Morning Links: November 14, 2008
— A study claims 1.4 times as many people are reading pirated versions of publishers’ content than are reading the real thing on the original content site. That this “study” was performed by a company that claims to track down said pirates (for a fee) should make you reach for the grain-of-salt shaker.
— Do conferences matter any more? It’s certainly a lot harder to schmooze and drink on the corporate tab at a “webinar” (ugh, what a word). But as travel costs rise, technology improves, and budgets shrink, it’s hard to justify the expense of most of the industry conferences journalists go to.
— Lonely Planet does something potentially smart: offering travel bloggers to publish their content on lonelyplanet.com and giving the bloggers some/all of the advertising revenue from that page. It appears they’re focusing on AdWords ads, which work particularly well with travel content. A couple of months ago, a very smart news exec said that travel content is one of the sectors news operations should be expanding, since it’s targeted enough to be comparatively lucrative to sell against.
— Help Me Investigate, a current Knight News Challenge contestant, is a spin on the crowdfunding model. Instead of asking the audience to invest money (a la Spot.us), it asks the audience to invest time — in many ways, a more limited resource.
We have to stop looking at everything in short-term dollars and cents. When I started my newspaper job I was told that everyone on the web staff was expected to go to one professional seminar or conference a year. One of the most valuable experiences I had was going to a Poynter seminar that first year. Did I learn anything concrete to bring back to my job? No. In terms of an immediate ROI, there was none for my employer. But the seminar was a valuable week of brainstorming and I returned with a renewed energy for my job, as well as a network of people with whom to trade ideas. Not to mention it was a great break from work. Seminars may not have a direct contribution to the bottom line. They may actually hurt the bottom line. But they’re also a relatively low cost and effective way to reward some of your hardest working, engaged employees, especially young employees who are more concerned with expanding their skills and professional networks than say getting an insignificant raise. I would have exchanged any of my raises for more opportunities to keep my skills and my professional network current. But after that first conference that part of the budget was cut all together (except for upper management, who really did get very little out of going to these conferences to learn about technology that they’re never use).