When I started Media Transparent one year ago, I used the tagline: “How the Social Media Converges with Mass Media”. This summer, I believe the Social Media has indeed become a Mass Media play, so now I’m changing the tagline to reflect the next movement in social media: “Media is the New Marketing”.

McLuhan’s 1960′s “the medium is the message” related to how media could control the masses’ perception of the world. Today’s social media does the same but gives voice to the “global village”, another well traveled Web 2.0 expression McLuhan coined. The 1960′s media spawned the Golden Age of Advertising, when Madison Avenue (Mad Men) was the internet of the day. Today, social media is destined to commercial application, and all business – small, medium and large – will be focused on harnessing the power of the Global Village to create a vast web of distributed content that intentionally supports and provides good will to the products and services they base their livelihood on. This is media, this is the new marketing.

My friend Tim White comments (on Facebook) on yesterday’s article: Anybody can become a Media Hub with new content distribution models:

In his updates from the CUNY New Business Models for News forum in Aspen, Jeff Jarvis discusses how a Salt Lake City newspaper acquired a real estate agency in order to sell houses as an alternative commercial venture.

Also here at Aspen, I was amazed and impressed to hear newspaper owner Dean Singleton tell some of us that his Salt Lake City paper has bought a realty agency and will list homes for a flat fee of a few thousand. Yes, the paper undercuts other agencies’ listings businesss. But, hey, the agencies have pretty much abandoned newspapers and newspapers still have readers and the ability to market homes in print and online. In Salt Lake’s case, the paper will send buyers – rather than sellers – to agencies that advertise.

When I worked in the newspaper industry way back at the start of the consumer web, I tried to convince papers to just this: to get into the real estate business to get homes into the listings and to get access to listings data. I thought I was going to be killed. But I believe that this was an inevitability.

Singleton’s move is the ecommerce strategy we presented in our models made substantial and real. We talked with the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel about their sales of wine, hangers, and hats. Selling homes is certainly bigger ticket. It monetizes the relationship papers have with readers in a new and smart way.

With the Breaking News Media Network, real estate brokerages and agents are using the same strategy, only opposite that of the media companies. They are building Breaking News city sites like Chico Breaking News in order to develop their community media presence as a branding vehicle. Note that the real estate participants in the Breaking News Network adhere to the idea that the sites are community services, so with a few exceptions, it’s almost impossible to see that a real estate brokerage or agent is behind them. Yet, their presence is always there because they are communicating with the community through the site. This is the new wave of marketing that real estate is beginning to adopt to attract the community for business rather than spam them to death with drip marketing techniques.

(tx h/t Tom Royce)

San Francisco’s “second” newspaper, the Examiner, launched Examiner.com last year not as the online equivalent for the San Francisco paper, but as a national forum for recruiting citizen journalists to report on the variety of topics a typical newspaper would cover. Participants set up blogs for their topic and city that allows them to develop a unique, granular voice. For example, one of the more popular “columnists” discusses San Francisco radio.

The mission behind Examiner.com is to create massive local blog networks covering as many topics as possible. The Examiner.com management then encourage their bloggers to virally market their blogs themselves, and provides pocket change incentive of $.01 per pageview.

In conclusion, Examiner.com is a great experiment taking an obscure local publishing brand and creating a new online journalistic (albeit not a professional journalist) business model. It melds its mass media name with the social media. I’ve signed on as a Social Media Examiner and will test the concept.

In any case, at least the Examiner is creative enough to try a new business model in light of the horrid newspaper advertising collapse now happening:

(fr. Techcrunch)

There is no market for a news weekly that regurgitates the news that happened ten days ago, daily newspapers have proven that. But good writing about current events will attract a specific and loyal reader.

The New York Times chronicles how Newsweek has redesigned to be a cross between The Economist and The New Republic by focusing on politics. Print publication is moving away from generalist to specialist, mass media to micromedia, with smaller audiences and advertising revenue opportunities. Some print publications, like Newsweek are upgrading their paper stock, and increasing their pricing. In simple terms, magazines are now trying to be… books.

One look at the book publishing industry today will tell you this is not the route to take. The magazine business model is dying in fits and starts by trying new directions, like Newsweek, to maintain journalistic relevancy. This is the usual course of the media… every new twist and turn seems to make the print marketplace smaller and smaller.

The magazine industry should look at who their customers are now – people who pick up magazines on the fly for something to read (probably because they forgot their iPhones), or people who pick up a free publication because it is… free. The supermarket tabloids, the free community press and local advertiser mags will continue to live on further, but they need to justify their cost of printing versus ad revenues.

The venerable NYTimes unveils TimesWire tomorrow in its attempt to “real time” its reporting. New articles are fed into TimesWire as soon as it’s published, but the stream of articles is slower than a ticker tape. I think it needs to open up to other journalistic sources to create a compelling stream of news and articles.

The moral of this story is: media organizations, even the NYTimes or CNN, can’t position themselves as the sole sources of news to a dedicated reader/viewership in this real time reporting world. News consumption will cross various media sources, from Twitter to blog feeds to the NYTimes. Media, both new and traditional properties, that can package and customize this real time news for distribution will attract traffic. That means any media organization trying to firewall their proprietary content behind subscriptions will ultimately fail unless it is provides tangible value, like stock trading data based on real time news feeds.

Tim O’Reilly’s comprehensive slideshow makes several points about the accelerating speed and syndication of information:

• The real time functionality of the new information distribution systems, elegantly demonstrated by Twitter, is critical to reporting.
• Social Networks facilitate content distribution, and media brands power content credibility

A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by what you pay attention to

• Advice to major brands like the New York Times: “build the platform and your customers and partners will build features before you do”. Note how the open source Twitter API spawned a riot of applications. The New York Times API, or other media brand APIs can potentially do the same thing – and leverage the content NYT creates and distributes.

Yes, I would like to see Tim’s narrative accompanying the keynote.

With media layoffs (McClatchy slashing 1,600 jobs today) and newspaper foldings becoming daily occurrences, editors no longer rely on sourcing stories from the decimated news rooms. They do what everybody else does – go online.

News media still needs to cover core breaking news – economy, politics, editorial, disasters, sports, local coverage – for credibility as news organizations. What’s being left behind are the topical news – arts, food, entertainment, real estate, fashion, home, books, travel – which seem more suited to coverage by bloggers or even corporations involved in the topic.

In real estate for example, I see more data being produced by real estate 2.0 companies that were once the province of commissioned media surveys. Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain tells me today that their just released survey of Realtors on the housing market was picked up by USA Today, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News. Last week, Trulia.com, an RE 2.0 site had their VP of Marketing Heather Fernandez talking about the Mortgage Relief Plan on KTVU television.

Content is still king, but production is no longer a journalistic monopoly. In fact, the old line producers have moved into a new rank and file of citizen producers, all of whom are competing for media attention. Companies like HomeGain and Trulia that provide the most original or compelling content get to showcase it in this new media system.

With the sudden closure of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News Friday and the publication of its epitaph video, the past week has been filled with speculation on the future of newspapers. David Cohn, of Spot.us, a collaborative funding source for journalist assignments, is chronicling topical articles on his Google Reader shared items. Recommended.

In sum, the future existence of newpapers must always return to the revenue model. The most radical being proposed is paradoxically a return to the old model of paid content. Walter Isaacson proposed the return of walled subscription services on February 5 in Time Magazine, and newspaper publishing company Hearst and Cablevision, owner of Newsday both just announced walled content initiatives.

The fifth estate’s laments focus on the value of their trade as monetizable, i.e. news is worth paying for. The problem with their argument is “free” news will always exist – through newspapers and journalists that won’t wall their content, through CNN, and via the bloggers and Twitterers who will distribute the free content. What else could a Newsday or SF Chronicle, or your local paper, add to the news that someone will pay for? Think about that.

The return of walled subscription services will put journalist value in a “put up or shut up” position that could threaten their entire value proposition. Duncan Riley dares newspapers to wall in content:

Why? because it will drive their readers to other sites, including blogs, and that’s good for business if you’re in the web publishing business.

It might also once and for all prove that the blogosphere doesn’t need newspapers as a primary source of news

Turning back the clock to the old world business model in which “we, the media, own the content” makes little sense. There’s a hint of disintermediation frustration behind the media’s stance. We know many citizen journalists already write about ideas and topics they know much better (through their life experience) than the beat reporter, and it remains to be seen what really will be called “news” in the future.

From the SF Chronicle itself: The SF Chronicle is ready to shut down if unions don’t accept pay cuts. The Bay Area public knows the Chronicle has been a second rate rag for a while now. Read the comments to this article to understand why nobody wants to read the Chronicle – lackluster, trivial content. Cutting staff that provides the content will just accelerate the death spiral. And they just bought new printing presses for June delivery? Cancel that order… prediction: Chronicle folds by year end.

Any hope? Sad for the newspaper guilds, but if content can be improved by recruiting citizen journalists / bloggers around the Bay Area (and many are good writers), it may cut expenses enough to provide some sort of business model.

The NY Post just fired their famous gossip columnist Liz Smith, who was making $125,000 annually for three columns per week. What does that mean? Simplistically, Liz’s $800 per column didn’t contribute the extra $800 ad revenue to keep her on… Any entertainment blogger would jump at the chance to replace her.

UPDATE: 2/26/09: Denver’s Rocky Mountain News shuts down tomorrow. They are even selling the website!

Why are print newspapers shutting down presses, and book publishers decrying where their readers went? Today’s NY Times essentially says this:

(Charts, of course, not based on actual statistics; for descriptive purposes only)

Consumers are increasingly avoiding newspapers — and books, too — because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.

The video mode has been reinforced by the rise of YouTube. In December, almost 100 million viewers in the United States watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos, according to comScore. Tellingly, YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership — it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen.