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Merrill
Brown - Keynote Speech
The Next Generation of Internet News
"Sensing the News"
The Institute for New Media Studies,
The University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN
July 11, 2002
Good evening and thank you all for coming to the conference keynote
session. I'm honored to have been invited.
I hope the conference theme doesn't evolve from the provocative "Sensing
the News" to "Sensing the Blues" since I'm afraid that the economic
environment, the roller coaster world of media economics and the confusing,
evolving, often invigorating, sometimes troubling state of news and
of Internet news in particular could yield that conference theme if
we're not careful. I say we're living in times of remarkable opportunity
and that as the media advertising marketplace moves into recovery,
the opportunities for those of us committed to Internet journalism
will soar.
A principal reason I accepted the invitation to speak here tonight
is because this conference is focused on what I believe is most important
about where the medium is today - innovation and the need for all
of us in this field -- journalists, software developers, sales people,
multimedia and applications producers, executives - to focus on our
continuing effort to break new ground. I used to say way back in the
mid nineties that Internet news then was similar to TV News in 1947.
To be sure, it isn't 1947 any longer and we've come a long, long way.
But it is 1952 and we've got a long, long way to go. We've only started
to see the magic of what's been created since our field began in earnest
just about seven years ago. We've only tiptoed down the road of television
- internet convergence.
We've only started to see the development of important new information
appliances. We've only begun to measure the impact of Internet news
in the global news culture and assess what 24 hour news at work truly
means to both the 24 hour news cycle and the commercial environment
that supports our creative efforts.
If you've think I've come here today to be anything but encouraging
about the tasks ahead for the Internet news community, you're wrong.
I am here to throw my views into your mix and to encourage you to
innovate, to press your bosses and their bosses to demonstrate the
same patience the cable industry showed in building its array of services
just a few years back. Nobody regrets more than the managements and
shareholders of CBS and ABC/Disney that they walked away from cable
channel opportunities in the 1980s because of an utter lack of vision,
guts and patience. Today those enterprises would be sitting on assets
worth $10 billion to $20 billion had they stuck with their early strategies
and their relatively manageable levels of losses. Are those big company
media management teams going to replicate those mistakes of the eighties?
I suspect not.
That's because the market is strong, the public is eager, and the
advertisers are increasingly focused on the brand building and direct
marketing opportunity that this medium offers. When they're at their
most candid, managements of TV networks, portals, and print publications
of all kinds realize that there is no turning back and that with a
savvy, aggressive, creative Internet strategy their core properties
are much likelier to face prosperous times as the decade progresses.
There's much quibbling about the data, to be sure. Internet growth
and Internet news audience growth has slowed. While it's certainly
important to note, and somewhat disappointing to be reminded that
consumers of traditional news represent the bulk of the consumers
of new news services, I'm afraid it misses the point. The bible of
the newspaper business, Editor and Publisher, headlined a story the
other day with "Online News Consumption Is Flat." "The trouble," E&P's
Wayne Robins wrote, "is that not that many more people are seeking
new media than those that relied on the old." The report on the Pew
study went on to note the "downbeat revelations" of the study including
the fact that one in four Americans goes to the Internet at least
three times a week for news.
There's more data in the study to ponder. 57% of college graduates
get Internet news at least once a week. More than a third of the general
public gets Internet news once a week. At MSNBC.com, we measured our
monthly audience of unique users at about 35 million people. Not hits
or page views or visits. Unique users. Our daily circulation according
to our internal numbers said we were double the size of any print
paper in the country - 4 million on so a day.
What's more there are 150 million people in the U.S. using the Internet
at least once a month, according to data prepared for the Online Publishers
Association. Usage time is up from 5:39 hours a week to 6:52 a week.
TV usage among Internet users is down by a full 25 percent to 12 hours
a week. 58 million people use the Internet at work on any given day
and that audience uses the Internet more than they use television.
Worried about the set of underlying business assumptions? There's
a lot to choose from in terms of ad sales data and projections. IAB
and eMarketer say that last year the ad marketplace was about $7.2
billion. Growth projections for this year range from Gartner's 44%
number to the more moderate 11% from eMarketer, although to be complete
Lehman recently stunned the ad community by recently suggesting this
year's numbers could decline by 13 percent. My guess is that there's
well over $1 billion in Internet news advertising today. And, there
are today 100 million U.S. online buyers and shoppers. All this is
a media business that's down across the board.
What's more, we're entering a new era in which the public is increasingly
showing a willingness to pay for some content types. I hope they'll
never have to pay for core news products, but the marketplace for
paid content is predicted to grow from $1 billion this year to five
times that over the next four years.
The audience is very large and growing. The advertising marketplace
is healthy and finally getting the creative and software development
attention I wished it had gotten years ago. Our medium does better
journalism, more valuable application development, has more high quality
multimedia content, and serves its constituencies on both the news
and commercial sides better than it ever has.
Meanwhile, the technical infrastructure continues to improve, albeit
slowly. Half of MSNBC's audience was viewing the site at high speed.
And while broadband hasn't grown as fast as we might have hoped there's
high speed household access now in something like 15 million homes
and studies suggest half of all homes will have broadband by the middle
of the decade. According to Forrester, broadband users go online at
least a third more frequently than conventional phone line users.
On busy news days the large sites are distributing video to an audience
making the site competitive with most cable network audiences. Last
September, MSNBC offered nearly 16 million live streams and over 6
million on demand streams, three and a half times the totals for the
previous month and nearly 10 times the amount offered a year ago.
The public, particularly the at work audience, wants video on the
desktop, and in fact requires access to multimedia services in times
of important national and world developments. The experience of watching
the news develop, listening to news coverage, commentary, and live
events while at the same time being engaged in chat and bulletin board
activity, reading stories and using interactive applications is now
a reality for millions of people.
Sites like MSNBC.com are in the video production and distribution
business in significant ways, today producing daily packages on the
hour of general news and business news headlines, streaming an enormous
amount of live content, and providing clips from cable and broadcast
networks. In short, video services are now available for people at
home and at work anyplace a modem can function, another one of this
medium's extraordinary accomplishments.
The change is quickening with the mass distribution of high speed
Internet access. We must be cautious, however, about the broadband
advance because there is no question about the fact that there has
been a slowdown in the development of the Internet infrastructure
and it is likely that the national rollout of the broadband network
will slow as a result.
The Internet news revolution has created an entirely new, utterly
unappreciated marketplace to news and information that didn't exist
as the nineties began. That's the at work market for news, sports,
stocks quotes, weather, you name it. It involves millions of people
who access data, text, video, applications and headlines at their
desktops in a marketplace that simply did not exist just a few short
years ago. After all, what's the penetration of the television at
the workplace - something like zero? What media had access to people
at work before all this began - via radios hidden in desks? The morning
paper on the coffee break? It all seems to have become so dated so
quickly.
To be sure, the intersections of all these content types create a
relatively clunky experience today for many people, while the technologists
and electronics manufacturers continue to create the true converged
appliance. But in the meantime, the numbers and the behavior patterns
give support to that dream of converged media - a dream that is at
the heart of what I call the third generation of Internet news, the
period we've now entered.
Today, we're already past what we could refer to as the medium's second
generation. In its beginnings, Internet news efforts focused on online
services learning how to redistribute wire copy and other third-party
content, and newspapers and other publications learned how to take
their print efforts online. I worked on the development of Time Daily
during that first generation and the challenge though complex at the
time was to publish high quality online journalism on just a daily
cycle.
Today our services are 7 by 24, technologically complex and accessed
by millions of people every day. This second generation of content,
vastly more complex than the repurposed headline and story era of
the first generation, featured the growth of entirely new content
forms. Everyday we're inventing new types of original video content,
webcasts that take video programming created specifically for the
Internet, not lifted from television, that fully integrate an Internet
aesthetic and Internet content into the program format. At the same
time, the top TV sites are doing more and more to not simply use television
to market URLs, but extend the storytelling experience from one platform
to the other - developments that are both in the business interest
of our industry but also just as importantly in the users' interest.
Last year marked the beginning of the third generation of Internet
news, a generation of new high-speed and handheld appliances that
will merge these new technologies in a fast, seamless way. For the
extraordinary audience growth to date is just the tip of the iceberg.
The second generation ended at a time when only about half the nation's
homes have personal computers, handheld Internet access is in its
infancy and high-speed access at home remains a relatively small slice
of the media universe.
In this new era improved interactive applications will create an entirely
new integrated news experience that will serve to engage consumers.
Video clips and entire programs will be streaming and on demand, as
will expanded and interactive personalized news. Video will be routinely
viewed on handhelds and in cars. Our content will be distributed around
the world via refrigerators, in cars, in ubiquitous hand held devices.
Who will create that news content? Certainly not GM or Sears. It will
be created by those of us in this room and by thousands of journalists,
developers and others who today make up our vibrant industry.
The war has given the medium a new role in world information dissemination
and we've only begun the process of understanding the impact of 7
by 24 global Internet coverage in war time. Issues such as those surrounding
Bin Laden and Taliban propaganda efforts and the views of the U.S.
government about them have effected how we're assessing, streaming
and distributing content on the Internet. These are difficult issues.
Difficult times.
But there's no denying the fact that the passive newscast and the
hours-old newspaper are being replaced by fresh, refocused products
that use technology to bring people closer to the news, to educate,
inform and entertain them. Taped and live streams will proliferate,
allowing audiences with specialized interests to watch hearings, press
conferences, interviews and events at their convenience at home or
at work. And they'll do so with very little effort thanks to high-speed
Internet access at home and at work. But the third generation of Internet
news is not just about reinvigorating the news and information business
with improved product and technology. It's also a critical opportunity
to engage the next generation of news consumers in the world of news
and public affairs.
For now, however, our vision isn't necessarily shared by all of our
bosses and colleagues in the newspaper, magazine and television industries.
Our industry has done a miserable job of telling its story. Few of
us have been able to get access to podiums, op ed pages and television
appearances to make clear the magnitude of what's been accomplished
in a very short period of time.
We work in the most successful new medium ever created. Our accomplishments
dwarf those of broadcast or cable television in their first years.
We have made it possible for anyone sitting anywhere in the world
to read any consequential newspaper in the world. We've created the
technology empowering Americans to view the work of broadcast journalists
from around the world or for a business person or student in the Middle
East to view a news package from NBC, CBS, MSNBC or CNN. We have created
a strategic situation which has in effect put NBC in the words business
and The Washington Post in the video business. We have made strides,
albeit baby steps, in creating a new storytelling technique through
applications and multimedia. We have merely brought the world closer
together.
The challenge of this conference and the challenge of your professional
lives is to continue that creative mandate. To reengage young people
in public affairs. To expand on the capability that allows people
of opposing views to read, view and assess each other's media and
worldview. To challenge a divided world in the same way that satellite
television and the VCR helped encourage those living behind the Iron
Curtain to break free of totalitarian rule and oppression and embrace
democracy and free speech.
Are these reasons for the blues? Hardly. This is the case to press
forward. As citizens, we've got to do all we can to encourage the
nation to complete construction of its broadband infrastructure. We
must do what we can to get the world around us communicating online.
We must develop publishing tools that make 7 by 24 news production
simpler, cheaper and viable for all journalists, not just those with
an affinity for new technology. We must continue to break down walls
between disciplines so that journalists and technologists share common
goals and languages. We must lobby for additional editorial investments
by those who sign our checks and for continuing and intensified creative
efforts to develop even more effective Internet advertising techniques.
And we can never simply rest on our laurels. We've only begun to invent
better delivery systems and storytelling techniques that bring together
critical news content and breathtaking technology. There's an extraordinarily
talented group of people assembled here in Minneapolis to do just
that. Have a great conference. |
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