Media Week

The COI announced this week that Joe public is now able to track crime trends in their area through online maps across the 43 websites of all police forces across the country.

It's a bit like using Google maps, only instead of finding your nearest frappuccino supplier, you get to see just what a crime hotspot, in my case, you actually have the misfortune to live in.

I was delighted to find out that Hackney Borough has an "average" crime rate according to the Met figures, but if you go right down to my sub ward, effectively mine and a couple of other apparently mean streets, the figures rocket, even by Hackney's standards.

I now fear for the safety of the organic fruit sellers and mother's clubs of Stoke Newington, I really do.

Quite what opportunities this presents to media organisations, one can only imagine. In my particular little slice of heaven I'm expecting a flurry of door drops for everything from secure windows suppliers to personal minders.

If you're a Londoner, check for yourself at the Met's map, only be prepared for a few restless nights depending on the results.

1. The BBC will take a fresh look at its digital ambitions and scale back expansion "just to cut commercial operations a break".
2. The number of media jollies will be drastically cut in favour of fruit baskets.
3. Dawn Airey will not have lunch at The Ivy.
4. There will be more people working in media by the end of 2009, compared with 2008.
5. Channel 4 will revitalise its plans to move into radio.
6. National newspapers will see a resurgence in copy sales and report buoyant ABC figures.
7. Google will crash as advertisers decide online display is the future.
8. The cinema sector will do something, anything news worthy.
9. No individual media sector will publish a report that suggests it is the best placed to weather the economic storm.
10. Jamie magazine will still exist - seriously...overkill.

The publication of a list detailing the entire membership of the BNP online last night brings into sharp focus the questions that dog the democratisation of the publishing world that the internet has brought.

Those who believe the millions of personal blogs out there amount to, at best, nothing more than a vacuous collection of witless musings and, at worst, a dangerous platform for the spread of misinformation, both deliberately and simply through ignorance, have been offered another opportunity to rail at the irresponsible power to publish we all now possess.

Believers in the personal platform revolution, meanwhile, will argue the publication of the details of members of the far right party is the perfect example of citizens working for the public interest without the constraints or concerns of a major publishing house.

Whichever argument you subscribe to, it's hard in this case to feel sympathy for those whose details have been leaked, though the publication of personal information including those of children is clearly a breach of data protection. Setting aside, if it is possible, the anti-Semitic, racist premise from which the party emerged, denied by its upper echelons, for whatever reason the person who posted the list did so, and a disgruntled former member appears to be the current consensus, the BNP has simply become a victim of a medium it's been using to aid its growth for a number of years.

Having worked for, and monitored, a large online community, it's clear the far right not only uses the internet to detail its manifestos and create online ‘friendly' communities where ideas can be exchanged, it actively targets mainstream forums to spread the word.

It was hard to tell how organised this practice was, but posting patterns and multiple account creation suggested a certain amount of collaboration. The tactic employed by Barack Obama to great success is nothing new to those pedalling more extreme views, on all sides of the political debate.

The fact that, on this occasion, the internet has been used to strike back in such a damaging way (would you join or renew knowing your details may end up as public knowledge?) is a perfect example of the internet delivering on all sides.

The ability to share information about ourselves - to paraphrase the Facebook dictum (a company well aware of the BNP-effect) - and others is a wonderful thing. If the information shared happens to leave a bitter taste in the mouth, well, that's something, for now, we just have to deal with.

With power comes responsibility. Whether individuals publishing online will gradually adopt a more responsible approach remains to be seen. The history of publishing suggests public opinion will gradually dictate that it does. The nature of radicalism, and the internet, may see to it that situations such as these become a regular occurrence.

Does commercial media have a role to play in all this? Ignoring the online personal publishing revolution is a mistake. The sheer number of people viewing and sharing content, whether through blogs, personal websites, or social networks, makes the proposition far too attractive, and important, to dismiss. And plugging into the right community, at the right time, amounts to striking marketing gold. Enter the social media space without a clear strategy for how you intend to protect your brand, however, and it could be fatal.

Slightly off subject, but earlier today I got on the Victoria Line at Green Park alongside a broken looking Robert Peston.

Sitting at the very end of a lonely end carriage, he cut a rather subdued figure. No sharp suit. In fact, casual shoes, no tie, not even a jacket.

Just a man looking like the world, for once, wasn't interested in what he had to say.

On the first day of the year when no-one gives a banker's bonus what the man who has been the beating heart of UK journalism had to say, Peston clearly didn't know quite what to do with himself.

Don't worry Robert. This Obama character, fly-by-night. Tomorrow's chip wrappers. You'll see. Come next week your army of fans, of which I count myself one, will be devouring your interesting broadcasting style as the continuing spiral of world financial catastrophe is explained in terms we can all digest.

I was going to come over and say so, but I was getting off at Oxford Cricus.

The very idea that a company can generate income by selling something that's little more than a few hundred coloured pixels is pretty mind-boggling.

But with Facebook announcing this week that it is changing the pricing model in its gift shop, from a flat $1 per gift to variable pricing based around credits, revenue from virtual gifts is clearly sufficient enough to make having a very real retail strategy worthwhile.

Varying web reports estimate current revenue at around £35m from Facebook gifts, with a hoped for doubling of that income by introducing the changes. Some have even suggested a nine-figure income in 2009 could be possible.

That's a lot, by any standards, but for selling pints you can't drink, flowers you can't smell and donkeys you can't, well, do whatever it is you can do with real donkeys, it's staggering.

Is it any different to sending someone a real gift? Given there are somewhere in the region of 35 million of them adorning Facebook homepages, plenty of people clearly don't think so. But try telling the wife that her anniversary gift is virtual and I suspect your subsequent status update would not make for pleasant reading.

Without wishing to offend half the world's population (but no doubt managing it anyway), launching Media Week's website has felt, I imagine, a little like giving birth.

It's been 9 months in the making, caused numerous late and uncomfortable nights, we've had false alarms for the final push and I even appear to have clapped it on (although that may be unrelated).

But it's finally here, thanks to the hard work of many people at Haymarket, too numerous to mention by name. And we're very pleased with it.

Our aim was not to reinvent the wheel, just to try to make sure the breaking news, indepth features, industry comment and expert analysis - generated by the Media Week team and the media industry itself - are easily accessible by our readers.

We've added a few shiny buttons - video, audio, galleries to name a few - and we'll be building on these over the coming months to deliver enhanced coverage of the big media stories.

There are bound to be a few teething problems, but hopefully nothing that will prevent us breaking the essential news readers of Media Week (whether of the magazine, online or through our daily bulletins) expect.

Please leave comments if you spot any issues or just want to make suggestions. I look forward to your feedback...I think.

 

Starring on the new Conservative Party website, overhauled ahead of the upcoming party conference, is the Blue Blog where, according to David Cameron's first post, "you'll see posts from me, the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and candidates and Members of the Party".

It's odd that it has taken this long for the Tories to get a blog going, especially as the party was pretty on the ball with Webcameron, but given Dave's bland first post, we haven't been missing much.

What catches the eye is the blog roll, which has to be the most contrived reading list I've ever seen. From BuzzMachine and Comment is Free to Guido Fawkes and Mumsnet, no worthy stone is left unturned, while Boris Johnson's musings are conspicuous by their absence - surely essential reading for any Tory?

Instead of showcasing the breadth of ideas being absorbed by the party, as it's no doubt intended to do, the list merely serves to reinforce the style over substance arguments Cameron battles constantly.

Let's hope future content will offer a little more insight.

The story surrounding Asda staff dumping newspaper inserts from rival supermarket Tesco is an interesting one in itself. 

The Daily Record have covered the story here, but what particularly caught my eye was a comment left by a reader responding to the story which ended:

"Tesco should respond by having their adverts printed inside the newspaper."

Printing ads "inside" a newspaper! What kind of crazy idea is that?

If a dress cost less than a tenner you have to ask questions about who is being exploited along the chain to produce it so cheaply.

And as Primark found to its cost when Panaroma did a bit of digging into the retailer's sources, keeping track of your supply chain when there are numerous contractors and subcontractors involved is no easy task.

Which brings us to the Evening Standard and its latest giveaway. Today, the Standard has been handing out free rucksacks with the paper - at least it has from the street vendor at Hammersmith Broadway. Not great rucksacks. Not even as good as the free rucksacks you get when you join a gym, but logo-emblazoned rucksacks nonetheless.

Having shed 5% of its circulation since July, according to the latest ABCs, it may be in need of a few creative promotions to bolster sales, but would a little digging into where today's giveaway was sourced unearth any unbecoming headlines?

Newspapers are right to splash on exposés of exploited home and factory workers, slaving away to keep the profit margins of multinationals good and healthy.

And don't the majority of us feel some sense of guilt when we read such stories, recalling the cost of the cheap T-shirts littering our wardrobes with the nagging feeling that something had to give to get them on the shelves for such questionably low prices?

Editors would always like to think the strength of their editorial offering is enough to sell a newspaper without lavish promotions, although the realisation that it often isn't is also understood.

But throw an ethically sensitive product into the promotional mix - which admittedly is practically anything these days though products with stitched seams always makes me doubly nervous - and questions over a paper's ability to report objectively on such matters must also be raised.

You would think, and hope, that the Standard - all newspapers for that matter - asks the necessary questions prior to going ahead with promotions. And it would be nice to think that at the end of the chain of this particular giveaway are content, healthy workers paid a living wage for their endeavour. I wouldn't want to unfairly point the finger at the Standard. For all I know, the rucksacks cost a tenner each and were put together by a workers' cooperative in Slough.

I have put a couple of calls in and someone is trying to find out for me. Or perhaps someone from the Standard can respond below and put my mind at ease.

In the meantime, wear your rucksack with, erm, pride.

Google's assault on the browser market has taken flight with Chrome, but despite a raft of pretty amazing reviews, it's got a long way to go to be a player in a market dominated by Microsoft. A few helpful figures from Nielsen Online show just how far.

 As you can see below IE, with a 75% share, is a hefty target if the plan is to dominate the market in the same way Google dominates search.

"Microsoft hasn't made much of an inroad into Google's dominance in search so it will be very interesting to see if Google has more success at toppling Internet Explorer," Nielsen's Alex Burmaster points out.

But if anyone can do it, Google can. They proved when they entered the search market that if the product is good enough, people will use it. Quite whether Chrome can ever be that much better than its competitors is debatable. I would attempt to add links to a few reviews but a quick Google search, using Chrome, natch, will probably do the trick.

I had the privilege of being shown round the TMG building yesterday - the editorial hub, TV and radio studios, the commercial department and their all new digital lab - and I was given a glimpse at a few of the new products they're working on for users and advertisers.

All very interesting and more on which over the coming weeks. The one thing that stood out, and something that I really got from Dave King in his recent interview on Media Week TV, is that TMG do seem to get it. They understand the nature of online, the need to be surrounded by specialists constantly thinking about the new, but always with a strong commercial ‘deliverable' end-game, even if at present the p&l isn't exactly singing.

They understand the need for their teams to aspire to being integrated, even if in practice that's not easy, possible, or even always desirable, which is not true of all media owners. Sticking up a few plasma screens around the office with your website on it is not enough to change the culture of a team honed over decades to produce a daily paper.

Having been impressed, therefore, by everything on show, I can't help think it's crazy that on the day I get to see what great strides TMG is making, Media Week is running a story that the newspaper is, after over 100 years of being in print, finally going full colour.

I'm not singling out TMG on this - the majority have only just taken the full-colour plunge if at all. Again, the arguments for and against the need or desire for papers to go full-colour is something discussed in the Dave King/David Emin interview, but reasoning aside, isn't it a weird state of affairs that on the one hand traditional media owners are really driving their digital strategies and at least starting to think a little like tech companies, even if they have some way to go to operate like them, and yet on the other hand it's news worthy that, finally, their main product can now be seen in ‘colour'...gasp!

In the dimly-lit bedrooms of sandy-haired indie kids all over Scotland, you can just about hear tearful snuffles above the mournful wail of Joy Division's Isolation.

And why shouldn't they weep? Indie station Xfm is to be no more, rebranded instead as part of the mainstream dance Galaxy network.

Whichever stations' playlist you prefer, and in truth there's good and God-awful on both, Xfm as a brand stood for far more than the blandness of Galaxy ever could.

It's true to say that Xfm has become far more commercial than it was in its ramshackle pirate beginnings, but when the music scenes it represents have been wholly co-opted by Bigco looking for a bit of scruffy hair cool, in comparison it held up well.

And what now for the London and Manchester stations? Are they, as Global currently suggests, big enough music cities to make safe an even slightly edgy station such as Xfm?

It would be a great shame for the decade-plus, dedicated work of certain Xfm staff to establish the station amongst the bland radio output of the UK, for it to be dumped in favour of a network sell more in tune with advertisers' requirements.

But we'll see. I suggest you listen while you can, because for all its flaws, Xfm would be greatly missed if it became no more.

In the latest edition of Mediaweek.tv, now showing, Mirror Group's David Emin, in discussion with TMG's Dave King about the future of newspapers, makes a point about traditional newspapers' ability to differentiate themselves from other online news sources, which he describes as "very parasitic".

It's a fair point - and a good sell. Online news is parasitic and traditional news organisations bring an air of authority, for the most part, which is almost impossible to replicate.

Unfortunately, it's immaterial. Seeing ones work plagiarised can but frustrating, but watching a story build momentum as it flicks across the web can also be exhilarating. It could be argued the "parasites" are more akin to bumble bees, pollinating stories and helping them to grow beyond the means they are capable of on their own.

Whichever argument you favour, the practice is not going to dissipate. And from a reader's perspective, who cares? Profiting from digital is proving tough. Exploiting content over which publishers have increasingly less control will make it even tougher.

You can, and we do, buy anything online, from second-hand motors, to forms of depravity that would make most of us wince.

Entire lives - shopping, banking, taxis and tax returns - can be run from a local Starbucks with a laptop and a wireless connection.

The fact that we cannot currently undertake the seemingly simple task of browsing media inventory, putting together a package and purchasing it at the click of a button is, frankly, archaic.

The British media industry is rightly lauded for its technological and creative advances. Why, therefore, is it taking so long for us to accept the inevitable?

There are a number of platforms on the verge of a UK launch, such as Media Equals and BuyNowMedia. But even taking the complex issues at play within media into account, it can only be a lack of will on the part of the industry to dip its collective toe that means we currently lag behind the average housewife from Rotherham when it comes to running our day-to-day business.

There are, of course, questions that need answering. Will centralising inventory devalue media owners' stock? Will an online platform really make us more efficient or will we have to, God forbid, add to headcount - bidding experts, anyone? Can a single platform ever be compatible with the multitude of ways in which media is bought and sold, not to mention with our quirky, individual booking systems?

Speak to the platform purveyors and they have reassuring answers. In reality, it will take time and cooperation between agencies, media owners and developers before online trading becomes a valuable, integrated part of the sales process.

Even then, product differentiation will remain key and well-trained sales staff will be more important than ever. It is possible for online trading to complement, not destroy, the intricate buying and selling skills that agencies and media owners have honed over decades, to create efficiencies and add value to once derelict stock. It can bring new customers into the market, but only if we offer compelling wares and a compelling way in which to buy them. Getting involved now gives us the opportunity to shape the inevitable

The "are we talking ourselves into a media recession?" question is one increasingly heard in the industry.

Apart from the irritation of its hand-wringing, woe-is-us quality, it is, of course, a ridiculous question. First, because to all intents and purposes we are in a media recession already; and second, because the implication is that, if only we stopped talking about it, the dreaded "R" word would be avoided. As if. Anyone who prevaricates about this is doing themselves no favours.

Agencies and media owners can help themselves by taking the difficult decisions now, trimming whatever fat there is and getting ready to bounce back leaner and fitter.

Let us all pay heed to the strategy behind our upcoming Olympic endeavour. Team GB comprises some athletes whose real medal chances lie not in Beijing - from where they are expected to return stronger and more experienced if not laden with gold - but four years hence in London.

Team Media GB can get itself in shape by putting the training schedules in place now (why, incidentally, is training one of the first lines to be cut when the going gets tough?), setting targets and preparing for the media bonanza that will surely come in 2012, if not before.

As our feature (Media Week, August 5, page 25) reveals, ZenithOptimedia predicts that the Beijing Olympics is generating an additional $1bn of ad expenditure. Nielsen research shows that ad spend in China is up 20% year on year in the first quarter, a figure expected to rise in the second and third.

Of course, 60 million portly Brits will not generate the same uplift as 1.3 billion brand-hungry Chinese and a clutch of Western multinationals desperate to serve them, but the prospects are nonetheless exciting.

There's nothing like an Olympic ad blitz to test the ingenuity of media owners and agencies. The former will seek to find new ways to engage audiences, thus tapping into advertiser cash. The latter will have to find solutions for clients, large and small, who will expect their message to be heard in a cacophony of noise.

Four years sounds like a marathon. But being fit to compete for gold when the finishing line comes into view in 2012 is a worthy goal. Training starts now.