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SHOW NOTES:
Moderated by:
Jacob Weisberg – Chairman and Editor in Chief, Slate Group

Speakers:
Jim Bankoff – CEO, Vox Media
Erik Martin – GM, reddit
Daniel Roth – Executive Editor, LinkedIn

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It should probably come as no surprise that Gawker Media is in the latter camp, since founder Nick Denton has a penchant for zigging while others are zagging, and is more than happy to rip up much of his existing network in order to try something new. The latest new thing is the Kinja discussion platform, which Denton talked about with me last year just before it launched — describing it as the core of the Gawker empire’s future. The latest version of the platform was just rolled out to users at Jalopnik.

Every commenter now becomes a blogger

As Tim Carmody at The Verge describes in a post on the new features, the platform essentially turns every commenter into a blogger. Prior to the latest change, readers had a profile page that showed their latest contributions, but now they have what amounts to a full-fledged blog with publishing ability — complete with their own custom address at Kinja.com. And editor Matt Hardigree says that the site, and by extension other Gawker sites, will be looking at the comments as a source of content and even future hires:

“If you want, you’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.”

It’s worth noting that Gawker already has a history of hiring writers from its comment section, something that the political blog network Daily Kos has also done a number of times. And it’s not just blogs: Yoni Appelbaum, a PhD candidate in history, commented so intelligently on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts at The Atlantic that he was eventually made a guest blogger.

Denton’s plan with Kinja isn’t just to create platforms for Gawker readers to hold forth on whatever they wish — the new system is also designed to function as a potential marketing vehicle, with advertisers and brands encouraged to participate (and possibly even sponsor) discussions that begin in the comments on a story. This is just one of a number of revenue-generating experiments that Gawker is rolling out over the next little while, Denton says.

Others also want to turn readers into bloggers

And Gawker isn’t the only new-media entity that is trying to reinvent reader contributions: The Verge, which is published by Vox Media, has turned its discussion forums into content hubs of their own, and often highlights them on the front page (Note: Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The question-and-answer site Quora, meanwhile, has launched something that is like an amalgam of Gawker’s approach and The Verge’s: the site recently turned its reader forums into blogs — which means that every contributor to those forums now has a blog page. And as my colleague Jeff Roberts recently described, The Huffington Post has launched a “Conversations” feature that gives popular discussion threads their own webpage.

In a sense, these efforts are just an evolution of the approach that the Huffington Post took when it first launched, which was to give almost anyone who wanted it the ability to publish a blog post. Will these new players produce anything valuable, or just a lot of sound and fury?

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy King and Pew Center

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After teasing the site’s arrival for months, Vox finally launched Polygon on Wednesday night. The site is a soup-to-nuts source for video game news, covering
everything from hardcore gamer staples like Call of Duty to casual mobile fare like Words with Friends. Polygon will also feature human interest stories about developers and players and even offer long-form journalism. The site has Vox’s typically elegant layout – here’s a screenshot:

“Video games have always been defined by change and right now we’re living in the middle of the most rapid change in video game history with mobile gaming, social gaming and web gaming, said Editor in Chief Chris Grant, in a phone interview.

Grant, who used to edit popular game blog Joystiq, says there is a lack of mature press coverage for what is now a $25 billion industry. He adds the audience for video game news is far more diverse than the stoned Halo players we may remember from college — a Polygon reader is more likely to be a young woman or a 39 year old lawyer than a couch-ridden burnout.

If Vox is betting that gaming is a large audience, it’s probably right. In the past, the company has shown no appetite for nibbling at the edges of a topic but instead prefers to go all-in with a big investment in staff and its Cadillac-like publishing platform known as Chorus (at paidContent 2012, CEO Jim Bankoff compared the platform to Lucas Films studios which George Lucas created in order to make Star Wars possible). Vox used this “go big” approach with The Verge which, in less than a year, has become a force in tech reporting.

Polygon managing editor Justin McElroy says the site also hopes to attract non-gamer readers with “people centric” stories. These include the tale of a couple who got married after meeting in a game video or, more darkly, a game developer who let his profession wreck his relationship.

Polygon is certainly thinking big, but who will pay for its fancy new canvas? Chief Content Officer Marty Moe says the site has already attracted premium advertisers from inside and outside the industry — Sony, Microsoft, Geico and so on. And as is the norm with media properties these days, Moe says Polygon also expects substantial revenue from off-line activities (read: events).

The Polygon launch means Vox now possesses mega-properties in three fields: tech, sports (SB Nation) and now gaming. This raises the question of whether Vox will use its formidable resources to scoop up another news domain such as health, fashion or food. In our phone interview, Moe said its existing three coverage areas were vast in themselves and left the company with plenty of room to grow — no new properties soon, in other words. He also said Vox has no plans to license its prized platform.

(Image by auremar via Shutterstock)

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The real-estate blog Curbed and its sister food and shopping sites, Eater and Racked appear to be bucking that trend.  The sites, which are owned by Lockhart Steele, cater to local audiences looking for buildings, restaurants or sales. How has he made local pay when others like AOL’s hyper-local network, Patch, have flopped?

“It’s a little counterintuitive. We’re a local company that’s not really interested in local advertising,” says Steele, explaining that the sites’ primary sponsors are national brands with big ad budgets like Ben & Jerry’s or Absolut Vodka.

Steele says big brands use Curbed to tap into local communities of shoppers, foodies or home buyers in different regions. He cites a recent example in which Curbed threw a party in Portland on behalf of Patron Tequila. “We can activate audiences in each of these cities we’re in, and activate a real community.”

Steele says there simply isn’t enough money in local advertising – with one exception. “The one place you can sell local is real estate … It’s the only category of hyper-local that’s really flush with money.”

The Mobile Morass: it’s ok to sit on the sidelines

Publishers are watching with growing consternation as audiences are moving en masse to mobile devices but ad dollars are not. Steele admits he doesn’t know how or when the mobile riddle will be solved but says he is not concerned.

Steele says it’s unrealistic to expect readers to download a publisher’s app unless you offer “non-stop engagement like Netflix” and adds that apps “create another distracting channel that you have to worry about.” He says Curbed is content to watch the mobile experiments of companies like Conde Naste which have been more bullish about apps.

“A lot of interesting start-ups in the digital media space are sitting on the sidelines .. We’re happy  to see big guys throw around hundreds of thousands on development. We’ll keep our powder try and watch others. If someone hits on the right strategy, we’re not above copying it.” In the meantime, Curbed is content to look for niche mobile opportunities like email newsletters and monetizing the screen that launches when a reader first downloads an app.

Why blogs are beautiful & Gawker’s still got it

Steele says his favorite sites are those that use a traditional blog layout like the Awl or Andrew Sullivan. He believes in a format that lets readers “scroll down and know when they’re full,” versus busy homepages like New York magazine which Steele describes as “seizure-inducing” (though he loves NY mag’s content).

Does he still follow Nick Denton, his former mentor and boss at Gawker, where Steele was the gossip site’s longtime managing editor?

“I still think Nick is one of the most interesting people in media. When it comes to product vision in this media space … I think Nick is pushing forward some of the most interesting ideas,” he said, citing Gawker’s recent attempt to transform the idea of reader comments.

Who else? Steele calls Jim Bankoff and Vox Media the “standard bearer for the media space,” He says sites like Vox Media’s The Verge are “the most beautiful on the web” for their seamless integration of text, audio and video.

Display ads are the Future

No really. While prominent display skeptics like BuzzMedia’s Jonah Peretti claim that banners (those ads that stretch across the top and side of web pages) belong to an earlier era of web publishing, Steele disagrees. “Display advertising is the future. Part of the reason is that display is also the past – people made fun of banners when they debuted on Hotwire in 1995.”

Steele’s point is that display advertising is a staple of the internet economy that publishers and advertisers now know how to buy, use and sell. He says companies continue to see these ads as powerful opportunities to build brand image. This is different than revenue from “click-through” ads about which “no one has illusions.”

To make display advertising work, Steele says, it’s important to keep ad sales in-house. “Giving inventory to ad networks puts you in a world of spiraling CPM’s.”

New York is tech and San Francisco is media (and vice versa)

“The old idea that New York created media and San Francisco created great product is out the window,” says Steele, citing Foursquare, the popular location-based social network, which long shared a roof with Curbed. He believes both cities are pushing each other to improve media platforms and publications. But that doesn’t mean he likes them equally.

“I’m a tried and true New Yorker. If lived in San Francisco, I’d have to kill myself. Other than that it’s a great city.”

(Images by Etienne Volschenk, Kiselev Andrey Valerevich and upthebanner via Shutterstock; L. Steele image via Flickr)

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Jim Bankoff, Chairman and CEO, Vox Media

Data helps destroy containers, and that’s a good thing. Data creates new content and information experiences and helps bring an end to the notion of content silos, Betaworks’ John Borthwick said: “The moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users.” Forrester’s James McQuivey pointed out that it’s not just a “tablet or iPad world,” but an “everything world” — and millions of people are consuming content not on iPads or e-readers but on gaming systems like the Xbox 360.

Digital storytelling is a native art. Stories on the Internet are not a new form of magazine or newspaper stories, but a medium in their own right — just like radio or TV. Publishers should develop their platforms accordingly rather than just repurposing other print vehicles. When Wenner Media released Us Weekly on iPad for the first time, it figured out a way to enable the “passalong” that’s so popular with the magazine’s print edition. As Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told us, George Lucas had to build a new story-telling platform called Lucasfilm so that he could tell the story of “Star Wars.” And don’t say blogging is dead: “That’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expression is dead,” said WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Not all “media” are created equal. Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Betaworks’ John Borthwick gave a rude awakening to Big Media executives, urging them to give up control of their content — and even to stop calling it “content.” But declaring new digital networks victors over somewhat different traditional print and broadcast operators after simply labelling each “media” can sometimes seem counterproductive and insufficient: What’s being created now are entirely new kinds of information vehicles. The industry is truly “at the crossroads” suggested by the paidContent 2012 conference’s subtitle– but technologists and information producers may now be heading in different directions, as well as speaking different languages.

Publishers have to sell their brands directly to consumers. “Publishing companies need to understand that the thing [companies] like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers really respect is a brand,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in an explanation of why those companies agreed to send customers directly to the Pottermore site to buy e-books. “If we’ve demonstrated anything, it’s the power of a brand,” he said, noting that over half of Pottermore’s e-book sales result from readers coming directly to the site instead of being referred there by the retailers. Not every brand is Harry Potter — but “need to understand that their role in the future is creating these brands,” Redmayne said.

It’s time to toss CPM as a yardstick for online advertising success. How can Facebook be so inept at advertising? Because it’s handing advertisers a sledgehammer not a scalpel. Betaworks’ Borthwick and GigaOM’s Om Malik say it’s time to discard old-fashioned display ads as the basic unit of online ad success. Instead, it’s time for advertisers to adapt their ads to the evolving nature of the internet itself. That means forgetting about CPMs and focusing on data and social dynamics. On a broader level, it means re-imagining basic precepts of advertising and product discovery in a world where Web pages are being eclipsed by new types of online discovery and interaction.

If you didn’t make it to the TimesCenter yesterday, you’ll find video of all yesterday’s panels here (registration required). And let us know your takeaways from the day in the comments.

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Vox Media CEO and Chairman Jim Bankoff

In order to tell the story of Star Wars, George Lucas had to create a new technology company that was powerful enough to tell that story. The same thing has to happen in digital news publishing.

That’s the conclusion of Jim Bankoff, CEO and Chairman of Vox Media, whose sites The Verge and SB Nation have shaken up the world of tech and sports journalism.

“Story telling digitally is a native art just like broadcasting,” says Bankoff, who argues that publishers must build themselves in response to the shape of the web and its audiences.

In practical terms, this means building content that is tailored to the fractured, passionate communities that make up the web. The audience isn’t “sports fans” or people interested in “health” but rather New York Rangers fans or those suffering from gout. Bankoff also touted his company’s proprietary tech platform that he says allows writers to better tell stories.

Bankoff was speaking at a paidContent 2012 panel with incoming USA Today publisher Larry Kramer and John Paton, a longtime newspaper veteran who is now CEO of Digital First Media.

Kramer and Paton addressed the familiar challenge for newspapers of how to manage legacy structures while trying to keep pace with nimbler digital natives like Vox. Paton described newspapers’ longtime practice of repurposing existing content as a lousy strategy and predicted that papers’ cost-cutting phase would last another five years.

The upshot is that legacy news companies will remain hard-pressed to leverage their biggest advantage — powerful brand equity — fast enough to be part of the new publishing world.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Image courtesy of Angela Waye.

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I’m also thinking about the range of interviews on tap, including two I’m doing. As president of Condé Nast, Bob Sauerberg is managing the translation of some of the magazine industry’s most iconic brands to a variety of devices and formats. In some cases, CN has tried to revive a brand by going pure digital, most famously with Gourmet Live. We’ll talk about what Sauerberg has learned, how committed CN is to app distribution, whether magazine consortium Next Issue Media can gain any meaningful traction and more.

Jon Miller is the chief digital officer of News Corp., the home of tablet tabloid pioneer The Daily, as revolutionary in its own way as USA Today was in 1982, and of a lot of digital experiments and acquisitions with mixed results (including MySpace, an acquisition Miller didn’t make but had to unwind after numerous rescue attempts failed). A current fixation for the former AOL CEO: video across properties, including the Wall Street Journal and IGN, not just the traditional sources of Fox networks and studios. And through it all, News Corp. has to protect its traditional billions and cope with the constant image hits in the UK. The same internet that offers so much potential revenue also makes it easy for every ripple to go tidal wave.

Other one-on-ones include:

• betaworks CEO John Borthwick with GigaOM Founder Om Malik
• VC Fred Wilson with Mathew Ingram, who outlined some ideas here
• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo will talk with our legal writer Jeff Roberts about the challenges facing authors from copyright to consolidation to pricing
• Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne will talk to Laura Hazard Owen about taking a beloved brand digital
• Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Anil Dash about platforms, power and disruption.

And that’s just part of the day. Check out the complete schedule and the full list of confirmed speakers is here.

The remaining ickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of the opportunities that come with networking from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

Thanks to our sponsors for their support. If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Joshua Haviv].

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All of us at GigaOM and our sister site paidContent are into the final planning stages for our big media show on May 23 — paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads. As paidContent editor and conference chair Staci Kramer has described in her posts leading up to the conference, we’re going to be looking at a wide range of topics related to the disruption in the media industry, from newspapers to e-books, with a great lineup of speakers including Media News Group CEO Jim Paton, Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff and Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne. I’m looking forward to all of those sessions, but I’m also really looking forward to the two I’m moderating: an interview with Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter investor Fred Wilson and a panel with Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller of NBC News.

More than perhaps anyone else, Fred Wilson has been ahead of the curve when it comes to the potential of social media such as Twitter as a disruptive force both for the web and for traditional media as a whole — a track record that arguably began many years ago with his investment in GeoCities, an early web community that was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $3.57 billion. Since then, Wilson and Union Square have invested in a number of other prominent social networking players, including Zynga, design community Etsy.com, Foursquare, MeetUp and of course Twitter.

While Wilson hasn’t invested in anything that is specifically focused on media, you could argue (and I have) that Twitter is getting awfully close to being a media entity, if it isn’t already. Although virtually all of its content is produced by users, Twitter still has media-like aspects, including the ability to censor tweets if necessary. More recently, the company has been adding “curation”-type features thanks in part to its acquisition of Summify, and also hiring editors to create editorial products with partners, such as the one Twitter just announced with Nascar.

The Union Square partner has also said that the world of technology and the world of media need to figure out how to help each other, and I’m looking forward to asking him more about what he means by that. In a blog post, he confessed to being a reluctant pirate when it comes to trying to watch certain sporting events that he couldn’t find legal access to — so I’d like to know how he would advise media companies to handle traditional functions like time-based “windowing” and geo-blocking in a digital era.

What’s the impact of real-time media on politics?

On the political front, we’ve seen over the past year or so how the real-time nature of the social web can play havoc with political campaigns and spin doctors. Not only can the candidates themselves post their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook — an example of what web veteran and blogging pioneer Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct” — but those comments can snowball to the point where they take over the entire political agenda, as Hilary Rosen’s remarks about Mitt Romney’s wife being a stay-at-home mother did just a few weeks ago.

Whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing for the broader political and social sphere is something I’m planning to ask Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller, the head of digital for NBC News and the former CEO of National Public Radio. Are we just seeing a more high-speed version of the same spin cycle we’ve seen for years, or has social media changed the balance of power for the better? What is the impact of meme-trackers such as BuzzFeed, which has added a lot of political firepower with former Politico writer Ben Smith and others, or The Huffington Post (whose co-founder Jonah Peretti is also at paidContent 2012)?

One thing we know for sure is that the world has changed in some fundamental ways thanks to the power of the web and of social media like Twitter: since anyone can be a publisher or a journalist — even for a short time — with the push of a button, we now have an unprecedented ability to see and hear what is happening in places like Tahrir Square in Egypt or Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Politicians like former deputy British prime minister Lord Prescott say Twitter gives them “a connection to millions” without having to go through the “distorted prism” of the traditional media.

What the future holds for media companies and for society as a whole remains to be seen, but there’s no question we are going through a time of almost unprecedented disruption. I’m looking forward to hearing what Fred Wilson, Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller — and all of the other great speakers at paidContent 2012 — have to say about that future. Please join me at the Times Center in New York on Wednesday, May 23.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Nony Mata

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• On Friday, Facebook is set to flip the switch from years of hyped speculation to the reality of a mega-hyped IPO. It’s waiting for regulatory approval to spend $1 billion on Instagram. As I write this, the news is breaking that Pinterest is about raise a round that will follow it at $1.5 billion. A quick scan of our own news pages shows hundreds of millions being invested in the digital content ecosystem — often with a firm belief that there is revenue somewhere to justify those investments, but without any real sense of where it will come from. We’ll ask John Borthwick and Fred Wilson, among others, where they are investing and why.
• Cable and broadcast networks have been unveiling new programming slates into a more fragmented video universe than ever before. Discovery Communications bought Revision 3 for $30 million, Turner Broadcasting invested in Funny or Die. At the same time, YouTube’s $100 million investment in original programming is rolling out channel by channel, AOL is finally moving ahead with its major video plans, Yahoo is investing in original programs with Tom Hanks, Katie Couric and others — and so are Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. Brian Bedol, who is trying to replicate his success as a cable network founder with YouTube channels and other efforts; Lisa Gersh, president and COO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Rob Burnett, CEO of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, will take us inside their thinking as they make their way through The Video Boom.
• Just this week, one of our moderators turned from board member and adjunct professor to active exec again. That means Larry Kramer will be sitting down as president and publisher of USA Today with John Paton and Jim Bankoff to talk about what it takes to lead and innovate, to be a “new publisher.” Since paidContent 2011, Bankoff taken SB Nation, a network of sports sites, to Vox Media and added a tech vertical with The Verge and has a gaming vertical on the way. Paton, meanwhile, has added MediaNews to his Journal Register portfolio, and is now the the CEO of the much-larger DigitalFirst.

As much as things change, one goal remains the same: the creation and evolution of sustainable business models that will support quality media, entertainment and information across platforms.

We’ll be covering the topics that matter to you in our signature one-day, single-stage, 360-degree style. We have a stellar roster of speakers and moderators who are more than up for the task, including:

• Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp.
• Bob Sauerberg, President, Condé Nast
• Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
• Josh Marshall, Editor & Publisher, TalkingPointsMemo.com
• Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite
• Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer, WordPress and Founder, Automattic

The full list of confirmed speakers is here.

Just as important as the speakers, though, is the fact that we have great attendees with a lot to add to the discussion.

But space is limited and tickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of this jam-packed agenda and the opportunities that come with networking throughout the day from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

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While it won’t do much to ESPN viewership in the near term, it will surely put Yahoo Sports & its video efforts under pressure. Nice move Jim Bankoff (CEO of Vox). They have launched six shows as part of this effort. I loved the first episode of Shutdown Fullback, a college football show, that is very much like Digg Nation, except for football — the American one. It is hosted by EDSBS.com‘s Spencer Hall and SB Nation’s college football editor Jason Kirk. I will also be tuning into Team Reports as well – it is baseball season after all.

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