Yesterday, I read an excellent blog titled It is our fault, posted on 8 October 2008 (http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/10/08/it-is-our-fault/) BuzzMachine author, Jeff Jarvis starts by disputing other media people’s opinions that declining newspaper sales are not the journalism industry’s fault. Jarvis calls “bullshit”, stating that those in the industry should have foreseen the changes that needed to be made for the future and taken advantage of opportunities when they arose. He also disagrees with the comment by the Washington Post’s Paul Fahri, that journalists should not bear the burden of readers losing faith. “He ignores the greater need and opportunity to rethink and reinvent journalism itself.”
He argues, that the online forum does not mean journalism is dead, but simply a changing environment in which we can communicate with an audience, creating networks and utilising links to make the most of the organisation’s content.
I then went to another one of his blogs about business models (http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/11/12/glam-the-success-of-the-network/), where I found an interesting chart and explanation.
The yellow circle on the left represents a site called iVillage. He explains that the largest circle inside symbolises the ‘junk’ or unsaleable traffic, such as people that came to the site purely for horoscopes.
Glam bought out iVillage and changed its expanded its networking model. The group of smaller circles represent specific information areas such as fashion, teen, beauty, etc. The yellow circles inside each of them represent their own content; however the rest represent independent sites and blogs related to that topic. Jarvis said Glam was successful because it picked quality content from other sites and shared in advertising revenue of their extended network.
