at Mequoda Daily are owing to Google.

Our site converts six percent of arrivals into email subscribers, so we regard Google as a very powerful engine that is responsible for as many as 400 new subscribers each month.

Third, a Mequoda System Publisher is email-centric.

Email-centric means you publish at least one free email newsletter to build and maintain customer relationships. Also, that your website uses conversion architecture that facilitates converting casual visitors into regular email subscribers.

Building your email subscriber list is a priority. Obtaining permission to communicate with subscribers on a regular basis is of utmost importance.

Fourth, a Mequoda System Publisher is multiplatform.

Multi-platform means your media pyramid has at least three levels including at least one premium level, i.e., at least one premium (usually paid) product.

The average multi-platform Mequoda System Media Pyramid has seven levels — two that are free (periodical website and email newsletter), and five that require registration and in many instances, require payment.

The five levels include online stores to sell one-shots, digital events and live events, plus levels that are companions to non-website subscription products, and membership products and their websites.

Of all the best practices we’ve discovered, the defining characteristics of a Mequoda System that supersede all other best practices is a multi-platform media pyramid.

Heard at the Mequoda Summit: “Tell me about your Media Pyramid.”

When you meet the rock stars of Mequoda System Publishing & Marketing at the October 7-9, 2009 Mequoda Summit Boston, ask them about their Media Pyramids.

What does a best practice Mequoda System Pyramid look like?

Bob Brady is one of the craftiest Mequoda System Publishers I know, with more than 30 years of experience. He launched the first Business & Legal Reports (BLR) print product back in 1977.

Today, BLR markets more than 500 products. Many are subscription publications that are updated daily, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Information is provided via a variety of media in order to meet the needs of a diverse customer base, including live events, digital events, membership websites, loose-leaf services, CD-ROMs, DVDs, newsletters, and booklets.

I know of no B2B publisher that exemplifies the seven-levels of a successful Mequoda System better than BLR.com. BLR generates 99 percent of its revenue selling premium information products, as do 80 percent of all “rock star” Mequoda System Publishers.

Here is a generic breakdown of the seven levels of a Mequoda System Pyramid levels with specific examples drawn from Bob Brady’s BLR Mequoda System Pyramid, top to bottom:

7. Live Events: Seminars, conferences & summits.

Example: National Employment Law Update

6. Memberships: Associations, clubs, libraries, directories, forums, classifieds, hosted software applications & databases.

Example: HR.BLR.com in Your State

5. Subscriptions: Newspapers, magazines, newsletters & loose-leafs.

Example: Compensation & Benefits Newsletter

4. Virtual Events: Audio conferences, online seminars, webinars & webcasts.

Example: Virtual Boot Camps

3. One Shots: Online store with books, reports, seminars, training, & software.

Example: 10-Minute HR Trainer

2. Free Email Newsletters: High-frequency, single-story or multiple-story summary.

Example: HR Daily Advisor

1. Free Periodical Websites: Content-driven, Google-friendly & email-centric.

Example: HR Daily Advisor

At the Mequoda Summit, we’ll present 16 case studies on B2B and B2C publishing companies — large and small — that have built profitable media pyramids.

Come to the Mequoda Summit, October 7-9 in Boston, prepared to talk one-on-one about your media pyramid with some of the most savvy online publishers in the industry.

Sign up today and reserve your seat to get a chance to mingle with and learn from Bob Brady (BLR.com) and David Pyle (Knitting Daily and Beading Daily). Bob is a leading B2B media pyramid expert. David has built three exemplary B2C media pyramids.

Register for the Mequoda Summit today.

According to Gizmag.com and Mobile Intelligence data, one in every two people now have a mobile phone, and “between January 2001, and December 2010 (a decade), our global society will have transformed from one where 13% of carried a mobile phone, to one where 70% carry one”. [source: Gizmag.com]

If you want to see how your site looks on a mobile phone, take half a minute to check out Google’s Conversion Utility.

Not looking so hot? There are quite a few tools on the web that can help your convert your site into a mobile-friendly interface.

• Mofuse is the choice of over 23,000 blogs, including HarvardBusiness.org and other publishers. It offers a platform tool for multiple devices including iPhone. This is a paid product, however, and monthly plans go from $39 to $199 a month which includes analytics and custon ad-server integration. They also a offer a free wordpress plugin.
• Firefox’s Web Developer extension disables images, JavaScript, and CSS to let you know the barebones of what your site will look like on less sophisticated browsing devices.

• Phone emulators are available by from mobile phone manufacturers. Sony Ericsson provides publishers with their Developer World while Nokia has a developer forum with an XHTML section.
  
• Device Capture, brought to you by Browser Cam is a paid solution that allows you to test your website on Blackberry.
• Device Central is an option for those that own Adobe’s CS3 or CS4 suite.
• Wordpress plugins (for those of us on Wordpress) are available that will automatically convert your site into a more mobile-friendly format. Among the many plugins available, some well-liked ones are Wordpress Mobile Edition and Wordpress PDA & iPhone.
• Winksite is driven my RSS deployment like most other tools, but also offers community features such as forums, chat, and polls and allows Google Mobile Adsense.
• MobiSiteGalore is a free service that’s W3C compliant and should work across all mobile phones.

Whatever option you do decide to choose for your website, we’d recommend that your mobile version is as clean and neat as your online version. Some converters may give you a quick fix of turning your site into an RSS feed that’s easier to digest, but not necessarily easier to read. We’d recommend getting a demo beforehand.

And while we’re talking, how many of you read blogs on your mobile device? Or do you use a feed reader instead to more easily digest the content?

Generating Profits From Easy Uploads of Video & Audio was a great session at the 2009 SIPA 33^rd Annual International Conference in Washington, D.C. this week.

Starting the session was Alane Keller from NIBM, who shared an A/B split with us. In the split, they offered a 90-second audio clip sample on the landing page for one of their audio conferences. The clip was offered at the top of the page, and in the P.S. portion.

When the test results surfaced, it appeared that the page with audio sold $2,958 while the page without made $2,364 worth of sales. However, upon a closer look, it turned out that a significant amount of sales that came from the landing page with audio clip, came from CD sales. In the end, an audio clip did not sell the actual conference more than the control landing page without audio.

If your publishing company uses video as a publishing platform, it may be in your best interest to create your own in-house video production studio, and that’s exactly what Dale Debber of Providence Publications demonstrated to the audience in the second half of this session.

Debber shared a video, produced by his interns, on how they created an in-house video production company called Studio B.

The comical video showed a handful of interns, whom Dale pays $12.50 an hour, purchasing and setting up an entire video studio. Debber told the audience that the studio cost him around $40,000 to create. The interns, who come from local highschools and have audio/visual experience were the ones to compile the needs of this new studio.

They purchased three video cameras, three microphones, lights, a green screen, use Adobe Premier Pro, Photoshop, and Encore (for DVD menus).

The interns, whom Debber brought with him to the conference, offered publishers a few lessons learned from the experience of building their own in-house studio:

• When purchasing equipment, keep like-brands together. This is for compatability reasons and also for quality of footage, which may differ depending on the brand. Studio B uses Panasonic.
• You can never have too much B roll. B roll is footage that may be played while someone narrates instructions or general dialog. The more, the better.
• Always bring spares. When you’re on location, you can’t go back for a new camera or batteries, so always bring more than you need.

Since launching Studio B, Debber and team have produced safety-training videos, and even employee profiles for their website, which Debber recommends to help give your users faces to go with the names in your company.

More coverage from SIPA:

SIPA Take Away #1: 17 Testing Tools from Sandra Niehaus

SIPA Take Away #2: Get Your Staff Pumped About Search Engine Optimization

SIPA Take Away #3: Create an In-House Audio/Video Production Studio

SIPA Take Away #4: Membership Website Experience from Mark Ragan

SIPA Take Away #5: Best New Product Development Ideas

SIPA Take Away #6: 10 Ways to Sell One-Shot Products

SIPA Take Away #7: Google Really Does Love Online Publishers