“I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.”

~Jon Klein, CNN President

In a Q & A with BusinessWeek editor Josh Tyrangiel, the executive noted that the sharing of media across social channels is something he’ll be watching closely from a competitive stand point. So, is he right? Should 24-hour cable news channels look at other media forms as their main threats instead of each other?

Not obvious what’s disconcerting here? Alright, here’s the story:

In the last 48 hours, anyone watching their RSS feeds may have noticed a slight change in the content produced by the Gawker Network (which includes many sites beyond the Gawker blog itself, including Deadspin, Valleywag and Lifehacker, to name a few). Whereas in the past, Gawker has served it’s entire article content into the RSS feed, they have started cutting the cord on what goes through the pipe to just a stub of the piece. Now, with the change, RSS subscribers must now clickthrough the post in order to get the whole story.

The media business attitude is sound: advertisers care about pageviews, not subscribers. It’s leftover from the days of counting audience size or print subscription base. They haven’t shifted their thinking, and as long as advertisers carry the cash, media producers will succumb to those needs for dollars. Hence, in order to boost that page view number, a fractioned article in the feed makes complete sense.

However, it’s a giant pain to those who rely on RSS for news. The sliver of Internet users who use syndication and feed readers (a smaller population than many would think) are forced to leave their news sources for the whole story: a mild departure from the whole central firehose that they work with. RSS users are not universal, but they certainly are an engaged and invested audience. They offer incremental pageview increases by moving this tactic, but it may have a cost in other participation metrics (returning visitors and commenting numbers).

Felix Salmon, who shares the same disappointment I do, pointed out that there’s at least some evidence to support that full feeds generate more traffic than truncated ones, and a commenter on his post actually noted that the Wall Street Journal – that Murdoch property of paywalls and more – actually does publish the whole story via RSS for its blogs. This isn’t a counterintuitive belief: those who subscribe to RSS are pre-disposed to being highly active users, and changing their stream of efficient information gathering is probably more of a detriment.

At the end of the day, Gawker’s move is one of hierarchical media thinking, not source-agnostic, conversational media; that’s a shame. There are “VIP” feeds out there for Gawker and its sister sites; Lifehacker had the courtesy to post its full feed and explain the change, recognizing how that segment of their audience gets news.

I can tell you right now that my Gawker news consumption is about to get sliced dramatically: kind of like their feed.

H/t Jenna K

It doesn’t make economic sense to have full-time reviewers, but Todd [McCarthy], Derek [Elley] and [David] Rooney have been asked to continue as freelancers.

Along with these full-time reductions, several other reviewers, most notably TV critic Brian Lowry, will be adding new responsibilities to their current review duties as to, assumingly, offset whatever loss Variety has forecasted.

The industry-watchers, especially in L.A., have been trying to sort through the news. As one movie blogger in L.A. noted, the reviews are often one of the most attractive parts of the entire publication, and McCarthy’s specifically. “[He] is the paper’s biggest star and the main reason readers all over the world read the august trade. His reviews post first, and are the best read thing in the paper, bar none.”

The L.A. Times movie bloggers unsurprisingly jumped headfirst into the news, as well, and took the opportunity for a direct shot with the headline “Is firing its critics really ‘economic reality’?”:

As anyone who regularly reads the venerable trade paper has surely noticed, even at the height of Oscar season Variety has been thinner than most of the starlets who walked the red carpet Sunday night [...] It was inevitable that Variety would once again have to find ways to cut costs, though it was definitely a shock to see the paper get rid of its top critics, especially McCarthy, who after the death of Army Archerd and the departure of former editor Peter Bart is easily the most iconic presence at the paper.

The post from LAT’s Big Picture also did a great job at accounting the other things at play here:

Virtually every survey has shown that younger audiences have zero interest in critics. They take their cues for what movies to see from their peers, making decisions based on the buzz they’ve heard on Facebook, Twitter or some other form of social networking. If anyone pays any attention to critics at all, it’s through aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, which offer a consensus score based on an accumulated ranking of critical opinion.

The very real forces behind digital, user-generated reviews are changing things, I believe that. “Advance Critics Screenings” don’t have the weight they used to anymore, and the rise in credibility and capability for the peer recommendation is notable (trust me, I work for Edelman, we study that Trust Barometer like it’s our job).

Now, I hated the sensationalist, “trend” attitude of stories last summer about “how Twitter sank-or-swim [x] movie,” but there is at least a modicum amount of truth to the crowdsourced review. The story has to go beyond that, though, because the impact is dollars-and-cents in communication efforts of studios, not just trust of source. This phenomenon, bottom line, is affecting the spending of these studios as they transition ad dollars to be spent as marketing in social media channels.

Are the voices of the crowd creating an earth-moving impact on Hollywood? No. The actual words or trends of reviews are something to note, but not the only thing at play. However, the presence of these voices, the fact that anyone with a cell phone in a theater can become an instant reviewer, mandates that studios need to be actively involved early on the channel to affect or quell negative trends and conversations. That has a cost, and just enough that launching a TV show, concert or movie can’t be done in an advertisement in single-channel, inside-business rags.

No wonder Variety has to cut costs: it’s already behind the eight-ball by relying on a prop of loss-leading subscriptions and ads-per-capita. The movie reviewers are just blood on the wall, the real shift is how the studios want to spend money to reach consumers instead of critics. And until Variety incorporates that, they’ll keep making news this way instead.

I really think we should count I Can Haz Cheezburger in the Fatty Acids of the media pyramid. Thoughts?

H/t 35 Great Social Media Infographics, via David Armano

“You gotta burn the boats…you gotta commit.”

~Marc Andreessen to TechCrunch’s Erick Schoenfeld, on how old media companies should look at the future of the media industry.

The analogy is fantastic (I still stick to my – er, Clay Shirky’s – kayaking upstream metaphor as my go-to metaphor), and Schoenfeld explained it in a weekend post about his exchange with Andreessen:

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. [Andreesen] has the same advice for old media companies…

First, you’ll now see that the “Departments” of Broadcast, Digital, News and Print have all earned some better real estate in the right sidebar. Boring update? Sure. But organization is fun. It’s what makes the world go ’round. These are now the channels by which I’m aligning the categories, and things fall under them nicely.

Of these, the most important is that I’m trying to emphasize that “Social” media is not the only part of the online channel; I think it’s greatly misunderstood – but that’s a whole book, so I won’t over explain it. It’s just, to me, social media is just a form of digital media that is created by the story of our interactions on networks we choose to participate – it’s not actually the connections themselves. To me, that’s the misconception, and I think it’s what causes dissonance between the idea of “privacy” on a network for which you registered in order to share information and news relevant to yourself. Much more on this later.

With that – time to keep chugging along. It’s been a little more than six months in this new home, so I’d like to keep it tidy.

It always helps getting the week’s digital media news in four minute bites – one of the reasons I have PBS MediaShift’s Four-Minute Roundup queued in my podcast subscriptions. Way I saw it, there were two really major stories in the space: one of which I covered* and one I just tweeted about and walked away from. 4MR had them both this week (among a couple one-offs), but something definitely stood out to me in the latter discussion of the Pew media consumption survey that I chose not to write about.

Host Mark Glaser was able to secure Tom Rosenstiel of Pew, so that definitely provided a little more weight to the study that was released on Monday than I ever could. In the “Just One Question” portion of 4MR, Rosenstiel said something that really jumped out at me (transcribed by me from the podcast):

“People no longer have a primary source for news, that they really graze across multiple platforms on a typical day, and online that they graze across multiple sites. But also, that they don’t graze very far. ‘I get a little TV, a little radio, I get a little this, a little that, and then when I go online, I don’t really range across the entire Internet.’”

I could not agree more with what Rosenstiel is saying. If there’s any change in the way I consume news from the generation before me, it’s this notion. This happens on nearly every platform: when it comes to daily newspapers, they are a single, primary source for a shrinking demographic. Evening news used to be non-miss because it was a single flash-point for the day, but by the time 5:30 rolls around these days, all of the stories they report are hours old it seems.

I’m not the norm consumer, I know that. I have hundreds of feeds and try to keep up as best I can with myriad sources – and the fact that sometimes they act as news originators (the research definition of primary source) as well as secondary sources is another study in itself. But even the luddites among us are likely well beyond that single source, full course meal of news. The fancy banquet is gone – the buffet is here to stay.

*Side: Glaser did mention a piece by Andrew Baron about the Viacom/Hulu story, and complimented and discussed Baron’s thesis that Viacom’s goal was centralizing its Web content. I agree that this is Viacom’s objective, but I think it’s a misguided strategy. Centralizing/grounding your content to one site isn’t necessarily better than removing it from a much larger destination where your audience and potential audience are going.

Who hasn’t yet seen the epically cool OK Go video for “This Too Shall Pass” (don’t worry, it’s embedded below just in case)? Two separate items for your enjoyment on top of the video. The first is the above story, of which I learned in A.J. Jacobs’s personal history/quest to be the smartest man in the world by reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica, The Know-It-All. This story was a talking point with a few friends when we first heard the song earlier this year, and with the new video, it’s a solid opportunity to pass it along. In my opinion, this is some of the best advice ever.

Next, because it’s fun, I thought it would be fun to share a little about Rube Goldberg and his machines (which are the driving force of OK Go’s video). As clipped from a Purdue University site dedicated to Rube:

Best known for his “inventions”, Rube’s early years as an engineer informed his most acclaimed work. A Rube Goldberg contraption – an elaborate set of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, and rods, put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles, and live animals – takes a simple task and makes it extraordinarily complicated. He had solutions for How To Get The Cotton Out Of An Aspirin Bottle, imagined a Self-Operating Napkin, and created a Simple Alarm Clock – to name just a few of his hilariously depicted drawings.

The promise and pitfalls of modern technology make Rube Goldberg’s inventions even more relevant now than when they were originally created. From think-tanks in Silicon Valley, to the New York Times, to Sunday morning’s Meet the Press, hardly a day goes by without the name “Rube Goldberg” being invoked. In fact Rube Goldberg is an adjective in Webster’s Dictionary.

Finally, as promised, just enjoy the glory that is a Rube Goldberg synchronized with a very, very good song.