The Chaser

The ability to build community has been one of the biggest selling points for local news media. When circulation numbers began declining and audience numbers dropped, local news media increased ad rates, because they argued there were still highly relevant to their local community. As a new report indicates, the Internet may be challenging that.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new study on the growing role the Internet plays in building community. According to the Pew study, about 60 million Americans said the Internet had played an important or crucial role in helping them with at least one major life decision in the past two years. While the report does not indicate what sites and sources users are turning to, it does tell us that the Internet is quickly becoming one of the most relevant aspects of everyday life.

The report dispels the notion that Internet users are some how less connected or more aloof, living in a virtual world where Web surfers never interact with real people. To the contrary, the report shows how Internet users often have stronger and deeper ties to their respective social networks. The Internet: It isn't just for geeks!

If you want to understand the power of online communities, look no further than the growing phenomenon of social network sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga. MySpace.com is fueled by hundreds of thousands of young people around the globe, though not exclusively teenagers, who build online communities around groups of people with whom they share similar interests and passions, regardless of where they live. For years, local news has relied on geography as being the most important factor in determining one's community and social networks. Sites like MySpace show how that is no longer the case.

You’d think publishers would’ve smartened up following their missteps with West Virginia coal miners’ story. But on the day after the Palestinian election, we spotted a newspaper-affiliated site with a lead story that reports a Fatah victory over Hamas (obviously grabbed from the print edition). And incredibly, right above that lead piece, a scrolling AP headline declares “Officials: Hamas Wins Palestinian Election.”

Ugh.

We know that news sites aren’t staffed 24/7 (at least not yet). And that automated feeds can spring some surprises on a Web editor. But there needs to be better coordination between print and online news teams on stories that are especially likely to bleed past a printed deadline, particularly elections. Editors of a printed publication with a set deadline have to go with what they know, and any articles that lack a definitive resolution should point readers to the Web for details. But those editors shouldn’t wake up to see conflicting reports stacked one above the other on the home page. Not if they want to be viewed as a relevant, trustworthy news organization.

And so goes today's Chaser rant. 

(Full disclose note: This Chaser is a semi-regular contributor of free-lance music articles to the news site described above. He hopes the person who signs his checks is open to constructive criticism!]

When professionals -- editors, academics, journalists -- are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

Might not this statistical optimization of "value" at the macroscale be a recipe for mediocrity at the microscale -- the scale, it's worth remembering, that defines our own individual lives and the culture that surrounds us? By providing a free, easily and universally accessible information source at an average quality level of 5, will Wikipedia slowly erode the economic incentives to produce an alternative source with a quality level of 9 or 8 or 7? Will blogging do the same for the dissemination of news? Does Google-surfing, in the end, make us smarter or dumber, broader or narrower? Can we really put our trust in an alien logic's ability to create a world to our liking? Do we want to be optimized?

• The other big variable to consider on probabilistic information systems is credibility -- of both sources and methods. With Wikipedia, for example, information sources are mostly anonymous to everyday users. One must trust that the community around Wikipedia will catch up to inaccurate or dated information, but rarely knows who put it there in the first place. With Google, one must decide whether the method of delivering search results worked as expected.
• A Google, therefore, has a lower barrier to human trust than a Wikipedia because it's pretty easy to tell from a few searches whether the Google system has what you want. Wikipedia may have an entry on the subject you want, but it is not nearly as easy to determine whether that entry is accurate. Google is an algorithmically sorted database at its core; Wikipedia is a collection of human effort. It's harder to trust an anonymous information source than an algorithmic search engine.
• Most blogs remove anonymity from the equation, but Anderson refers, we think, to the universe of blogs as a probabilistic system, not any one blog in particular. Still, a blogger can build credibility and trust over time, and not all bloggers attempt to be portrayers of fact as much as opinion leaders.
• If Anderson is right, and everyday humans can't grok probabilistic systems, maybe that opens up a lot of new opportunities for information systems designed to work the way humans expect and can trust. Maybe that means narrowing focus to improve accuracy and build credibility and, in the process, zeroing in on information value propositions that are of manageable size.

Within the last month, both the Online Publishers Association and Newspaper Association of America released studies on various services that measure the usage of online news products. The two reports review the four major audience-measurement services: comScore Media Metrix, Nielsen//NetRatings, Scarborough Research and The Media Audit.

Understanding the audience-research services is important, but all of them contain a flaw. All of them reflect the old-media approach to the world: if you build it, they will come.

In this "Field of Dreams" approach to audience measurement, we are only interested in how many people look at our sites. If reflects the mindset that the issues traditional media face never have to do with content, but rather with proper marketing. As a result, the metrics we use reflect that thinking.

Nothing better reflects that approach than newspaper-launched blogs. A quick scan by this Chaser of 10 newspaper sites found 15 blogs. The blogs read like newspaper columns and, most shockingly, more than half of them contained only one link or no links at all. Whoa!

That misses the whole point of blogs and the blogosphere. If you are not linking to other sites, you miss one of the key aspects of what makes the blogsphere work; you might as well not even participate.

We need new stats for the converged media world. When it comes to blogging, you should be tracking how many other blogs link to your blogs and how many items are you linking to. Identify 10 other local blogs and track how frequently they link, mention or interact with your local blogs. The new media world is a conversation in which traditional media is only one part. If you aren’t linking to other sites and if you are not being linked to, you are missing the whole point.

In another study released by the OPA, a new metric for tracking a Web site's success is put forth: SUM (site usage measure). This measure could be used for any media, but its focus is not simply on how many people look at something; it tracks the level of interaction a user has with a Web site. In essence, it's a loyalty index for your content.

If you don’t have a loyalty index for your site, you are missing a key metric that other industries have found extremely telling: while all visitors are good for the site, some visitors are better than others.

While audience aggregation data is important, these stats are quickly becoming outdated, and they don’t reflect the way people interact with media. We need new stats, and we need them now.

Shameless plug department: Chaser HQ will be hosting a media consumption seminar titled "Blogs, Podcasts, TiVo, Wikis: New Habits of News Consumers" March 12-15, 2006. Details are posted here.  The conference goal is to explore how we use all media. Apply now. Avoid the rush.

It’s time for Chasers to start making their holiday wish lists, and so far, the page is crammed with gadgets and ideas to help us explore the future. Oooh, the Chasers just love this time of year!

So many new gadgets and next-gen devices, just in time to add to a plump and juicy holiday wish list. The items below aren’t just for fun -- no, no -- they’re all about R&D and getting smart about continuing fascination with content delivered to portable devices and small screens. (At least, that’s the argument we’re making to get The Big Chaser to spring for ‘em!) Everyone’s invited to chime in with the gadget and gizmos they’re drooling over. (Just keep that drool away from our turkey!)

We’ll start the list by pointing to the most intriguing choices from recent newspaper pre-prints (yep, we still skim ‘em) and Wired magazine’s December 2005 issue.

Entertainment hubs: Hewlett-Packard’s HP Digital Entertainment Center and the Voodoo Media Center share similar goals -- to beat the stuffing out of your existing DVD player, DVR, FM radio and MP3 player! Oh, did we mention the PC is an endangered species, too? Yes, these boxes cram it all in there. We’re skeptical, of course, but that’s why they call it R&D!  

Handsets and PDAs: The T-Mobile Smartphone keeps Chasers connected to e-mail, blogs and more -- plus, it’s got built-in Wi-Fi. This one won’t sneak past the bean counters, but the Mobiado Professional Executive Model handset mashes style -- exotic wood exterior -- with substance -- camera, camcorder, Bluetooth and on and on.

Reporter gear: Grooming your own Kevin Sites? Equip the on-the-scene reporter with a modular utility belt from Think Tank Photo that would, in Wired’s words, “make Batman jealous.”

Games: Must… try… Xbox 360! And not just for the games, but to see how Microsoft delivers on a machine that integrates wireless communication and community-building for $400. And drop a PlayStation Portable in the online shopping cart, too. It’s too soon to hope for all-in-one portable perfection, but Sony knows its core market as well as any consumer-goods company -- always worth watching. The "Play" in "PlayStation" expands far beyond video games to include movies, music and content from media publishers.

Now it’s your turn: Tell us what’s on your Chaser Wish List. Remember, this is the season to share!

Hmmm, reruns of TV shows on the computer screen. This is what we’ve been working so hard to accomplish? This is the fabulous result of massive broadband penetration? Vinnie Barbarino from “Welcome Back, Kotter” strutting around on the screen, followed by a helping of “Kiss my grits!” from “Alice,” washed down with caring parental guidance from Alan Thicke on “Growing Pains”?

OK, it’s just one lil’ ol’ announcement from America Online and Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution, not the end game of our digital-media future. The programming venture that places old TV shows on AOL, scheduled to begin in early 2006 under the name “In2TV,” builds on a series of other recent announcements from media companies that are working furiously to maximize their assets and bring content to new platforms.

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Understanding media consumption Mark your calendars for "Blogs, Podcasts, TiVo and Wikis: The New Habits of News Consumers." This conference will bring together journalists, researchers and media watchers, who will explore how consumers use media in their daily lives. March 12-15, 2006. Limited seating. More info click here.

This TechWeb article refers to the AOL project as an “online TV network,” but as new programs are created for multiple screens, that terminology will be as misguided as Horshack’s scarf/jacket/hat ensemble.

In October, MTV and Motorola launched an eight episode, original content show for mobile phones. Viacom-owned MTV also developed a broadband version of its 24-hour college network, mtvU, during the same month. Scripps Networks is among the most aggressive dabblers in online homes for its content. Last month, Scripps’ HGTV introduced a new show, “My First Place,” on the Web instead of the TV screen.

All of these examples do more than repurpose made-for-TV format on the Web. They add extra video content, interaction among audience members, and cutesy add-ons like games and polls. The TechWeb article points to a significant stat that surely has motivated content dealmakers:

More than 94 million people, or 56 percent of the online U.S. population, have watched streaming video online, according to Web metrics firm ComScore Networks. Over the last three months ending in June, the average consumer watched 73 minutes of online video a month.

In addition to a sizable audience, there’s the not-so-insignificant fact that publishers and advertisers are getting more comfortable with video ad formats on the Web. AOL’s advertising model incorporates streaming advertising within the content, banners and sponsorships.

As the Newspaper Association of America’s Online Publishing Updated noted yesterday, there’s also movement from hardware manufacturers who see the opportunity to meet emerging needs for time-shifted, on-demand programming. Sony Electronics says that its LocationFree service is now capable of receiving content wirelessly from an individual’s TV, DVD player or digital video recorder. It’s competing for attention with Sling Media’s Slingbox, which also delivers content typically viewed at home to subscribers, no matter where they are.

All of the above are more signs that the digital future will be a multi-faceted thing.

This week, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released its latest study on teen online behavior. The study reported on teens as content-creators and consumers, and if you had any doubt that the media landscaping is changing, this study will help to put those doubts to rest.

The study found that 57 percent of teens online -- or about half of all teenagers aged 12 to 17 -- have created content for the Web. That's approximately 12 million young people. The type of content they have created ranges from blogs to personal Web pages to sharing original works of art online.

So what does that mean for those of us in traditional media? Contrary to what some believe, the issue is not simply about how many blogs you are or are not creating (and just because you post to a blogging platform does not mean you have a blog!).

So what is the issue? The issue is that the media world has gotten substantially larger. No longer is a local newspaper, television or radio station competing against another for viewers' and readers' attention. In today's media world, traditional media compete against their very own users: readers and viewers have become media outlets in their own right.

Young people online are not content to simply search one "definitive" source of news and information. They search multiple sources, and, as importantly, they want to be involved in the process. If teens continue with the same habits as they become adults, it does not bode well for traditional media outlets that fail to engage their audiences in the newsgathering and reporting process. Hence, the much-talked-about citizen or community journalist.

Traditional media must decide: Do they try to compete against these new media sources, or do they somehow try to incorporate them into the existing media world? To this Chaser it is not clear what direction traditional media will pursue, or, more importantly, which one will be successful.

• "Our users don't bother with our customer service pages, so why bother updating them?" Help pages that don't help are a waste of disk space. Ditto for customer interaction pages, such as subscription sign-ups or product orders, when they are also full of distracting banner and tower ads. The point of customer service pages is service, not sales. Maybe it's time to eschew ads on those pages for the same reason car dealers keep their sales people out of the service waiting room.
• "No one can find this-or-that feature on our site, though it is linked from the home page." Sure it is, along with 200-300 of its closest friends. Chances are, many of those links have been designed into graphic tiles or other attention-getting devices -- but probably designed independently of each other. The net effect resembles Times Square, Tokyo's electronics row or any minor-league outfield wall. Message soup.
• The ad intrusion arms race. Web consumers became blind to old, small banners and tiles in recent years, much the way TiVo users zap through TV commercials. The industry's response? Larger-format ads and more intrusive time-based formats, such as interstitial ads. Users' response? They're quickly becoming blind to the larger formats, while permission-based programs such as e-mail marketing continue to thrive.

The point to remember is that the way we present information to consumers affects their use of it and decisions about it. So if the only way we media types make management decisions is to study user behavior in the environments we create, we fall into loops of logic that are tough to escape. 

For Chasers, that's the same as chasing your tail.

Here is today's understatement: Dealing with the future is complicated. So, dealing with today's stuff should be easy, right? As every Chaser knows, making changes around what we do today can greatly improve our chances of success in the future. Change the present and realize the future.

On that note, we shift to a report from an investment company, Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc. The folks at Chaser HQ sometimes receive copies of the reports written by Paul Ginocchio, an analyst who specializes in the media industry. We like Paul's view on the media world, especially the newspaper business. He is generally positive, but also very realistic, about the changes needed for the future.

The report, written by one of Ginocchio's associates, David Clark, struck us as very "future-focused."  Clark wrote about what newspaper companies need to do to secure their future when it comes to advertising -- especially retail advertising. Here are Clark's seven themes, picked up at a recent industry conference:

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Understanding media consumption Mark your calendars for "Blogs, Podcasts, TiVo and Wikis: The New Habits of News Consumers." This conference will bring together journalists, researchers and media watchers, who will explore how consumers use media in their daily lives. March 12-15, 2006. Limited seating. More info click here.

Theme One: ZIP code zoning, or die

Newspapers must quickly improve their zoning capability, as targeting is now the single most important marketing factor for retailers.

Theme Two: Creativity creates opportunity

Newspapers need to think outside the box to provide retailers with differentiated marketing opportunities. New sections and Post-It notes are not enough.

Theme Three: Stabilize circulation in key geographies

Retailers have penetration targets by ZIP Code, so circulation in key ZIPs is more important to them than overall circulation.

Theme Four: Prove your value

The newspaper industry needs to quickly develop ROI metrics to justify rising ad rates in the face of a declining audience.

Theme Five: Know the client

Newspapers do a poor job of understanding the retailers' strategy and needs. Retailers want newspapers to see clients as partners, pass along market intelligence, and stop pushing unwanted products.

Theme Six: Less separation of church and state

Retailers want newspaper ad sales departments to push the editorial side to be more flexible and allow more creative advertising. (We think movement on this front is unlikely.)

[Chaser note:  We agree, although we are seeing some signs of a willingness to try different shapes and positions.]

Theme Seven: Standardize rate cards

It is difficult for retailers to do national/regional ad buys because every newspaper has a different rate card structure, so industry standardization was urged.

It's a good list. In fact, you could probably use those same themes for other aspects of the industry, including the newsroom. OK, not the rate card thing. But being creative, listening to customers/readers and thinking about local needs are important themes, regardless of department.

Clark's contention is "that many of the newspapers' retail [advertising] woes are driven by cultural inertia rather than inexorable structural changes." In other words, change is hard and there isn't a push to do things differently.

One other perspective on the topic is in a report commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America and written by this Chaser and consulting associates. The gist of the report, "Leveraging Your Web Site for Ad Sales," discusses the missed opportunities for newspapers to use their Web sites to help advertisers place print ads. 

Some highlights:

• Fifty-five percent of the sites reviewed have an area for marketing the print edition. That still leaves lots of sites without any marketing information for potential advertisers.
• Sixty percent provide visitors with advertising rates and information about deadlines, terms and ad sizes.
• Less than 10 percent provide a self-service area for advertisers. The report defines self-service as the ability to schedule and upload an advertisement.

The opportunties are there, making the change is hard. Throwing off "cultural inertia" is essential for any future thinker.

We were struck, during our usual Sunday morning stupor, by The New York Times Magazine article by Clive Thompson that explores how workers deal with interruptions. Titled "Meet the Life Hackers," Thompson introduced readers to researcher Gloria Mack. As you read the following, put yourself into Chaser mindset: If this is happening while we work, what happens when we try to consume news and information? Okay, here are the nut graphs:

When [University of California professor Gloria] Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark's study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the high-tech workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all claimed that they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But they grudgingly admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see; if a cell phone call breaks through while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.

In a presentation this Chaser uses to promote the value of e-learning at Poynter's NewsU site, there's a moment where the narrator says, "Life is interruptions." The challenge, for media companies, is to get the attention of consumers.

Down at the bottom of the Times story is one of those important ideas:

Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the technology that can hold the world at bay.

So, what will media companies do to help the consumer in the Age of Overload?

Footnotes:

The Times article mentioned personal-productivity guru David Allen. Poynter's Chip Scanlan is a disciple of Allen's, and has written about the topic. Here's the link for an article called "Writer Hacks." 

Want some other solutions for all of these life distractions? Here's some info from the Times piece:

"In fairness, I think we bring some of this on ourselves," says Merlin Mann, the founder of the popular life-hacking site 43folders.com. "We'd rather die than be bored for a few minutes, so we just surround ourselves with distractions. We've got 20,000 digital photos instead of 10 we treasure. We have more TV Tivo'd than we'll ever see." In the last year, Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging "buddy list" so only close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him only once an hour. ("Unless you're working in a Korean missile silo, you don't need to check e-mail every two minutes," he argues.)

Mann's most famous hack emerged when he decided to ditch his Palm Pilot and embrace a much simpler organizing style. He bought a deck of 3-by-5-inch index cards, clipped them together with a binder clip and dubbed it "The Hipster PDA" -- an ultra-low-fi organizer, running on the oldest memory technology around: paper.

Back to paper? That's cool!

First, Google announced that it was launching a search engine focused on indexing blogs. And today, Yahoo! announced it would begin including blogs in its news search engine's results, right next to traditional media stories.

As Forbes.com reported, approximately 750,000 blogs will be indexed for inclusion in the updated news search tool, which is in beta testing.

Some 750,000 blogs and other user-generated content will soon show up on Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) News search pages, presented right alongside news from mainstream media. But is Yahoo! taking another big step in the blurring of lines between professional media and grassroots journalism?

The company is testing a new search tool that includes results from thousands of mainstream media outlets, and a separate results column for blogs, its new My Web social search and pictures posted to the company's Flickr photo service.

The article goes on to note that Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo! News, is clearly aware of the dangers of marring the lines between traditional and so-called citizen journalism:

In a prepared statement, Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo! News, says the company wants to fuse professional journalism with so-called citizen journalism to provide a fuller spectrum of content to its members. Still, Yahoo! is clearly sensitive to the dangers of blurring the lines between professional and amateur journalism.

Yet, just before that, Joff Redfern, a director at Yahoo! Search noted: 

"Traditional media don't have the time or resources to cover all stories," says Joff Redfern, a director in Yahoo! Search. "We want to offer an alternative perspective on news outside of what the mainstream media has to offer."

Is Yahoo! making a bigger play here than just blogs? Is Yahoo!, which relies on partnerships to produce much of its news site, making a play to bypass media companies for hyperlocal and niche content, which is the focus on many blog sites? A search on the term "Chicago" yielded four displayed blog results and more than 3,000 additional blog results.

As always, The Chaser will follow events and report back, but it is clear the Blogosphere just became a little bit more mainstream (which is something that might make bloggers out there go nuts).

• Soft launches generally rely on existing customers to find the new product or service through passing references in existing products or services. That tendency leaves almost no opportunity for acquiring new customers.
• Soft launches assume incorrectly that people are actively watching and waiting for new products and services from you. If you're Google, yes, they are -- so everything can be a "beta" and a crowd will form around it. The news biz? We hate to break it to you, but prospective customers aren't exactly camped out to get tickets to our laboratories.
• Worst, soft launches indicate a lack of confidence in our ability to scope, develop and manage new products and services. That's a shame. There are enough Chasers in this business to go around, to have great ideas and to build on them. If mainstream media don't show enough confidence in the ideas they grow from the inside, the brightest minds on the inside will soon be on the outside.

1. Cultivate at least some lightweight processes for taking great ideas and turning them into finished products and services. That doesn't mean you have to build a huge team of technologists and creatives; in fact, you can do very well by staying deliberately smaller than the competition. It just means that you should have a plan, a way, a culture for building new stuff.
2. Learn the customer (as opposed to the time-worn, overconfident "know the customer"). Research money spent on consumer audience segmentation, for example, probably serves media better than money spent on technology sciences.
3. Remember that media businesses are more services than products. We talk a lot about "product development" (including in this post) when what we're providing are services to consumers and advertisers. It's a different mindset. Introductions of new services must, for one, be perceived as distinctly more human, more personal than selling some new widget.
4. Plan for success. That means bake marketing and promotion money into the product or service development budget. And it means, given the fact that we're talking about services rather than products, planning for an uptick in requests for customer support, even if we perceive our new idea to be perfectly executed.

This is the "all video, all the time" edition of The Chaser.

First, we came across stories about how U.S. television viewing has reached a record household average of eight hours and 11 minutes per day. Wow. That means the tube is on for more than one-third of the day. Nielsen Media Research, which conducted the study, also concluded that, on an individual basis, TV-watching time is four hours and 32 minutes, slightly higher than the four hours recorded in the Ball State Univesity media usage study we reported on last week. 

Here's the lede from Reuters:

LOS ANGELES -- U.S. TV viewership climbed again last season to a record household average of eight hours, 11 minutes a day, Nielsen Media Research reported on Thursday, challenging perceptions that Americans are watching less than they once did.

 

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The all-time high viewing level posted for the 2004-05 television season, which ended earlier this month, was up nearly 3 percent from the previous year and 12.5 percent from a decade ago, the TV ratings service said.

Moreover, Nielsen said the average individual watched four hours and 32 minutes of TV last season, the highest level in 15 years. The figures include in-home viewing levels for broadcast, cable and satellite TV during all parts of the day.

However, what put this item on the Chaser radar was Nielsen's reporting on the "explosion in the number of available channels." The Reuters story continues:

According to Nielsen, the average U.S. home now receives more than 100 channels of programming. 

The second video item is an interesting piece from The New York Times about the emerging video search engine companies, including Blinkx, an online search company based in San Francisco. Blinkx does pretty much what standard search engines do -- plows through tons of data and returns the most relevant information to the user. However, instead of text, Blinkx searches video clips. 

Here are some of the important elements from Bob Tedeschi's New York Times column on the subject:

A handful of new Internet companies have recently introduced Web sites that aim to sift through millions of online video clips and instantly splice them together according to the viewer's stated or implied tastes. Right now, that includes a fairly meager selection of mainstream media selections -- and, yes, you sometimes have to watch it through a subpar Internet connection. But more network-quality shows are coming online, and Webcasting technology is fast improving to the point where you can now catch glimpses of what TV could look like in the not-too-distant future.

"You can debate what you should call it, but in the coming world, it's going to be a user-controlled environment," said Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner, a technology consulting firm. "I watch what I want, when I want."

Finally, also from the Times, is a story about Jeremy Allaire, the software wizard who helped with the evolution of Macromedia's Flash system into a video format. Here's what he has planned:

As with his earlier ventures, Mr. Allaire intends to shake up an industry -- this time, the world of television -- by allowing all types of video producers, from media giants to anyone who has a camcorder, put their work on the Internet and make money if anyone watches it.

Set in an office building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brightcove, [Allaire's new service], will offer three interrelated online services. It has tools that let television producers load their video onto its servers, arrange them into programs and display them to Internet users. It will help producers charge fees for their video, if they choose, or sell advertising on their behalf to insert into the programs. And it will broker deals between video creators and Web sites that want to display the video, arranging for the profits from such arrangements to be split any number of ways. [...]

"We are trying to create a new kind of online media distribution business that has the scale of Google, an Amazon or an eBay," Mr. Allaire, 34, said. Some big companies, including Viacom and A&E Networks, are already experimenting with Brightcove's service.

Lots of video stuff going on, so let's recap:  First, more channels than ever. Second, new ways of searching those extra channels -- first on the Web, but perhaps later on the next generation of television sets. Third, new ways of creating and distributing video. 

Whew. Lots of video dots to connect as we look to the future.

Oh, one more thing:  Reuters is reporting that Apple will annouce a video iPod next week. Link thanks to eWeek.

Now, here's a blogger's dilemma:  Can a Chaser blog himself?  As wiser heads figure out a solution, we thought we would call your attention to our Poynter Online centerpiece about media consumption. Here's the lede:

Americans are hungry media consumers, spending almost two-thirds of our busy days interacting with one medium or another. We spend more time with media than eating, sleeping or any other activity.

We are also media multi-taskers, spending one-third of that time with multiple media, such as using the Web and watching television at the same time, or using an iPod and reading e-mail.

Those are two of the major conclusions of the latest report from Ball State University's Middletown Media Studies project, which tracked the media usage habits of more than 350 people.

And here's some statistics that matter:

Here are the overall amounts of media minutes spent per user per day according to the 5,000 hours of observations recorded by the project researchers:

• Television:  240.9 minutes
• Any computer use: 135.8 minutes
• All Internet: 93.4 minutes
• Radio: 80.0 minutes
• Music [includes MP3 players]: 65.1 minutes
• Phone, includes cell: 42.2 minutes
• All print media: 32.8 minutes
• All video [VCR and DVD]: 32.6 minutes
• Newspapers: 12.2 minutes
• Game console: 11.6 minutes

You can read the full article here.  The complete reports from Ball State University will be available here. You can read the news release here.

Understanding how consumers use media is vital, regardless of the medium involved.  So important that Poynter will be hosting a conference on the subject next March.  You can check that out a link to the seminar page with a click here.

This is getting scary. Is there anything that Google won't do? 

According to Reuters, Google is planning to get into the WiFi [wireless access] business. Soon we'll need to find another way of describing the company. Perhaps we could call them "The Company Formerly Known As a Search Engine." Here are the key bits Reuters dug up from the Google Web site:

The Google Web site has several references to Google WiFi but provides few details. One page, http://wifi.google.com/faq.html, refers to a product called "Google Secure Access", which is designed to "establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi."

A separate page, http://wifi.google.com/download.html, offers a free download of Google Secure Access, carrying the headline: "Your wireless connection is almost ready to use."

Google declined to comment further.

Speculation about a forthcoming Google WiFi service has been rife since August following an article in Business 2.0 magazine, but the company has refused to discussed its plans.

Chasers, we aren't sure how this all fits into our future, but we know that it is very interesting.  Stay tuned.

Chaser HQ has written about the explosions of blogs in the past. From Wonkette.com to the dog blog, more and more people are blogging. As the latest stats from ClickZ indicate, the blogsphere is growing:

According to David Sifry, Technorati's chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Meanwhile, Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.

However, one of the problems with blogs has been the ability for people to discover the contents of individual blogs. Most people use search engines to navigate the billions of pages on the Web. However, blogs pose a problem for most search engines.

Traditionally, search engines crawl Web sites, cataloging the content of the site. They visit the site, and then they move on. The problem is that blogs are designed to be updated frequently, in many cases throughout the day. As a result, a search engine which is not crawling the blog frequently miss much of what these journals have to offer, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, results have been mediocre:

The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.

Specialized search engines, such as Technorati, Bloglines, Feedster and DayPop, have attempted to capture blog content, but most of them have failed to gain a substantial following, outside of blogophiles and geeks.

That was then. And now there is Google, the 180 pound guerrilla [pun intended] in the search engine wars.  Google has a blog searching tool (blogsearch.google.com), and the initial reaction from the blogosphere is positive. The folks at Six Apart, makers of the blog software Movable Type and the blog site TypePad, have already weighed in

First, the new Blog Search works. All the basic functions you'd expect from Google search results are present, including ranking results by date or by relevance. (Interestingly, the default is by relevance, like other Google searches, instead of by date, which is the default for most blog displays.) But more importantly, the advanced search offers powerful functionality such as searching by date ranges and limiting to individual blog authors, in addition to features like searching for words in a blog post title or by language, which have been deployed in the past on other services.

There are problems with Google’s approach, but now that Google is in the race, expect the other big players to soon follow.

For traditional media companies, Google’s entry into the market means one thing: lookout. Few people expected Google to become a major player in online news, but today it has six million users a month to its Google News site. Could Google do the same for blogs -- open them up to a whole new group of people?

For many on the Web, the content of blogs was inaccessible. Google’s entry into the blog world may very well changes all of that. Millions of blog pages just became that much more accessible to the larger Web audience. Chaser HQ will continue follow developments, but if you want to get into the game, don’t wait.

We love market research. There, we've said it. Chasers are fascinated by forecasts and enthralled by estimates. We're always skeptical about the predictions, but enjoy ‘em nevertheless.

We are especially taken by this hearty piece from The Hollywood Reporter. Don’t mind the misleading title, “Convergence Fulfilled,” because no media company we can think of is satisfied with its cross-platform initiatives. The piece is valuable to Chasers because of its thorough review of consumer spending habits and predictions of changing consumption patterns for news and other content.

Annual consumer spending on all forms of U.S. media and entertainment — from television, home video, print and boxoffice movies to music and the Internet — will approach $253 billion by 2009. By that time, consumers, advertisers, service providers and institutional end-users will spend more than $1.1 trillion on all U.S. communications, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson's recently released five-year industry forecast. Consumers will media-multitask an average of 11 hours daily and 78 hours weekly by then, the New York-based media-merchant bank adds.

Globally, PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts that consumer and end-user spending on all media and entertainment will grow 7.8% annually to more than $1.3 trillion in 2009. PWC predicts that U.S. consumer spending on media and entertainment will grow at an average annual rate of 5.8% to $475 billion in 2009, with domestic advertiser spending projected to grow 5.3% annually to $216 billion during that span….

The big unknown, though, is how quickly out-of-home use of portable interactive devices will overshadow long-dominant in-home use.

You’ll all agree with the article’s main point: Media companies need leaders with vision and the conviction to make wrenching choices during a period of extreme turbulence:

The lines separating content forms, distribution platforms, producers, consumers, companies and nations also will be blurred and even shattered, and the fortunes and existences of traditional and new-media companies will become intertwined as their content, marketing and technology savvy are fused to define an interactive media era under the leadership of entrepreneurial executives.

That “intertwining” relationship is possible only if traditional-media companies take risks, make smart acquisitions and invest in the technology and people who can elevate their online game. For media companies, this means don’t get stuck playing the “how big can we crank this profit margin” game just like in print. There’s a role for number crunchers, but the dreamers need a space in the sandbox, too.

Chaser HQ is a multi-purpose building.  It hosts lots of different folks during the course of a year.  Recently, a number of newsroom trainers held their annual gathering at HQ. Their conversations spark this thought:  Who and how will we train journalists to carry out the future?

Leaving aside any definitions about what kind of future journalism has -- and let's NOT talk about who is a journalist -- it seems like news organizations have a two-front effort:

1. Develop the new business models to support the journalism so essential to democracy
2. Develop the staff -- young and old -- to be more flexible and adaptable to a changing media landscape

We've written about the work Merrill Brown, the founding editor in chief of MSNBC.com, did on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation on the future course of news and information.  Merrill has adapted his Carnegie Reporter for the The Seattle Times.  As you read some of these thoughts, ponder the question of training. 

Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, people are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business; meanwhile, new forms of newsgathering and distribution, grass-roots or citizen journalism and blogging sites are changing the very nature of who produces news.

Data from the Carnegie project indicate that today's young adults intend to continue to increase their use of the Internet as a primary news source, while newspapers and national television-broadcast news fare poorly in the research.

Internet portals emerge in the survey as the most frequently cited daily news source — with 44 percent of the study group using portals such as Yahoo at least once a day for news. By this same measurement, local TV comes in second at 37 percent, followed by network or cable TV Web sites, and newspapers, at 19 percent each.

And by other measures, the Internet is already clearly ahead of other media among the young. According to the survey, prepared for this project by Frank N. Magid Associates, 41 percent of young news consumers say that the Internet is "the most useful way to learn," compared with 15 percent for second-ranked local TV. And 49 percent say the Internet provides news "only when I want it" — a critical factor for this group — versus 15 percent for second-ranked local TV.

As a result of all these changing habits, American news organizations and many around the world are going through significant upheaval. Clearly, young people don't want to rely on the morning paper on their doorstep or the dinnertime newscast for up-to-date information; in fact, they — as well as others — want their news on demand, when it works for them.

And, say many experts, in this new world of journalism, young people want a personal level of engagement and want those presenting the news to them to be transparent in their assumptions, biases and history.

The next generation of journalists are about to not only join the profession but take up new leadership roles.  Are we ready to help them?

Sometimes we know things are important but we don't always know why.  That was the feeling -- call it a "blink" moment -- we had at Chaser HQ when we saw the Wall Street Journal  news alert about the possible eBay purchase of Skype, the Internet phone company.  Here are the juicy bits:

eBay Inc. is in talks to acquire Internet-telephony company Skype Technologies SA for $2 billion to $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would represent a dramatic shift in strategy for the world's largest online auction site.

The talks are in a sensitive stage and could fall apart, according to one person briefed on the matter. Luxembourg-based Skype, whose software allows consumers to make free telephone calls around the world using Internet technology, has been in active discussions with other technology companies, and none has led to a deal.

But the emergence of eBay as a suitor reveals a lot about the auction leader's growth prospects and strategy. While still dominating its field, eBay's core business is maturing, and the company is searching for new product categories and international markets. The company has made a steady string of acquisitions and investments over the last year and a half to enter markets such as rental-property listings, online classified-ad listings and comparison shopping.

The competition for consumers' time and attention is tough and the lineup of players seems to be something like this:

• Google with search, cool tools and now voiceover IP talk, versus
• Yahoo with search, cool tools, sense of community, chat, versus
• Microsoft with lots of software users, desktop stuff, versus
• eBay with commerce/auctions, sense of community, versus
• Some new player to emerge, versus...

It's a wild and wacky world so you have to keep paying attention.

Only the geekiest early adaptors would get all worked up about the phrase “Internet protocol television delivery.” Of course, that means its perfect for The Chaser.

The translation into plain speak is a lot more tantalizing, at least as Microsoft has been explaining it for the past couple of years, admittedly with plenty of hyperbole. TV watching is better, better, BETTER! Content selection expands and navigation features get a boost. Multiple programs can be recorded simultaneously with a DVR (nice!) and, per Bill Gates’ oft-repeated objectives, the TV media experience now taps into video, music and photos found within a user’s home network.

The most recent IPTV development happened on Monday, when content distribution specialist [hardware maker] Scientific-Atlanta Inc. and Microsoft publicly announced a partnership to develop set-top boxes for what it deems “the growing worldwide demand for IPTV technology.” The team-up also gives support to Scientific-Atlanta’s advanced network known as “Project Lightspeed.”

Here’s how the company’s describe the benefits to media users and operators:

The new line of Scientific-Atlanta IP set-tops, which will be integrated with the Microsoft® TV IPTV Edition software platform, will support advanced codecs such as MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264 and VC-1 and will include standard-definition (SD), high-definition (HD), and whole home SD/HD digital video recorder (DVR) devices, as well as innovative gateway products that can serve an entire home with a single device. Additionally, these new set-tops will support a “no new wires” strategy for operators, which will enable IP video to be delivered over existing coax cable already installed in millions of homes. To help expedite the global implementation of IPTV services, country- or region-specific versions of the new Scientific-Atlanta set-tops will support U.S. or international standards.

The Chaser doesn’t profess to know the ins and outs of IPTV, but the release caught our attention because of the high-profile partners and the key phrases “high definition… whole home SD/HD digital video recorder (DVR) devices” and “no new wires.” For media users, high-def DVRs are becoming tech must-haves, and for operators, the ability to distribute IP video over pre-existing cable should mean a faster rollout.

No matter what language you speak, IPTV’s opportunities merit a place in discussions of future media consumption patterns and emerging technologies. 

The Chaser has seen the future, and it is . . . text? Chasers are always looking for the new, the next big thing, but it turns out the next big thing has been around for thousands of years.

Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life project released a new study on how teens use the Internet. It has taken us a little time to dig into the report and to get a glimpse into a group who has grown up with the Internet as a fact of life.  According to the survey,

The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. Compared to four years ago, teens’ use of the internet has intensified and broadened as they log on more often and do more things when they are online.

For this group, the Internet is much larger than just the Web: email, gaming, the Web and text messaging are part of Internet generation's life. No surprise there.  However, there is one other thing they do online: read the news.

76% get news online. That represents about 16 million people and signifies growth of 38% in the number of teens getting news online since 2000.

As traditional media (newspapers and televisions) engage in a never ending parade of focus groups, surveys and studies to try and figure out what will get teens to read the newspaper or watch the nightly newscast, perhaps the answer is to realize this group lives online and focus its efforts there.

However, like many things, those in traditional American media may already be behind the curve.

One thing that got Chaser HQ's attention is the number of teens who use text and instant messaging.  According to the study,

• 75% of online teens — or about two-thirds of all teenagers — use instant messaging, compared to 42% of online adults.
• 48% of teens who use instant messaging say they exchange IMs at least once every day.

And to prove how much teens rely on instant messaging, the survey found that almost one-fifth of online teens use IM as their main way to deal with friends: 19% of online teens said they use IM most often to connect with friends, compared to 8%  for email and 71% for the telephone.

And teens messaging is not tied to the desktop:

Close to half of teens (45%) own a cell phone, and 33% have used a cell phone to send a text message. Texting on cell phones is particularly common among those who already go online frequently and use other internet tools often. Teens who have cell phones are heavy users of online communication tools. One in four cell phone-owning teens have used their phone to connect to the internet.

Already in 2003 movie companies were trying to blame text messaging for a drop in movie attendance, arguing "instant reviews" during and immediately after a film caused teens' friends to stay away. While evidence for this argument is scarce, the impact of text messaging for what journalists do is substantial.

While movie companies may have been too quick to blame text messaging, many have been too slow to respond to it. And while text messaging via SMS and instant messaging are different technologies, they point to a problem the Chaser has been prophesying about since its inception: convergance is more than just pushing stories to Web pages.

The Pew study reveals that as teenagers mature, their expectations about accessing information will be very different from the vision many media companies have set-out. They will expect to be able to access information and news where ever and whenever they want.

Instant messaging is only the beginning. Just imagine getting headlines via a video game.

"The report studied how companies earn the loyalty of their enterprise customers in five industry sectors: wireless service, wireless handsets, Internet service providers, local voice and long-distance voice. ... The study found that not one of the industry sectors could claim that even half of its enterprise customers are loyal, yet all the sectors registered customer satisfaction scores of at least 75 percent."

The folks at Chaser HQ have personal interest in Current TV, the cable channel launched earlier this month with much fanfare. Hey, Current's got Al Gore involved, so the launch was bound to get lots of media attention. 

The connection between the Chaser and Current is simple: The co-founder of this blog, Robin Sloan, left the confines of Chaser HQ for the startup fun at Current. So, we admit we wanted to avoid being perceived as cheerleaders for Robin's efforts.

If it stunk, we would say so. But it doesn't. However, don't take our word for it. 

The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley uses her TV Watch column space to write a favorable review about the cable network. Here's how she describes Current's efforts:

But after only three weeks, Current is not a joke. It actually lives up to its billing as a slick, commercial cable network that gives its audience a voice in the programming. ...

Outsiders' films are labeled VC2 (as in viewer contributed content squared) and are selected by viewers who looked at them on Current's Web site (www.current.tv) and voted online for their favorites. Only a few of these so-called podcasts are truly distinguished, but they all have one thing going for them: they look nothing like the glossy, overpackaged and bottom-feeding fare found on MTV or VH1, which are both owned by Viacom.

Current's topics range from the depopulation of the small Wyoming town of Chugwater to a mock political ad to a pyrotechnician (a commercial fireworks display maker) in Marietta, Ga. Aspiring contributors take video cameras as far afield as the West Bank, the slums of Nairobi, hip-hop circles in Sierra Leone, and even to Iraq, where surgery on the leg of a marine wounded by shrapnel is shown in graphic close-up. (At the bottom of the screen, a progress bar informs antsy viewers how much time is left before the end.)

For Chasers, Current demands watching. Not just for the content, which give us older folks a better sense of the world coming after us, but for the unique storytelling approaches. 

The Times' Stanley puts it this way:

Reality television has spawned a generation of viewers who feel entitled to be on camera. Current allows people to take editorial control -- something they cannot do with Fox or MTV -- and create their own programs.

For all its rough spots and blog pretensions, Current is for-profit public-access television, an attempt to add grass-roots diversity to a television universe that is ever more controlled by a few media conglomerates. Current is easily mocked, but it is at least one youth-oriented cable network that does not dance to the tune of the 82-year-old Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom.

Finally, Chasers should look at the Current Web site and how they have built a community.

More community

Speaking of community, a recent item in The Wall Street Journal [for registered users], is about another cable television startup: a network about rural America called RFD-TV. The article has an important point about connecting to readers/viewers/users:

"I think they've tapped into something," says Shane Moreland, news director at the NBC affiliate in Roanoke, Va., and an RFD-TV viewer. "It's really all about the content. If it's something no one else is offering and there's a hunger for it, it should survive."

Yea, its all about the content.  And making a connection with the community.

Even more community

Finally, in the "too-short-to-be-worth-a-separate-item" department:

We urge Chasers to pay attention to Philadelphia's efforts to connect the entire city with a high speed wireless network. They are down to finalists for the contract to create the City of Brotherly WiFi.  This Yahoo News search will give you lots of stories to read.

At Chaser HQ, we're always looking for the "next great thing." OK, maybe we're looking for the next important thing, too.

An article on AdAge.com caught our eye. Here's the lede:

Nielsen Media Research has signed a deal for a new technology that will allow its portable people meters to track video-on-demand programming, according to the company.

Sounds interesting and important to those who crunch numbers. What really got our minds spinning was being reminded how these new Nielsen people meters work. Here's how the story describes the devices:

Nielsen's controversial computerized audience-measuring devices are used to replace the paper diaries that the company's media-sampling agents use to record what media they are being exposed to each day. The meters are beeper-size devices worn on the belt that pick up special audio signals embedded in the TV programming. Inaudible to the human ear, these signals are "heard" by the meter, which documents exactly how long a person views specific programs. The system requires that content producers and TV companies embed the special audio signals in their programming.

Little beepers on the belt capturing audio signals. Hmm, what happens if video on the PC takes off [and we expect it will]? Will there be hidden audio signals embedded into Web pages? Will computer users wear the people meter devices while they surf? And once radio goes digital, could the signal be put into those broadcasts as well?

Tracking what people do with their media choices is both exciting and scary. Lots of privacy issues.  Lots to think about for the future.

Sidenote:  The Poynter Institute will be hosting a conference on the new media habits of news consumers. Stay tuned for details.

This isn't news, but in case you missed the memo, Bill Keller and Martin Nisenholtz announced to their respective New York Times and Digital staffs that the news operations would be integrated.

What's more interesting at Chaser HQ has been the buzz about the merger. So, in Chaser style, we thought we would put some of it into perspective.

Mark Glaser at Online Journalism Review published an illuminating interview with Keller and Nisenholtz, including this quote from Nisenholtz: 

"One of the breakthroughs here is that we're not just putting word people into the newsroom. We're putting people in all of these functions into the newsroom who will exercise a very different kind of report for the Web than what would be characterized as a repurposed newspaper. That's huge. To me, that's a big signal event for the New York Times and for any newsroom. It's a matter of growing new muscles in new areas that are Web-oriented and have little or no application in the print world."

Newspaper consultant Tim Porter writes in his industry blog "FirstDraft" that "the Times is an iconic symbol of American print journalism and when it says the walls are coming down, then institutional evolution is clearly afoot."

And media maven Jeff Jarvis writes in his "BuzzMachine" blog:

"The essential truth of all this is that a fundamental change in media is driving fundamental change in the market, which should be driving fundamental change in news products, which must cause fundamental change in newsrooms. That is what we are witnessing now. I often hear people say that big-media executives don’t get it, that they don’t get the imperative for change. Well, they’re getting it. They have no choice."

Is the Times move truly a fundamental change? (It's worth noting that Porter writes about "evolution," not "revolution.") Will the vastly larger and more influential print newsroom become a platform-agnostic news provider any time soon? How long will the folks dedicated to producing the online report still be charged with repurposing a newspaper? 

At the Times, Rich Meislin, "the obvious choice to help lead us into the future" has been named associate managing editor for Internet publishing. How much power will he wield in the newsroom?

What might be considered truly revolutionary? How about putting the online editor in charge of the entire newsroom? That's essentially what they did in Lawrence, Kan., promoting Rob Curley to the title of director of new media. (Curley later moved to the Naples Daily News in Florida.)

Shaking up a small daily in Kansas might not seem as risky as shaking up the the 1,200-member New York Times newsroom. In fact, Keller seems to be taking a careful approach in his OJR interview:

"There's going to be some portion of people who are essentially non-adapters but are so valuable for the paper for what they do, and we'll live with that. We have a lot of people here, and not everybody will have to be thrown into the Web. There will be slow adapters, and we will certainly try to proselytize for this and explain that this is an exciting thing to do."

Every newspaper in America is struggling with these issues. And as long as the printed newspaper brings in the lion's share of the revenue for a news enterprise, the power and authority would seem to rest with the traditional print editors. The pace of change, then, most likely will be determined by the Bill Kellers of the world. It will be interesting to see, over time, whether a slow evolution is less risky than a revolution.

Online commerce sales jumped nicely -- 25 percent year-over-year -- in the second quarter of 2005, says the E-Commerce Times in a summary of a report from Forrester Research.

No great surprise there, but the drivers behind the trend might make Chasers pause:

"After a somewhat slow start to the year, in which seasonality tempered online sales, the rising tide of offline sales lifted online boats this quarter to exceed expectations," [Forrester analyst Carrie A.] Johnson said in a copy of the report obtained by the E-Commerce Times. "Q1 represented the first real quarter in which online retail felt the impact of the same seasonality trends as its more mature offline counterparts. ... This trend continued in Q2, when strong offline consumer spending -- despite rising gas prices and interest rates -- had a ripple effect on online sales."

To put it another way, consumers generally ignored high-and-rising costs to run their cars, and shopped where they wished to shop. So offline sales spurred online sales, without any change in consumer behavior tied to those rising costs.

Then again, it isn't as though pure online retailers, offline/online enterprises or shopping aggregators of any size encourage consumers to use e-commerce instead of driving the family Buick to the strip mall.

Amazon.com pages focus almost purely on products for sale and their prices. There's no mention of the potential to save money by clicking instead of driving. Ditto for Target.com, Overstock.com and local-media-based shopping portals from ajc.com and nwsource.com.

It's hard to understand why the e-commerce pure-plays, such as Amazon and Overstock, would not use the scary cost of gas as a marketing tactic. ("Don't drive, just click!") It's easier to understand why sites that promote both offline and online shopping -- especially local media shopping portals -- would play it down. The big money in those environments comes from the offline interests.

Even where the marketing strategy is blended, however, shopping portals typically offer e-commerce gateways for one or more retailers. Once consumers drill down into e-commerce screens, maybe it's time to offer them tools to compare the real costs of buying products online ...

• Product
• Shipping cost (delivery fee plus time lost)
• Sales tax (sometimes)
  
  ... vs. offline ...
  
• Product
• Round-trip cost (fuel plus vehicle wear plus time lost)
• Sales tax

Wouldn't that be useful?

Bottom line for this bottom line business is this: Paying attention to the behavior of your users is hard work.  And the answers aren't always obvious.

Because we are always on the lookout for interesting headlines that might lead to interesting stories, we naturally stopped at this gem in The New York Times Magazine:

Post-Popism
Welcome to the a world where ads are everything and a cell phone ring tone tops the charts

And we weren't disappointed.  A.O. Scott's relatively short essay in "The Way We Live Now" section looked at the role of advertising in our culture and how marketing products has expanded. Here's a tasty bit:

...Commercial advertising has often distracted us from the pure pleasures of popular culture -- on the radio, on television and in the pages of magazines -- even as it underwrites our ability to enjoy them. It has been, historically, what makes mass culture available to the masses. At the end of the 19th century, magazines, which had been expensive, limited-circulation (and ad-free) accessories for the elite, discovered the formula that still governs most of the industry. Retail advertising simultaneously allowed them to drop their prices and expand their circulation, in effect by treating consumers as a product to be sold to salesmen. The same logic came to govern radio and television, which delivered songs and stories free of charge to listeners and viewers in exchange for periodic reminders that their attention had been bought and paid for.

As the media horizon has expanded -- and the opportunities for plugging products have consequently multiplied -- the ability of consumers to filter out advertising has increased. Premium cable services and satellite radio have reverted to the ancient magazine model, relying on relatively pricey subscriptions for their revenues and generally restricting their advertisements to their own products. Digital video recording technology -- TiVo and its ilk -- allows viewers to skip over ads. And while the Internet is full of pop-ups, banners and sponsored pages, online advertising still doesn't support the costs of creating content. If you are reading this article in print, you will have flipped past images of skinny men and women pouting in expensive clothes; these pictures pay for production and printing (and writing) much more efficiently than the mouse-clickable boxes that border and break up the text on your computer screen.

Scott makes some good points in the essay about consumer control and receiving advertising's message. The lesson for this Chaser is simple: The role of advertising in the future is yet to be determined. And, like most things, actual results may vary, depending on the medium.

This Chaser has always cheered publishers’ efforts to distribute their content through emerging platforms. Satellite radio still counts as emerging, even though its subscriber numbers are in the millions. Earlier today, Washington, D.C.-based XM Satellite Radio and New York Times Radio got together for a partnership that will bring reviews and commentaries from Times staffers to XM stations, along with plans for newscasts and classical music specials, according to a story from the Washington Business Journal.

XM is battling rival Sirius Satellite Radio for premium content partners who’ll appeal to its four million subscribers while attracting millions more. The two leading satellite players will approach national entities first, but at some point, they’ll need to build their local news and weather channels. The partnership news reminds me that podcasting is just one way for publishers to deliver engaging, informative and fun audio content. The ambitious site directors out there could introduce their best podcast hosts (staff members and people in the community) to a radio partner and create new shows that give massive promotion to the newspaper’s site and print edition.

Anyone tried something like this already? Please tell me we're not lost in space here!

When you consider publishing icons, you can't leave out TV Guide. Anyone who remembers what television was like when there were only three networks and a couple of independent channels knows the importance TV Guide has had in U.S. homes. That was then. This is now: The age of 500 [well, not quite] channels and lots of other things to do with your television set, such as games and DVDs.

TV Guide is still important watch, however, because of what it will do in its next life. In one of the boldest moves by a publishing company, the magazine will be reinvented in October. Not just a cosmetic fix, but a total makeover.  Extreme-style. Here's The New York Times on the specifics:

In October, the book-sized title will become full-size, and every page will have color. And instead of being 75 percent television listings and 25 percent feature articles, it will be the other way around, said the magazine's parent company, Gemstar-TV Guide International.

At the same time, the magazine expects its circulation to fall by half, to 4.5 million, as it ends the sale of discounted copies, including 3 million discounted copies to hotels. The company, 41 percent owned by News Corporation, has been struggling to attract advertising and paid circulation as television viewers increasingly find show times on the Internet or simply let digital video recorders, like TiVo, automatically record shows.

Media Life magazine put it a little more bluntly:

But the bigger reason for the makeover is that the listing format had outlived its usefulness in an era when TV viewers can find show listings on the internet, in their local papers, and on their TV sets with a push of a remote control button.

"Nobody actually needs a guide anymore," says Samir Husni, a magazine consultant and chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi. "We've come a long way from the days when we had a few [TV] options to having 500 options every night. We're looking for someone to give us more than the yellow pages for TV."

Pew's fascinating report on teens and technology, released July 27 and much publicized since, says teens have begun to express preferences for using instant messaging more often than e-mail.

"Teens ... said that they view email as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups. When it comes to casual written conversation, particularly when talking with friends, online instant messaging is the clearly the mode of choice for today’s online teens."

Good to know. But before you rush to accommodate this preference with new information products, don't miss the point:

Teens accustomed to using online services prefer IM for interpersonal, not institutional, communication.

That makes sense. IM's a fine way to chat with one friend, or even a small circle of friends, without tying up the home phone or burning cell plan minutes. It may even feel more "private" to ever-clandestine teen cliques.

Media folks, unfortunately, have a habit of picking up the top line of a consumer habits study -- especially one like this that suggests a particular tool or technology is hot, and especially with younger consumers -- and trying to port what they already do into that hot environment.

None of these findings, however, suggest a no-brainer, mass-media-style product to reach teens via IM. In fact, teens' motivations for IM run counter to the notion that they would respond well to IM "broadcasts," or large-group communications in an IM window.

And not all teens say they're ready to replace face-to-face or phone talk with IM. In the same study, many respondents still expressed preferences for talking with friends on phones. Chasers know text communications don't always convey the emotional nuances of vocal or facial expressions; apparently, teens know this even better.

So, want to develop online products to address the findings of the Pew study? Don't focus on the tools, whether IM, e-mail or telephony. Focus on the motivator threaded through what teens say about the tools.

Current and former teens alike know it. It's the desire to gain and maintain friendships. The urge to be social. Not much in mainstream news products helps teens with this most basic emotional need. That's too bad.

Media regulars view their role as providers of information and dialogue that help people understand the world around them. So we must be able to offer something -- information, tools, interaction venues or even just empathy -- to help teens succeed with friendships without sounding like a cheerful but clueless aunt.

Ideas? Let's have 'em!

Sometimes, it is just hard to do all the things you want to do. And sometimes you need a kick in the pants from your editor to get going. We got our kick and it must have rattled around our brains enough that we have decided to recommit to our goal of perusing the latest information about the future. In fact, we have decided to refocus Convergence Chaser into The Chaser. Here's our new vision statement:

The Chaser is a guide to industry issues related to media consumption, changing audiences, cross-ownership developments & convergence experiments. We look at the intersection of journalism, media business and information delivery technology.

We haven't abandoned our roots, but we'll be expanding our scope to look at many different issues and technologies that are having an effect on media. Asute Chaser readers might wonder if this is really new. Well, it might not be new, but it is now "official."

As usual, we await your comments and suggestions and, eventually, some volunteers to help us chase down the stuff that you need to know about.

Convergence Chasers are always watching for new mobile devices that keep readers/shoppers connected to online services. The most recent comes from Nokia, which is preparing its handheld Internet tablet for a summer launch.

Some details about the Nokia device, courtesy of a May 25 Associated Press article:

Priced at $350, the Internet Tablet is being positioned as an alternative to buying an extra personal computer or laptop for different rooms, providing a cheaper, quicker and less-cumbersome way to connect to the Web and e-mail at home.

There's no hard drive but rather 128 megabytes of onboard flash memory and a memory card slot. Nokia says the device is not intended as a rival to Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL)'s iPod or other MP3 music players. A software update is expected early next year to add features such as voice-over-Internet telephony and instant messaging.

The device will remind you of earlier attempts to put a smaller-than-a-laptop/bigger-than-a-Palm device in every room of a home. But here’s the difference: The appetite for portability and high-speed access is much greater than four or five years ago. Back then, the idea of a small device that lets you do a Google search on a product that you’ve just seen on TV in between instant messaging some friends while lounging on the couch seemed too sci-fi (or just geeky). Now that search is HUGE and portable devices are everywhere, it’s a much easier for sell for Nokia and PalmOne Inc., which introduced its LifeDrive earlier this month.

The newest wave of these products reminds publishers that today's Web browser is just one digital-media platform, and that they'll need to gain the expertise to program for many others to remain competitive. Aggressive companies will pursue content placement deals; others will dig around for some bucks to buy the devices and figure out informal (e.g. no-cost) ways for readers to place content on these new toys.

Newspaper-affiliated sites have offered streaming audio for a long time, so it’s not surprising to see a few publishers move into podcasting. The experiments are exciting and noteworthy because the early adaptors have expanded beyond “newspaper stuff” –-headlines and news articles.

Podcasting allows for a different kind of convergence.  Some pioneers are sharing the best local music (Ventura County Star), discussing culinary delights (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and talking about video games (Columbus Dispatch). News, sports and business articles get their place, too, particularly in The Denver Post’s recently launched podcast.

The mix of programming tells us publishers recognize that news is just one course of their audience’s online diet. It’ll take much more than headlines to keep them engaged, loyal and open to new forms of content. As the demand for portable, on-demand entertainment continues, the introduction of podcasts positions newspapers among the swirl of choices from independent and traditional media companies.

Sometimes convergence means more work, as podcasting is more like creating a radio show than just dumping content.

NAA’s New Media Federation collected a sampling of podcasts from U.S. newspapers. The spreadsheet provides the name of the publication, URL, contact information and a brief description. Want to be included, fellow Chasers? Send those details to Rob Runett and you’ll be there.

The folks at Jupiter Research, a provider of research about online, information technology and business, have a new report out for their clients. Because Chaser HQ is plugged into David Card, the company's senior analyst and vice president, we got a tip about the reports. Here's the summary from the company's press release:

...the number of online adults who prefer the Internet as their main source of news has grown over 35% in the last four years, at the expense of television and newspapers. Currently, over 26% of online adults prefer the Internet for national and international news, compared to 19% in 2001.

JupiterResearch consumer surveys show that the percentage of online adults using the Internet for daily news had been flat -- hovering around 50% -- for the last few years. Preference for online local news is growing, but hasn't exceeded 10% among online adults. Young adults, ages 18 to 24, are helping drive the preference trend, especially in national news. Thirty-three percent of online young adults say they prefer the Internet as their primary source of news, while 40% prefer TV and 10% newspapers.

David sent along this observation to readers of the Chaser:

"Being a true believer, I think the interpretation of this data could be pretty positive for local papers. I'd recommend, for instance, that a local paper invest modestly in its online local entertainment coverage as a way to steal young adult market share from TV or the local alternative paper. It's probably more cost effective than launching a free tabloid.
 
"The fact that national news preference favors companies like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN is not bad news for local newspapers. Local coverage is still a battle between papers, local TV, and radio. Local Internet-only sites are fairly rare, and the national networks relatively unsuccessful (Digital Cities, CitySearch, Yahoo Local). Most local TV sites are weaker than their newsapaper counterparts. It's a good opportunity to hold and grow a local audience online.
 
"I don't think it's easy to build an audience online and make money off of it offline, but that's worth exploring. The key is to build online revenue streams, primarily advertising."

There was one other section that caught the attention of this Chaser and it is about BLOGS! [The boldface is Jupiter's]

The media is currently obsessed with blogs. That is because the media industry always over-covers itself, and a handful of would-be online pundits attracted attention during the elections and by exposing shady journalistic gaffes (while committing many of their own). Make no mistake, blogging is a phenomenon, but there is little evidence from surveys, traffic data, or case studies to support local sites making heavy investments. According to the recent survey, more online local news fans, for instance, got entertainment site information from message boards than did so from blogs. But the good news is that local content sites are increasing community elements relatively inexpensively.

OK, Chasers. Lots to chew on, lots to do.

We are sure it hasn't been a conversation around the latte machine, but the Chaser has been missing the last few weeks. We have a good excuse: the launch of News University, The Poynter's Institute's e-learning portal. Creating a site for self-directed journalism training has been a draining and all consuming process. So we took a little, unannounced, holiday. The Chaser is back. We hope you missed us. We'll try to stay on the watch going forward.

Forget about hiring an actor to read the newspaper [see the MobileSoft effort from SF Gate back in 2002]. This is about podcasting niche content such as entertainment coverage from your site and much more.

Chaser heads sometimes spin around trying to make sense of different, and often contradictory, forces affecting the media. So buckle up, here's our latest bounce around the media landscape.

First stop, let's get the celebratory greetings out of the way. It's the 400th birthday for newspapers this year. Thanks to the Center of Media Research, one of the Media Post sites, for the tip. Here's their post that is based the World Association of Newspaper's press release:

The World Association of Newspapers has accepted evidence produced by one of the world's leading printing museums that 2005 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of the first newspaper in print.

Martin Welke, founder of the German Newspaper Museum, and 'father' of the discovery together with Professor Jean Pierre Kintz, a Strasbourg historian, told WAN that the publisher of 'Relation' was a certain Johann Carolus, who earned his living at the turn of the 17th century by producing hand-written newsletters, sold to rich subscribers at very high prices, reproducing news sent to him by a network of paid correspondents.

"In 1604, he bought a complete printing shop from the widow of a famous printer," said Dr Welke. "In the summer of 1605 he switched to printing his ... newspapers, because it took him 'too much time copying by hand'". Carolus also calculated that he could earn a lot more money "by printing a higher circulation for a lower price".

In October that year, Carolus wrote a petition to the Strasbourg city council asking for "protection against reprints by other printers." And the rest (copyright law) is history, says the release.

Why should Chasers care? For many journalists it's a little good news to know that they are working in a medium that has staying power. However, that doesn't mean you get to relax about the future.

Here's why media folks shouldn't relax. It's about the story of radio, a relatively young medium Radio has only been around for about 80 years and until recently has avoided the turmoil surrounding other media forms. Wired Magazine, in its latest issue, has a number of articles on radio that captured our attention recently on a long plane ride to the frozen north. When taken together, radio's future is a bit more murky. The cover title is "The End of Radio."

These articles that are worth some Chaser reading time. The most interesting one is about "podcasting" and is a provides a look at the work of Adam Curry, former MTV star. While Curry makes for an interesting study of what someone does after MTV, here's the meat of the article:

Several U.S. public radio stations, as well as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC, are experimenting with the medium. Even beer megacorp Heineken is getting in on the action. The brewer has started making podcasts of popular DJs available on its Web site as part of a promotional campaign. Given that podcasting didn't exist nine months ago, this adoption curve is impressive. Podcasting -- unregulated, low-cost, on-demand radio -- is heading for a tipping point.

Anytime we see "tipping point" we sit up straight and start to pay attention, right?
 
The two other articles involve satellite radio [with Sirius' rising star Howard Stern] and the development of digital radio and how this technology switch might unshackle lots of creative energy.  We're sure you read lots about satellite radio. So let's skip to digital radio:

Ultimately, broadcasters will have the chance to spray multiple streams of bits into listeners' dashboards and homes -- as many as six streams per station, depending on the fidelity requirements of the programming. Because the 1s and 0s in HD radio are functionally identical to those sent across the Net, says Jim Griffin, founder of media consulting firm Cherry Lane Digital, "digital audio implies the ability to carry video, software, email, text messages, you name it." Within a few years, he says, radios will have what he calls a buffer -- a TiVo-like device that stores broadcast signals at the listeners' command. "You program it to store All Things Considered for the drive home. Maybe on the show there's an alert about a new virus. You punch a button and download an antivirus update into your buffer from NPR B, then take that into your house when you get home." Or perhaps you hear a review that makes you want to get a movie or an album, which you download as you drive. Meanwhile, your radio, which taps into the automobile's GPS unit, is constantly scanning for local traffic reports, and when a pertinent one appears, interrupts and then resumes the stored All Things Considered. "At the other side of the transition," Griffin says, "digital radio isn't necessarily radio in the way we think of radio, other than the fact that it uses transmitters. It's all about pushing and pulling bits into the buffer."

Young or old, let's hope you can push and pull bits in your buffer.

Frank Ahrens' Washington Post story headlined "Hard News: Daily Papers Face Unprecedented Competition" is a sobering read and builds on the point Jack Safer wrote about in Slate recently [see Chaser item below].  Here's a bit from the start of his long article:

"Natural societal things are going on," said Steve Lerch, a newspaper advertising buyer for Campbell Mithun of Minneapolis. "You can't take a half-hour to read the newspaper and eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. People aren't eating cereal anymore, either. I know -- I have General Mills as a client. People are eating yogurt bars on the way in to work."

Frank A. Blethen, publisher of the Seattle Times, said his industry has some breathing room left. But not much.

"The baby boomers are going to continue to drive print [sales] for some time," he said. "The problem we have are the . . . 18- to 35-year-olds. They're not replacing the baby boomers."

Others are more blunt, if hyperbolic.

"Print is dead," Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? "Get over it," meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

Hey, let's not end on a downer note.  Here's Ahrens' ending:

The good news for newspaper Web sites is that, after the 2001 dot-com crash, Internet advertising has roared back, exceeding previous highs. Total Internet ad spending in the first six months of 2004 was 40 percent higher than in the comparable period in 2003, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The sobering news? Internet advertising still accounts for only about 3 percent of total ad spending each year.

Several of FOCs [Friends of Chaser] sent along links to an interesting article in Slate by Jack Shafer.  It's a great takeout on the state of the print news business.  Safer uses the arrival of the Washington Examiner in D.C. to explore, as the headline put it, "media gestalt."

Here's his take on our past, which is important if you want to think about the future, as a all good Chaser do.

There's a long newspaper tradition of unbundling in the face of competition. Back in the early 1920s, big city dailies—especially Sunday editions—functioned as the home entertainment center, commercial bazaar, and primary information source for American families. The eclectic newspaper package offered every constituency something special. Shoppers browsed for goods on the bounteous ad pages. Comics splashed across whole pages at a time for both young and old readers. Fiction by pulp artists and "serious" writers ran in serial form, often in dedicated "fiction" sections. Some papers published daily magazines, where the feature form flourished. Columnists translated city life into newspaper vernacular, and editorialists crusaded.

Oh, and important news got reported in Section One.

But newspaper hegemony ended when radio took hold as a commercial medium in the middle of the decade. First, radio unbundled breaking news from the newspaper package, eliminating the need for five or six updated daily editions. Next, radio unbundled from newspapers the market for fiction with broadcast dramas. The newspaper's sports franchise took a hit as well, as broadcasters aired baseball and football games, and variety and music shows stole other leisure readers. Reporters are reluctant to acknowledge that newspapers are ads that happen to have stories printed on the back—and that they're really advertising-industry employees. Yet anybody working at a newspaper in the 1920s would have understood that radio, an extraordinarily cheap way to reach a mass audience in those days, was unbundling the ad market and shrinking the newspaper advertising base.

Safer also makes a good point of how the Internet is just another "unbundling" of the printed newspaper.  Worth a read.

The piece emphasizes the benefits of teaming for major, continuing news stories, such as the 2004 election. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News and the CBS affiliate and public television station worked together to produce Webcasts and offer text-based election archives. The Denver Post and 9News KUSA-TV go halfsies on the salary of an employee who prowls for stories that would benefit from collaboration.

The Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World is cited as the one example of a converged relationship that leads to more money for all parties. But those “parties” – the paper, Web site and local TV station - are all owned by The World Co. "We're not just moving money from one pocket to another," says COO Ralph Gage. "We're convinced it yields additional money."

Convergence Chasers are convinced about the content and promotional benefits. But we're still searching for the dollars that will fund better and more unique storytelling collaborations.

P.S. – Here's a correction to a line in the article - The Arizona Republic’s azcentral.com brand existed prior to Gannett’s acquisition of Central Newspapers Inc. in the year 2000.

Eyes backed by bucks are watching short, newsy online video clips, Chasers. And while that might not seem like news to some, the Online Publishers Association put out a web-video viewing study of more than 27,000 users from 25 different websites showing these web-videos watchers are mostly male (63%), married (56%) and packing cash, with 23% saying their household income is more than $100K.

The study of such sites as MSNBC.com, NYTimes.com, Sun-Sentinel.com, DIYnetwork.com , shows a quarter of the viewers watch online video once a week and more than half do it monthly. The market research firm Frank N. Magid Associates, also found that about a fourth of the viewers visited an advertised website after seeing a video. In Mediaweek’s coverage of the survey, reporter Mark Shields says

“Of course, the convergence of television and the Internet has long been watched by the advertising community, and many expect more advertisers to test the waters of the video realm in the near future. Just yesterday, The New York Times reported that it will begin accepting video ads, and many advertiser have been exploring ways of repurposing 30-second spots or producing Web only creative.”

News for Chasers could be in the detail that 66% seek news and mostly watch 1-2-minute clips. Movie trailers ranked high with nearly half the audience, with a little over a quarter saying they also seek out music videos and sports. Dayparters, however, should take hope in continuing to split out the day as more than half say that, while they might not admit to viewing video at work, the 8 a.m.-5 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. are about even as their favorite viewing times.

Curiously all these viewers say that they are eager, yet get their video fill randomly and aren't sure when video will be an option. Hmm, and 53% say they want more! Chasers, line up for copies of this study as strong evidence for that upcoming budget meeting!

To figure out the path to the future, each participant joined one of seven working groups created during the seminar. These groups looked at content, customers, competition, community, credibility, competencies and corporate structure. The output from those groups will be used to create a "manifesto." No time table has been set. 

Meanwhile here are some of the key takeaways and questions from the seminar, as reported by Chaser Rob Runett:

• Online news organizations associated with newspapers should salute their achievements during the last 10 years: Reaching entirely new audiences, enabling a once-a-day medium to become a competitor in the breaking news business, achieving profitability and adding real value to the parent company.
• News organizations have begun to embrace a two-way relationship with their audience, and that relationship will evolve and change in new ways. How will journalists and the organizations that fund their work react to this change? The current distrust and, in some cases, disdain for readers should be replaced with respect.
• During the next 10 years, will the economic underpinnings of the current media business collapse? What business models will support quality journalism? Is the idealism and democratic value of journalism under duress?
• New storytelling models will emerge that engage online audiences and attract new participants to newspapers' journalism, brands and products.
• The transformation for media companies has to happen faster. During one presentation, a series of slides about opportunities used an emotional appeal from Mr. Marshall Mathers to motivate us: "If you had one shot, or one opportunity/To seize everything you ever wanted/One moment/Would you capture it or just let it slip?" (Marshall Mathers = Eminem. Those are the lyrics that start the song "Lose Yourself," which will definitely get you wired and is totally applicable to an industry that needs inspiration.)
• The industry is too focused on small fixes to broken models instead of being courageous and daring. Our dynamic competitors know this and will take full advantage of our inaction.

Many of the Web+10 participants have personal blogs (no surprise), and they wrote about the seminar. Here are few worth a look:

• Jessica Barron, of Yahoo!, said the seminar was "was better than Burning Man!": http://www.poprocks.com
• Robin Sloan, of INdTV, and Matt Thompson, of the Fresno Bee: http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/journalism/index.html
• Steve Yelvington of Morris Communicatins: http://www.yelvington.com/item.php?id=824
• Neil McIntosh of The Guardian, London: http://www.completetosh.com/weblog/2005/02/state_of_the_un.html