Today is a big day for discussing media.

In Washington, a Federal Trade Commission two-day workshop is bringing out a host of big names in the field, including Rupert Murdoch, Steven Brill, Paul Steiger, Leonard Downie and others. There is sure to be big news from this area.

In Hyderabad, India (where I had a 12-hour airport layover a year ago; not fun), the World Newspaper Congress is underway with lots of interesting tidbits. Not surprisingly, the lead is one of Murdoch's minions, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton whose talk could be summed up with this quote: " How can it be that the Internet offered so much promise and so little profit?" Don't look for much new media love from Hyderabad. The link is to paidcontent.org so you can imagine that group's take on the situation. (Hint: "Free costs too much."). Lots of stories out there. Search using "World Newspaper Congress."

And I fully appreciate the irony that I'm using new media, including both links, to report on old media. We certainly live in a crazy media world these days.

Newspapers oppose online "opt-in" advertising strategy

Depending on what point of view you have, newspapers are weighing in on one of the hot topics of the day -- behavioral targeted advertising -- on the side of the devil or that of the angels.

The Newspaper Association of America is urging the federal government not to follow an "opt-in" strategy for such advertising. "Opt-in" means that consumers can't be targeted unless they specifically allow it. It's the opposite of the "opt-out" strategy used in telephone marketing (another area where the newspaper industry has sided against most consumers).

New media looks like the old

New media looks awful, well, white, says Byron Monroe, former Ebony magazine editor and former editor of the National Association of Black Journalists. He's got a point. For new media to actually be an improvement over the old, it must represent a diverse America.

Ready for the robots?

AOL is. CEO Tim Armstrong announced that AOL robots will trawl the web, suggest stories, calculate payment (and ad rates) for free lancers, edit the stories and check for copyright infringement.

Can this be the future of the Internet? Or just the failure of yet another plan put together by human MBA drones?

Magazines readying for growth of eReaders

AdWeek says that magazine publishers are readying digital platforms for the growth of eReaders, which are expected to multiply within months.

The sky already fell, but . . .

Interesting musings on media from David Carr at the New York Times. For some time I've repeated the line that historians tell us what life was like before Gutenberg and movable type, and what life was like afterward. But nothing tells us what life was like when it revolutionised the media landscape -- and the world.

Carr does a nice job of looking at the chaos as the sky fell in great chunks (his phrase), but then waxes optimistic about a future without the heady days of media past:

"So what do we get instead? The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent.

"For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down."

The sky fell. But there's a new dawn with a new sky and lots of people are looking at what might be instead of what was. That's a pretty good way of looking at things.

Ad spending optimism rebounds

For some time, observers have wondered whether the decline in advertising was a consequence of poor media performance or poor economic performance. MediaPost reports today that it seems to be the latter, since ad executives report the highest level of optimism since before the recession hit.
Now someone needs to tell the media companies so they'll quit committing suicide by attrition and start giving us consumers a reason to buy their product.

Social media has two faces

Very interesting blog post points to some of the problems with social media for marketers (and the rest of us). Sure, it can really help a product, but it can also really hurt if some in the "community" turn against it. It includes research showing that people who are most involved with a product by, say, commenting on it or interacting on a web site, are the most knowledgeable but also the most critical of it. Nice to have something to think about the day after Thanksgiving.

Murdock's move supported, and not

Some American newspapers ponder joining Rupert Murdock in pulling their news content from Google, but BBC said that it had "no intention" of joining in the move.

The American newspapers, in Denver and Dallas, said they would protect stories "behind pay walls" but allow Google to link to free online offerings. This seems a sensible policy, and one that I suspect will be followed by any successful print/online company. News content free online, but features, columns, reviews and the content that really adds value to news coming behind a pay wall and not available to Google or Yahoo searchers.

What's next for social media?

Often in recent years we yanks have been behind the media trends and have had to look to Europe, Australia or Asia for what's really happening. Great Britain's Guardian offers some excellent media stories, including a piece reporting on an Oxford Business School session pulling together some of the top names in social media to discuss its future.

None of the panelists (with ties to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) were willing to answer the basic question: What's next after social media. But there's a lot of good thinking reported in this old media vehicle (accessed via the Internet, so does that make it new media?).

Musings on e-books, textbooks and the future

There have been some small news stories recently that are touching on a larger one. It's always been the case that media is better at seeing trees than forests. In this case, the trees are e-books and textbooks (I sort of like using trees as a metaphor for tree-less technology), and their impact is the forest.

The stories are the first steps toward using e-books for textbooks. All of us -- including university faculty -- recognise the incredible cost of textbooks. We also understand why their so expensive, but they remain very expensive. Frankly, I can't see e-book technology significantly reducing the cost over the long run, but that's a different story.

What I do see is more use of the e-book platform for delivering textbooks in the future, and that's the forest. As students use e-books more and more (especially when technology catches up and offers e-books in color and more useful), they are being subtly trained to like the technology. That's the forest: Once students adopt the e-book technology, they may well prefer it, which will strongly affect the book publishing business.

L.A. Times extends behavior rules to the Internet

L.A. Times issues new social media rules that basically say that everything news staffers post online must be viewed in light of how it would reflect on the newspaper. I guess that means no hot holiday party pictures.