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Table des matières
veille décembre 2006
1 La France : le pays où le blog est roi (Atelier groupe BNP Paribas - 23/11/2006)Les Français sont accros aux blogs ! Selon une étude du cabinet Forrester Research, 3 % des Européens interrogés soit 4 millions de personnes, seraient des blogueurs dits "actifs", c’est-à-dire qui remettent leur blog à jour au moins une fois tous les trois mois. Et la France n’a pas à rougir de son score, car elle compterait 1 million de blogueurs, soit un quart du total européen. Pour mener à bien cette étude sur la blogosphère européenne, Forrester Research a interrogé 7 377 consommateurs en ligne en France, en Allemagne, en Italie, en Espagne, aux Pays-Bas, au Royaume-Uni et en Suède. L’Europe du Sud n’est pas en reste puisque la France, l’Italie et l’Espagne regroupent à eux trois 57 % des blogueurs européens. Et chose étonnante, l’Allemagne, ne compte, elle, que 13 % de blogueurs ! En outre, ceux qui possèdent leur propre blog utilisent également massivement l’outil Internet. 80 % d’entre eux consultent tous les jours leurs e-mails, 52 % déclarent consulter des quotidiens et des magazines en ligne et 50 % postent des commentaires en ligne. Au total, ces blogueurs passent en moyenne 16 heures actives en ligne par semaine, contre seulement 5 heures pour un internaute moyen. Et voilà une bonne nouvelle pour les publicitaires en ligne : 41 % des blogueurs interrogés ne sont pas gênés par les publicités liés à leurs centres d’intérêt, contre 34 % pour la totalité des internautes. 
2 La complémentarité print/web (Blog de Philippe Heymann du 25/11/06)Les "lecteurs" confirment la complémentarité entre l’écrit et le web. Ipsos Media et Seprem Etudes & Conseil viennent en effet de réaliser une enquête auprès des lecteurs et éditeurs , à la demande de la Fédération nationale de la Presse pour son Congrès. Et Nathalie Silbert, dans Les Echos de vendredi 24/11, en résume et clarifie les principaux éléments. Or les lecteurs de la presse nationale sont évidemment aussi des lecteurs de la presse et des webs d’entreprises ! Par rapport aux outils de la com., j’en retiens quelques enseignements ou confirmations. Et essentiellement ceci : les "lecteurs" attribuent trois fonctions principales à leur lecture et ,à chacune d’entre elles, correspond de plus en plus un type de media :
Voilà, je crois, une classification intéressante qui clarifie bien les rôles. Reste à l’appliquer au quotidien !
3 The future of newspapers (The Guardian du 13/11/06)The age of podcasts, war-zone bloggers, and countless other online information sources presents newspapers with arguably their biggest challenge ever. But how to react ? Is print heading for obsolescence ? Or can it re-invent itself and reach out to a generation brought up looking at screens ? Leading media figures tell Ian Burrell where we’re going from here Published : 13 November 2006 Steve Auckland, Associated Newspapers, head of free newspapers division If you look at the growth of free newspapers and put that on top of the decline of paid-fors I think we are still ahead of the game. There’s a hell of a lot more people reading newspapers in London than there were going back even two months. I think you’ll end up with some premium-branded newspapers, a bit like The Sunday Times has done with its £2 price, which will be far more niche-orientated. The ones that have got a clear definition as to what their market is are the ones that will survive. Love it or like it the Daily Mail has a very strong market, it has a right-wing bias and it really targets that quite heavily. It’s getting that niche and really working it. That’s where Metro has been successful, it’s a young, urban, travelling audience and it’s fulfilling a need for that audience at that place and time. We don’t want older readers and we don’t want young kids. Online we know we are not going to break the news first but we can be quirkier and get a cult image with that market. I don’t see it as a threat, just as another way that we can extend our brand. Helen Boaden, Head of news, BBC I think the challenge for traditional media is how they make money in this new world. No one’s really come up with an answer for it yet. But if you sit where I sit on the Tube every morning and watch under 30-year-olds avidly reading the Metro and gobbling up the information in it, I have no doubt that there’s still an appetite for the convenience of newspapers. People are still going to want information, but newspapers are going to have to find new and innovative ways of getting to them. The other thing is that the demographic of this country is getting older so you have got a lot of people who are traditional newspaper readers who will continue the habit they have had over a lifetime. The challenge is how to keep those people happy whilst bringing in a new audience of people who have infinite amounts of choice in terms of where they get their information. Newspapers, like the rest of us, have got to straddle two worlds, the old analogue world and the digital world or, in newspaper terms, the newspaper as against the podcast. Definitely for the short to medium term they are still around. But if I was running a newspaper what I would be worried about was how you actually make money. You might migrate a lot of your information and your audience to the web, but how do you make money out of it ? Or significant enough amounts of money not just for profits for shareholders, but enough to keep the editorial going. Tim Bowdler, CEO of Johnston Press We believe the industry is extraordinarily well-placed to continue to be a vitally important medium in the local markets in which we operate. That’s not to say that newspapers can remain unchanged and expect life to carry on as it has. Clearly the digital space is one where barriers to entry are lower and there’s a lot of competition, but we do have incredibly strong brands, incredibly close links with our communities and an unparalleled level of local content information and customer contacts. It’s a question of grasping the opportunity that these new channels provide to make sure we remain the preeminent local media company. With our Preston [Lancashire Evening Post multimedia newsroom] experiment we’ve found there has been a high level of enthusiasm among journalists to get involved in this new level of news reporting. We’ve had a huge growth in page impressions and unique users and are using the interactivity to shape the content of the newspaper. We will be rolling this initiative out across our group and plan to do so by the middle of next year. In Preston we have LEP News, an hourly news bulletin read by one of our journalists, and we have people trained to take out video cameras to record various items in the community. You can well see that developing with the inclusion of audiovisual advertisements. You can see how an audio visual channel delivered over broadband could become a part of our offering. Nicholas Coleridge, Managing director, Condé Nast Publications Newspaper reading is very important to me, a major habit of my life. Although I also get news from the radio and the internet, I never entirely believe it until I have seen it in print. I prefer reading newspapers with strong editorial personalities and built-in political bias, for example The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mail. Editorial spin doesn’t bother me - I like to know a newspaper’s point of gravity. News on the internet is generally too vanilla for my taste. The prospect of a world without newspapers is hideous. I often read six a day, the range of quality papers in Britain is one of the perks of living here. The Telegraph is still my paper of preference, though I am slightly anxious about it at the moment. It reads less decisively than it did, some of the old swagger is gone. I hope it comes back. The "magazineification" of newspapers is everywhere. I have no particular objection to it. It is actually quite difficult for newspapers to do it well, because newsprint is so inferior to magazine paper. The reason I buy newspapers, however, isn’t for stories that would be better done in monthly or weekly mags. I read newspapers for news, and the stories behind the news, political sketch writing (Quentin Letts in the Mail is the best), gossip and diary stories, and certain columnists (Charles Moore and Boris Johnson). I suspect that newspapers will continue to lose market share of advertising and circulation for the foreseeable future. Magazines have gained share for four consecutive years. Although I am a magazine man, it will be a tragedy if young readers lose the habit of reading newspapers, it really will be their loss. Jon Gisby, Head of Media Group, Yahoo ! Europe I was waiting for an easyjet flight in Paris airport the other day and there were two people clearly coming back from a hen night and looking at the English tabloids lined up outside the newspaper shop. One of them said "Don’t bother to buy it, we can check it out online when we get home." That was really startling because it was coming at a time when you should be shelling out 40p or 50p to kill some time on a flight with a newspaper. Are newspapers in crisis ? Yes, unless they reinvent themselves because readership is moving away from the printed form. Do they have a future ? Absolutely, but it’s a future that looks quite different from the one they’ve been used to. When you are putting content online, you need to use the brands that newspapers have around authentic news and quality journalism in a medium that’s more democratic and and interactive and slightly less tablets of stone. But my gut feel is that if I was an ambitious 21-year-old and had two job offers, one from traditional print and one was from online content or distribution, my guess would be that most people would take the online. A good way of determining whether an industry is in decline or not is to decide what you would do at the age of 21. Bill Hagerty, Editor of the ’British Journalism Review’ The printed newspaper is in crisis but of course it has a future. Multimedia has to be an answer. Look across the Atlantic to The Washington Post and The New York Times, have they got a future ? Not much. They said the Telegraph was the world’s first multimedia newsroom - you’ve got to be kidding. I went to The Washington Post and they’ve got the whole lot in there, radio, TV, online and print all sitting alongside one another. It’s a properly integrated multimedia operation. That’s the way that papers have to go. In terms of the printed newspaper, sure it’s in decline if you don’t do something. Stefano Hatfield, Editor of News International’s ’thelondonpaper’ I’ve spent the last three years in a boom sector, the free newspaper part of the newspaper world. It’s a ridiculous thought to think that newspapers shouldn’t evolve exactly as society all around them evolves. There’s a terrible tendency to hark back to the good old days but none of my team do ; we are living the moment and enjoying doing things a different way. It’s less about us sitting in ivory towers and preaching at readers and more about a two-way communication with readers. It’s not us pushing out our views to a grateful public in a didactic way, it’s about building a community between the editorial of the paper and the readers. People will still read newspapers. We and London Lite are putting out three-quarters of a million-plus a day and they are being read. It’s not that people won’t read any more, you just have to create the right sort of thing for them to read. I think there will always be room for a paid-for product although more and more papers will go free. Peter Hill Editor of the ’Daily Express’ Newspapers have got to get their costs rigorously under control because they can’t possibly spend at the rate at which some newspapers have been spending. We’ve more or less abandoned the idea of giving away free DVDs every week with The Daily Express because the cost is outrageous and there’s no retention (of readers), as anybody can see. I think that provided newspapers can make a profit they have a very long future. I think at Express Newspapers we’ve got it right. I think other people have got it wrong and could send themselves bust if they carry on spending the sort of money they’re spending. I’m talking about giving away things that cost £5 a copy for every extra copy sold. It doesn’t make any sense and in the end it will have to stop. I’m amazed that shareholders haven’t stepped in and started protesting about it. Millions upon millions of newspapers are sold every day and they are still extremely popular in this country. There’s no question about that. There’s a lot of competition from all sides, but I think newspapers have proved themselves immensely robust. They are essential to the life of the country and I do not see an end to newspapers, ever. People will always like to pick up newspapers as they will always like to pick up books. Would you want to read a book on the internet ? - I don’t think so. Nothing has yet been created that’s as easy to read as a newspaper, you can read it in bed, in the bath, in the kitchen, on the train. My son is eight years old and if he wants to be a newspaperman I’m quite sure newspapers will be there for him. Simon Kelner, Editor of ’The Independent’ In October 2003, the combined circulation of Britain’s four quality daily newspapers was 2,173,248. In October 2006, the combined circulation of Britain’s four quality daily newspapers was 2,198,449. So, incredible though it may seem, given the rush to predict the demise of this medium, more people are buying quality newspapers today than were doing so three years ago. Other sectors have fared less well - particularly the red-tops - but, if you include the growing distribution of free titles, many more people are reading newspapers today. And there is still an appetite to advertise in them. A very specific factor has driven the rising figures of quality papers : innovation. In September 2003, The Independent launched the compact revolution, followed soon afterwards by The Times, and last autumn The Guardian invested a huge sum in changing to the Berliner size. All these titles have gained circulation rewards for a willingness to innovate, and newspapers must continue to adapt to the changing needs of readers. Information is freely, and instantly, available from so many sources that a newspaper cannot naturally consider itself the first port of call for information. We must concentrate on our strengths and unique qualities. Newspapers have a tradition and authority that the online world cannot yet match ; we cover news in more depth and breadth than the broadcast media ; we have a voice, an attitude. In a world where everyone has a blog, there will be a premium on sober analysis, skilled editing, and authoritative comment. But our most pressing challenges may turn out to be more prosaic ones : how to maintain quality while tackling the rising cost of producing newspapers against a background of cover prices that are too low and the fragmentation of the advertising market. We need to be as clever about how we produce our papers as we do about what goes in them. Will Lewis, Editor of the ’Daily Telegraph’ Part of the reason we are embracing and trying to dominate the digital world is because we think it will produce better newspapers. It depends on how you look at the current situation. Either you get down in the dumps about it - as readers and advertisers move off rather rapidly to reading and watching stuff outside of newspapers - or you embrace it. You say : "Wait a minute, if we produce a brilliant digital sports offering are we more or less likely to drive people into our brilliant newspaper sports section ?" I’m absolutely convinced that it’s a virtuous circle. That brilliant journalism during the day will drive people into wanting to have our brilliant journalism in the newspaper in the morning. I fell in love with the Telegraph by reading the newspaper’s sports section. The issue we face is that quite a lot of people aged 15 may not get their hands on a Telegraph sports section but they will see our fantastic Ashes coverage (online) and they will undoubtedly go "We’ll have a bit more of that, thank you," and move into the newspapers. If you own a story online during the day there is concrete evidence that that pushes people into the coverage the next day. Don’t fall off your chair, but brilliant journalism wins on the web. When Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes something on the web millions of people read it around the world. When Sir John Keegan writes something it soars to the top of our charts. The web is now in danger of being dominated by the regurgitation of substandard words and images, so if you can stand aloof from that, if you can ensure you are producing great stuff, then people will come and use it. We absolutely think it’s possible to produce two fantastic newspapers and at the same time a raft of digital products and services. Andrew Marr, Broadcaster Are newspapers doomed ? Absolutely not. Although there’s an enormous amount of online news-related material, if you analyse it, very, very little is actually new fact, new information - it’s almost all parasitic journalism carried out either by broadcasters or newspapers. So you have an enormous, gabbling opinionated commentariat which has sort of bubbled up over the past 10 years, but what you have not got, obviously, is a new source of original proper journalism, because that costs money and someone has to pay for it. I don’t see anyone on the internet with the financial resources to start to recruit, never mind train, frontline, investigative, serious reporting journalists. Those newspapers that focus particularly on hard reporting will be the ones that survive because that’s the thing the internet cannot do. That’s the USP of newspapers. Piers Morgan, Former editor of the ’Daily Mirror’ Every newspaper has a great future online. End of story. Within five years every newspaper will be free and they’ll all be online. And if they’re not, they should be. There will still be a presence in print but that will be for older readers and you will find that anybody under the age of 35 will only read newspapers online. It will be the newspapers who are the most dynamic online who win. Any newspaper editor or proprietor who believes they will escape this inevitable translation from newsprint to online will get buried. They are under a massive misapprehension. If newspapers do it right and invest now they will be successful and make lots of money. It’s not the death of the paper. It’s the morphing of the paper from a print version to online. Gavin O’Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and chief operating officer, Independent News & Media Despite the basic fact that newspapers still happily represent the second largest medium in the world - in terms of advertising billings and user consumption - it would be hard to believe this when one has to contend with all the negative commentary about ours being a "dying industry", and the rather tired conventional wisdom about all things digital and online. I think there is a clear bias these days by media commentators/analysts to wantonly beat up on newspapers - to the exclusive benefit of digital/online. Nothing is ever that black or white in life, nor is media consumption mutually exclusive. However, this constant campaign of misinformation - and my industry’s apparent inability to bat it back convincingly up to now - only perpetuates the problem. It has a real negative impact on the investor perceptions about newspaper companies and capital flow, not to mention the confidence of the industry among newspaper executives. And as we know, confidence begets confidence. Rather than accepting the tired view that newspapers are dying, we should remember that 439 million people worldwide buy a newspaper every day. Global newspaper circulation sales (paid-for titles) increased by 0.56 per cent in 2005 and by no less than 6 per cent over the past five years. We are the world’s second-largest advertising medium (30.2 per cent), exceeding the combined spend on radio, outdoor, cinema, magazines and the internet. In the past five years, more than $6bn (£3.2bn) has been invested in newspaper technology. Importantly, despite this short-term market disaffection, it is interesting to see a rise in "public to private" private equity deals - where clearly the private equity boys see real durability in the future cash flows of newspaper companies. They see real business sustainability. Ian Reeves, Editor of ’Press Gazette’ It’s certainly a crossroads but with lots of different routes out. The choices that the big publishers make now are hugely significant as to what shape the industry will be in 20 years from now. Nobody can be remotely confident that the path they are choosing is the right one, that’s the great conundrum. For me I think it’s all about grasping the opportunities that technology affords you. Those companies that are experimenting with a lot of things and allowing their talented people to try different propositions out are the ones that are going to work their way through it the best. John Ridding, CEO, ’Financial Times’ There’s no doubt that we are seeing the biggest changes and challenges to the newspaper industry for a generation, and certainly for the 19 years I have been at the FT. But from where I sit the doom and gloom is way overdone. We are seeing good momentum, we are firmly back in the black and are positive about our prospects. In a time of industry disruption and fragmentation it’s all about defining your audience and being clear about what makes you different and essential. For us, a powerful force has been the globalisation of business. We have been in step with that trend and that strategy is paying off now. How and when people consume news has clearly changed with online development and channels. From our perspective we have been investing in quality journalism for years and content is for us a competitive advantage. Online is more of an opportunity than a threat because it gives us new channels through which to reach our audience. Alan Rusbridger, Editor of ’The Guardian’ I feel broadly optimistic. There are two important things to consider about revenue. One is that advertisers follow the audience. If you’ve got an awful lot of people in the demographic that advertisers want to reach using the web then advertisers will go there. The second thing is that Google has definitively demonstrated that there’s an awful lot of money to be made from selling advertising against content and there’s no point in complaining about Google, they’ve just been smarter than anybody else. The trouble is that Google is taking 85 per cent of revenue and we have to get some of that. There are signs that the long-term economic model could be there. The problem is to get from here to there and that’s the difficult bit. There’s nothing I can do about print. That will be largely a combination of three things : the technologies that people invent, the habits of the audience and the economics of print - none of which I can do anything about. As an editor I have to make sure that The Guardian is available in any form the consumer wants. In the average week we distribute The Guardian on eight or nine different platforms and one of those is print. There’s nothing I can do if the trend is that people are moving away from print. Print is important and is where a lot of the revenue is. I don’t think it’s going to disappear overnight but I think you have to be alive to whether a lot of the energy around what you are producing is actually not in print. Journalistically, the burden that we bear, which is enormous editorial costs - which no one else in the digital world is going to want to assume - is also our greatest strength. John Ryley, Head of Sky News Do they have a future, yes I think they do. But I’m about to catch a train from Washington to New York, it’s 7.40am, there are 30 people waiting to catch the train, and half of them are either on BlackBerries or mobile phones. Two of them are reading newspapers and that’s it. A Financial Times and a Washington Post. Both the readers are in their late forties. That for me is quite a symbolic illustration of the future. This is in Washington, arguably the most opinionated city in the most powerful economy in the world. The idea that people will buy a hard copy of a newspaper and pay 75p or a £1 for it, at a kiosk or counter and take it away, that ain’t going to be around forever. But the idea of a newspaper generating and publishing content just like a television organisation I suppose will be where the future goes. It all comes down to the delivery system, or to use that horrible television word, the platform. It’s easy to write off newspapers and I don’t think their decline is imminent - they’ve been around for 300 years or whatever. But there’s a shift taking place in the way that people find out what’s going on in the world. Chris Ward, Commercial director, MSN Clearly the whole media landscape is changing and being driven by the way consumers are taking up new technology. It’s changing the way people consume media and they’re much more in control. Whereas 10 years ago I read a newspaper, watched TV and listened to certain radio stations, I can pretty much now circumnavigate all of that and put together my own media schedule and decide when and if to consume the marketing messages that come with it. Newspapers are not going to die. But they need to embrace digital at the same time. Obviously they have a massive challenge because they have been hugely profitable but consumers are starting to vote with their feet and it’s the consumers who will drag the advertisers away from print media and into digital. That’s what we are seeing at the moment. Newspapers have a lot of great content but they need to make that available to people wherever they are and wherever they are consuming as digital consumers. If they are prepared to make their content available in that way and start thinking about new business models in order to generate revenue then I think they will thrive. There will always be people who want to buy and read newspapers but the number who buy them regularly will diminish over time and we might start to see some rationalisation because it’s going to be difficult to sustain those revenues. I know that privately newspapers are predicting very low (advertising) revenue growth next year, whereas online will grow another 50-60 per cent. That tells a story in itself. John Humphrys, Presenter of the ’Today’ programme The idea of society functioning without newspapers in one shape or form is simply preposterous. If they don’t survive, heaven help all of us. The question is what form they take and I would be absolutely astonished if within the foreseeable future they didn’t remain in their current form. We love newspapers. Obviously we are not buying them in the same numbers we did. They have been through this sort of crisis before and I have lost track of the times we have discussed the imminent demise of newspapers. But whenever a newspaper comes up for sale, you get killed in the rush, everyone wants to buy it. How come ? There are plenty of people like me, and I accept that I’m an old fart but, nonetheless, I loathe reading newspapers online and I love picking up a newspaper and reading it. I refuse to believe I’m alone. I’ve got kids who like newspapers and don’t like reading stuff online and they are in their thirties. And sooner or later we will explode the blog myth. The idea that you can click on to a few dozen blogs and find out what’s going on in the world is nonsense. It’s fun but that’s all it is. I don’t want to get my information from blogs but from carefully thought out newspapers. Newspapers are the people who employ reporters who go out to find the news. They have done that for a long time and will continue to do that. Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport Of course technology is changing our lives and the internet has created its own revolution in the lives of millions of us. Sometimes it is possible to overstate the scale, pace and even public enthusiasm for change. There will, I believe, for a long time to come, be an appetite for newspapers that increasingly offer news and views in a way that is distinctive and unconstrained by the rules that govern public service broadcasters. This difference is implicitly understood by the wider public. Of course there are generational differences and the challenge for newspapers is to use their creative talent to inspire, educate and inform a new generation. Sir Martin Sorrell, Ceo WPP Group The answer is yes they do have a future, but they probably have to adapt to the digital revolution. If I take the specific example of analytical comment on stock-market events, breakingviews.com or lex.com can give me immediate info and analysis of the impact. For example, when I was at Davos a couple of years ago and Procter (& Gamble) took over Gillette, I had analysis of that much more quickly than if I had had to wait for the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. It’s about how you define papers. In Korea, Ohmynews is a citizens’ paper. They employ about 25,000 journalists and pay them $20 a story. It was created by two ex-journalists, using citizen journalists, and they’ve had two of the biggest scoops in Korea in the past year. Over time, old and new media will fuse. As far as the profitability of newspapers is concerned, I doubt whether they will be as profitable in future. I was in New York last week and was told that Gannett has effectively fused all its editorial departments, so it has got one information desk that is feeding all the media it has across the country. Newspapers are not dead. I think they will continue to develop. Young people are not reading as many newspapers as before and that’s a worry, but newspapers are going to have to adapt to that. Immediacy is key. Nathan Stoll, Global head of Google News I would say that it’s certainly the case that technology is disruptive and I think it’s definitely a challenging time because of that. But I don’t think new technology is a threat but an opportunity. My sense is that newspapers will continue to exist [but] the forms are still being experimented with, the ones that are going to work out long-term. Think about sites like Ohmynews which has emerged in the past few years and has more than 40,000 citizen journalists, or even The New York Times experimenting with its TimesSelect model - or The Wall StreetJournal opening up some of its content which was once all behind a pay wall. I definitely believe that original quality journalism will always succeed. Les Hinton, Executive chairman, News International The choice is easy for newspaper executives and editors : we can be transfixed by the headlights of the oncoming internet train, or grasp the opportunity. This is a tumultuous time and we have to refashion our business models, but the good news is that never has the media been able to reach more people more instantly with richer content. The Times has been around since 1785, yet its journalism has never been more widely read - by nearly 10 million a month online alone, and still climbing. If you have great brands and great content, that is pretty well all that life is about. But we have to use our imagination to continually reinvent the manner in which we keep our brands popular. Bright new low-cost start-ups will keep cropping up ready to chip away at our businesses. So we have to be nimble enough create our own versions. Yes, classified is moving to the web ; but many papers are using their powerful brands to drive traffic to fast developing websites. And those websites are getting really interesting. Andy Duncan, CEO, Channel 4 Newspapers face significant challenges. Whether you are talking about the music industry, television, radio or newspapers, they have to adapt to a fast-moving environment. The biggest challenge to newspapers is the generation gap. Over a certain age there’s an established base of loyal readers who will carry on reading newspapers until they die. The big challenge is how to bring in the younger generation. I wouldn’t be incredibly gloomy in terms of the future of newspapers, but equally I don’t think they can afford to be complacent. In most cases you have very strong brands, you have a clear proposition in terms of what the newspapers are offering in editorial line and you’ve got a pretty loyal customer base. Those are all things to build on. The newspaper groups that do best will be the ones that transition most effectively to new platforms.
4 Wikipedia est-elle menacée ? (Transnets du 29/11/06)Citizendium (l’encyclopédie qui veut marier participation massive et sanction des experts dont j’ai parlé hier) se donne comme objectif officiel de déplacer Wikipedia. Pour y parvenir elle partira du contenu fourni par... Wikipedia elle-même. La licence “copyleft GFDL”, m’a expliqué Larry Sanger, l’animateur de Citizendium par courriel “nous permet de bifurquer”, c’est-à-dire de développer un nouveau projet sur la base du contenu existant. L’expérience, poursuit-il, tient à ce que “nous demandons aux experts et au public de travailler ensemble”. En cas de conflit, “si c’est à propos du contenu les experts auront le dernier mot ; si c’est une affaire de comportement, ce sera le tour des responsables de communauté que nous appelons ‘constables’.” La difficulté de fond, a expliqué Sanger lors d’une conférence récente, est que les experts (en particulier les universitaires) ont en général des pratiques opposées à ce qui caractérise la “culture web 2.0_ : aux approches simples et bottom-up, ils préfèrent souvent la complexité et se sentent confortables au sein de bureaucraties. Pas tous. Wikipedia a déjà fait évoluer beaucoup de monde. Les jeunes ont une attitude différente. Le fossé “pourrait se réduire dans les années qui viennent.” Il espère que son modèle y contribuera en “combinant dynamisme et fiabilité” mais reconnaît dans son courriel que “nous ne pouvons pas garantir qu’il n’y aura pas de nombreux conflits”. Mais qui décide qu’un/e expert/e est un/e expert/e ? Pour Sanger, ce sont “des gens qui en savent beaucoup sur un sujet, qui sont reconnus par différents mécanismes sociétaux pour cette connaissance”. En voilà un piège. Les mécanismes sociétaux en question ne sont pas neutres. Ils tendent souvent à bloquer l’émergence de savoirs nouveaux à imposer des critères qui ne sont pas tous fonction des connaissances. Et puis Wikipedia évolue et s’est dotée de structures permettant de mieux “contrôler l’intelligence collective” pour reprendre une formule qui commence à s’imposer. Il n’est pas certain que le système qui filtre les experts sur la base de leur reconnaissance par les institutions traditionnelles sera meilleur que celui qui laisse émerger les meilleurs parmi des millions de participants. Les deux pourraient tendre à se rapprocher, mais alors il serait extrêmement difficile pour Citizendium de rattraper son retard, moins en termes de contenu qu’en raison de la popularité bien établie de Wikipedia. On comprend que le meilleur endroit pour se renseigner sur Citizendium soit... Wikipedia. Les responsables, au demeurant, se réjouissent officiellement de cette concurrence au nom du principe selon lequel plus il y a d’information libre (gratuite, ouverte) accessible à tous, mieux c’est pour tout le monde. Croyez-vous que Citizendium puisse s’imposer ? Est-ce vraiment l’enjeu ?
5 L’Express rajeunit sa formule et cherche à féminiser son lectorat (Le Figaro du 22/11/06)PRESSE. L’Express veut séduire les lectrices. À partir de demain, le supplément encarté dans le news magazine ne s’appellera plus L’Express Mag mais L’Express Styles. « Un titre qui fait appel aux dimensions essentielles du plaisir, de l’évasion », souligne le directeur de la rédaction de L’Express, Christophe Barbier, qui a succédé en septembre à Denis Jeambar. Les pages cultures, arts et spectacles seront ainsi rapatriées dans le news, dont les rubriques seront elles-mêmes réorganisées. Cette migration permettra aux sujets « féminins » de L’Express Styles de gagner 6 à 7 pages. Un renvoi de ce supplément figurera en appel de une de l’hebdomadaire. De quoi susciter l’achat au numéro. L’Express compte 360 000 abonnés dont le nombre « progresse régulièrement » et « seulement » 70 000 acheteurs au numéro. Cette nouvelle formule cible aussi et surtout les annonceurs. « Les relais de croissance sont dans les univers de la mode, de la beauté, du luxe, des voitures », indique Christophe Barbier. La publicité représente la moitié des recettes de l’hebdomadaire. Autre relais de croissance : le site Internet dans lequel les lecteurs doivent pouvoir retrouver « l’expertise » du magazine. Douze journalistes travaillent exclusivement sur le site. Ces réaménagements s’inscrivent dans la volonté du nouvel actionnaire, le belge Roularta, de doubler la marge opérationnelle (5 % actuellement) du groupe Express-Expansion d’ici à trois ans. Une clause de cession est ouverte jusqu’au 31 décembre. Une vingtaine de journalistes (dont dix pigistes permanents) est déjà partie. La rédaction compte une centaine de personnes.
6 Vers le web 3.0 ? (InternetActu.net du 21/11/2006)“Le web 2.0, qui décrit la capacité de relier sans couture des applications (comme la cartographie) et des services (comme le partage de photographies) via l’internet, est devenu ces derniers mois le centre d’attention de toutes les sociétés de la Silicon Valley. Pour autant, l’intérêt commercial pour le Web 3.0 - ou “le web sémantique” - émerge seulement maintenant. L’exemple classique de l’ère du Web 2.0 est le mashup - par exemple, un site web de location de vacances relié aux cartes de Google pour créer un service nouveau et plus utile qui montre rapidement, sur une carte, la liste des locations disponibles. Le Saint Graal des promoteurs du web sémantique consiste en un système capable de donner une réponse raisonnable et complète à une question simple du type : “Je recherche un endroit chaud pour les vacances. J’ai un budget de 3 000 dollars. Ah, et nous avons un enfant de 11 ans.” Répondre à une telle question aujourd’hui peut exiger des heures de tri dans des listes distinctes de vols, hôtels et locations de voitures, qui proposent des options souvent contradictoires. Avec le web 3.0, la requête appellerait une réponse cohérente, aussi méticuleusement assemblée que si elle l’avait été par un agent de voyage humain. Comment de tels systèmes s’établiront-ils, et quand commenceront-ils à fournir des réponses signicatives, commence à être le sujet de discussion de nombreux chercheurs et d’experts”, explique John Markoff pour le New York Times (enregistrement obligatoire). Pour Markoff, ce web 3.0 s’appuie sur la fouille des connaissances humaines, comme Google l’a exploitée avec son Page Rank (qui interprète les liens d’une page web à une autre comme un vote). Et de donner une somme d’exemples à sa thèse : “Nous allons d’un web de documents connectés à un web de données connectées”, explique Nova Spivack, de Radar Networks, une start-up qui exploite le contenu de sites de réseaux sociaux et qui signalait il y a peu, sur son blog, son ras-le-bol du web 2.0 (“Détruire le mythe du web 2.0_). KnowItAll, issu d’un groupe de recherche de l’université de Washington, extrait et agrège l’information de sites de critiques de produits pour donner des informations compréhensibles à l’usager. Ainsi, aujourd’hui, pour avoir une information sur un voyage, vous devez passer en revue de longues listes de commentaires glanées sur le web. Avec le web 3.0, le système vous classera tous les commentaires et trouvera, par déduction cognitive, le bon hôtel pour votre besoin particulier. “Dans son état actuel, le web est souvent décrit comme étant dans sa phase Lego, avec plein de parties différentes capables de se connecter les unes aux autres. Ceux qui portent la vision d’une prochaine phase, le web 3.0, le voient comme une ère où les machines commenceront à faire des choses apparemment intelligentes.” “Il est clair que la connaissance humaine est plus exposée aux machines qu’elle ne l’a jamais été”, explique Danny Hillis de Metaweb. Des systèmes d’intelligence artificielle, comme Cyc, qui combinent des bases de règles classiques à l’analyse des contenus du web, pourraient permettre d’exploiter toujours mieux cette incroyable base de donnée que constitue aujourd’hui le web pour fournir des réponses à des questions complètes. A moins, pense le responsable de la recherche de Yahoo !, que le salut ne vienne de l’intervention agrégée des utilisateurs : “Avec FlickR, vous trouvez des images qu’un ordinateur ne pourrait pas trouver. Des problèmes qui nous on défiés depuis 50 ans, deviennent brusquement triviaux.”
7 Publicité : le devoir d’être aimé (La Tribune, 29/11/2006)La semaine de la publicité qui se déroule actuellement est l’occasion de s’interroger sur sa fonction dans notre société, et la nature de la relation, souvent ambivalente, qu’elle entretient avec chacun d’entre nous, consommateur, citoyen ou professionnel. Ambivalente pour tous, y compris pour le publicitaire que je suis, qui n’est, pas moins que d’autres, choqué par certains excès quantitatifs ou dérapages qualitatifs de la publicité. Une récente étude a montré que le rapport des Français à la publicité évoluait peu dans le temps : le faible taux de publiphobes invétérés n’est pas plus élevé que le faible taux de publiphiles absolus. Finalement, la publicité, c’est comme la télé, on est ni pour ni contre : cela dépend des émissions. La fonction économique de la publicité est rarement contestée car elle est peu contestable. La publicité est, comme le démontre, chiffres à l’appui, une thèse rendue publique cette semaine par l’Union des annonceurs, un facteur déterminant de la croissance économique. Innovation et communication sont donc bien deux des mamelles de la croissance. L’une va toujours mieux avec l’autre. C’est pourquoi le plus grand danger qui guette la publicité n’est pas celui que l’on croit. Il ne vient pas des casseurs de pub, ceux qui taguent occasionnellement les affiches dans le métro ou font un « sitting » une fois par an dans les locaux du BVP, pour se faire leur propre pub, en rêvant d’un monde sans consommation, donc sans emploi. Non, le plus grand danger qui guette aujourd’ hui la publicité est sa propre banalité. Vous êtes-vous jamais demandé pourquoi la plupart des gens qui zappent la pub à la télé n’arrivent jamais en retard au cinéma pour éviter les pubs ? Tout simplement parce que la qualité moyenne d’un écran cinéma est très supérieure à celle d’un écran publicitaire en télévision. Dans un monde numérique où les gens pourront de plus en plus faire le choix de zapper les écrans publicitaires, la publicité n’a pas d’autre issue que de cultiver sa fonction qualitative et divertissante. Marquer sa différence Quand on s’invite tous les soirs à table à l’ heure du dîner, une certaine politesse s’impose. La qualité publicitaire était autrefois une opportunité. Elle est devenue une nécessité existentielle pour la publicité tout entière. Mais vous aimerez aussi la publicité de demain pour d’autres raisons que sa qualité et son obligation à vous divertir pour vous dissuader de zapper. Vous l’aimerez pour sa capacité à vous surprendre là où vous ne l’attendez pas, dans le monde réel comme dans le monde virtuel. C’est ce que Lee Clow, le publicitaire californien de Steve Jobs depuis le lancement d’Apple, appelle « Media Arts » : l’art de dire des choses différentes des autres, là où ils ne sont pas. Dans un monde de plus en plus digital où les messages et les médias se démultiplient, où l’on fréquente plusieurs médias en même temps, les marques ont besoin de se démar quer t out aut ant par l e mode de diffusion de leur message que par le contenu de celui-ci. Et rien n’est plus efficace que de toucher les gens par une voie jamais utilisée auparavant. Les exemples ne manquent pas, comme Adidas qui a créé au Japon la première affiche vivante où deux footballeurs suspendus à 200 mètres de hauteur sur un gratte-ciel jouaient au « vertical football » pour démontrer qu’« Impossible is nothing »ou Absolut Vodka à New York qui est devenu le sujet d’un épisode entier de « Sex in the City », car l’un des héros, Hunk, avait décidé de poser nu dans une affiche Absolut sur Time Square. Citons aussi Hollywood Chewing-Gum en France qui a créé la première publicité « en direct » pendant la « Star Academy » ou encore BNP Paribas qui organise le Roland-Garros Virtual Tour, un grand tournoi de tennis virtuel en parallèle du Roland-Garros réel. À l’image enfin de la SNCF qui, pour les 25 ans du TGV, fait traverser tout Paris à un TGV pour l’exposer au Trocadéro... Métier à réinventer Les marques vont de plus en plus vous surprendre par la capacité d’inventer leur propre média. Demain, tous les sites Web des marques deviendront des Web TV diffusant 24 heures sur 24. Un nouveau métier s’invente, nommé le « connections planning » : la capacité à inventer des nouveaux modes de contact entre les marques et les gens. C’est une révolution culturelle qui est en marche aujourd’ hui dans les agences, et qui les oblige à marier plus que jamais les compétences et les métiers. C’est pourquoi l’erreur historique qui a consisté à séparer les agences créatives des agences médias doit impérativement être réparée. Les idées doivent dès le départ intégrer leur futur mode de diffusion afin de maximiser leur efficacité. Le métier est à réinventer, et c’est une chance pour tous ceux qui le rejoignent. Dans ce nouveau monde de la publicité, elle devra briller plus par sa qualité et moins par sa quantité. Un monde où la publicité n’aura pas d’autre issue que de se faire aimer...
8 Have Camera Phone ? Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service (NYT, du 04/12/2006)Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public. Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video. “There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images,” said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group. He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers. “This is looking out and saying, ‘What if everybody in the world were my stringers ?’ ” Mr. Ahearn said. The project is among the most ambitious efforts in what has become known as citizen journalism, attempts by bloggers, start-up local news sites and by global news organizations like CNN and the BBC to see if readers can also become reporters. Many news organizations turned to photographs taken by amateurs to supplement coverage of events like the London subway bombing and the Asian tsunami. Yahoo’s news division has already used images that were originally posted on Flickr, the company’s photo-sharing site. For example, it created a slide show of images from Thailand after the coup there in September. Camera phone videos are increasingly making news themselves. Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer on “Seinfeld,” was recorded last month responding to hecklers in a nightclub with racially charged epithets. The video was posted on TMZ, the celebrity news site. The Yahoo-Reuters project will create a systematic way to incorporate images covering a wider range of topics into news coverage. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to upload photos and videos to a section of Yahoo called You Witness News (news.yahoo.com/page/youwitnessnews). All of the submissions will appear on Flickr or a similar site for video. Editors at both Reuters and Yahoo will review the submissions and select some to place on pages with relevant news articles, just as professional photographs and video clips are woven into their news sites today. “People don’t say, ‘I want to see user-generated content,’ ” said Lloyd Braun, who runs Yahoo’s media group. “They want to see Michael Richards in the club. If that happens to be from a cellphone, they are happy with a cellphone. If it’s from a professional photographer, they are happy for that, too.” Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events. For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo. Before photographs or videos are used on the Yahoo site or distributed by Reuters, photo editors at Reuters will try to vet them to weed out fraudulent or retouched images. This is an imperfect process. Last summer, a blogger discovered that photos of the conflict in Lebanon by a freelance photographer working for Reuters had been digitally altered. Reuters stopped using the photographer and withdrew his work from its archive. The company is now trying to develop software that will help detect altered photographs. The arrangement with Yahoo is one of several initiatives by Reuters to use the Internet to bring new sources to its news report. It has invested $7 million in Pluck, a company that distributes content from blogs to newspapers and other traditional media outlets. It has also backed two more experimental ventures : NewAssignment.net, an effort to foster reporting that combines the work of professional journalists with input from online readers, and Global Voices, a collection of blogs from less-developed countries. Yahoo has its own ambitious plans for the You Witness News service. The images received will be used on its sports and entertainment sites. Over time, it wants to expand to local news and high school sports. And it will consider allowing users to contribute articles as well as images. For now, both Yahoo and Reuters are concerned that they do not have the resources to edit and verify such articles. “News has special constraints on content quality,” said Elizabeth Osder, a senior director for product development at Yahoo. “If we publish text, we want to review it.” CNN, which is owned by Time Warner and introduced its I-Reports section for user-submitted material on its site in August (www.cnn.com/exchange/), accepts text, images and video. Some submissions are included in its news broadcasts. “Even the best reporters in most cases are approaching the story from the outside in,” said Mitch Gelman, the executive producer of CNN.com. “What a participant observer can offer is the perspective on that story from the inside out. We feel as a news organization we need to provide both to offer full coverage to our audience.” Yahoo and Reuters will have other competitors besides mainstream news organizations when it comes to attracting submissions. People with compelling video, for example, may want the instant gratification of putting it on YouTube, the giant video site owned by Google, or some other site. “The average person witnesses something that is considered news once every 10 years,” said Steve Rosenbaum, who created MTV Unfiltered, one of the first viewer-contributed video programs on television. “When it’s time to put something on the Internet, they will put it in the place they have used before. The numbers tell us that is YouTube.” Indeed, Yahoo has had some trouble attracting submissions for another high-profile initiative, an effort to solicit videos for a site created jointly with Current, the cable network started by former Vice President Al Gore. As of Friday, that site is no longer accepting new videos. Moreover, said Mr. Rosenbaum, who now runs Magnify Media, which helps Web sites post video contributions, it might be difficult to get the right sort of submissions. “If you are asking your audience to know what is a national news story of interest to the world, it seems to me there are only two results : whether you get flooded with lots of car fires, or you get nothing. Neither is a particularly good effect.”
9 "La France rattrape son retard dans le numérique" (lemonde.fr du 12/12/06)Le ministre de la culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, estime que les nouvelles technologies vont stimuler l’industrie des programmes. La chaîne française d’informations internationales, France 24, a vu le jour le 6 décembre, après de nombreuses péripéties. A-t-elle les moyens de son ambition ? C’était un défi attendu, le voilà réalisé. Dans l’arc-en-ciel des télévisions d’informations internationales, il manquait la couleur de la France, celle de la liberté d’information. Quant au budget, il est à la hauteur de la concurrence. Je serai vigilant pour accompagner les développements ultérieurs de la chaîne si nécessaire. S’agrègent à la rédaction de France 24 les correspondants de l’Agence France-Presse (AFP) dans le monde et de Radio France Internationale (RFI), qui donnent une vraie crédibilité à la chaîne. Que répondez-vous aux salariés de TV5, qui estiment que le lancement de France 24 se fait à leur détriment ? A chacun sa vocation. TV5 existe et existera pour la promotion de la langue française et la francophonie. Le gouvernement lui apporte un vrai soutien politique. Les salariés de TV5 Monde n’ont pas d’inquiétude à avoir pour leur avenir. Le contrat d’objectif et de moyens (COM) de France Télévisions pour la période 2006-2010 n’est toujours pas signé. Pourquoi ? Ce n’est pas juste une question budgétaire. Je suis exigeant quant aux contenus. A mes yeux, il y a quatre objectifs prioritaires : le soutien à la création audiovisuelle et cinématographique ; la place accordée à la culture et au pluralisme de l’information ; la diversité de la représentation de la société française ; et la place donnée au débat démocratique. Enfin, je souhaite que France Télévisions soit le fer de lance des évolutions technologiques. Ces objectifs sont les garants de la différenciation du groupe, car la banalisation serait fâcheuse. Patrick de Carolis penche pour une hypothèse d’évolution à 3 %, j’en prends acte. De mon côté, je souhaite que soit pris en compte la nécessité d’un soutien renforcé à la création. Etes-vous d’accord avec Patrick de Carolis quand il affirme que le "virage éditorial" qu’il avait promis est bien engagé ? Patrick de Carolis a pris des engagements devant le CSA. A lui de les tenir. Je constate des initiatives qui s’inscrivent dans la perspective que j’ai décrite. Mais je ne signerai pas un contrat qui ne correspondrait pas à nos objectifs. La loi sur la télévision du futur, qui organise le passage au tout-numérique entre mars 2008 et novembre 2011, a suscité des critiques, notamment l’attribution de chaînes "bonus" à TF1, Canal+ et M6... Le passage de l’analogique au numérique modifie les durées d’autorisation. C’est la raison pour laquelle il fallait des contreparties. Elles pouvaient être financières. Nous avons préféré offrir des chaînes supplémentaires, en posant des conditions en matière de diversité culturelle et de soutien à la création. Comment comptez-vous accélérer le développement de la télévision numérique en France ? La France est en train de rattraper son retard. Nous serons au diapason des autres pays européens. Nous allons passer à 20 chaînes gratuites au terme de ce processus. Il y avait une France à deux vitesses, celle de ceux qui ont le câble ou le satellite et celle qui ne dispose que de cinq ou six chaînes. Nous voulons faire en sorte qu’il n’y ait pas d’inégalité dans l’accès à la télévision. Envisagez-vous une aide pour les foyers modestes ? Oui, nous voulons que personne ne reste à côté de cette révolution populaire. En annonçant le lancement d’un satellite dans quelques mois, qui permettra de couvrir les zones d’ombre de la TNT, n’affaiblissez-vous pas le développement de la télévision numérique terrestre au sol ? Le satellite répond à l’objectif que 100 % des Français reçoivent l’offre numérique gratuite. Il n’est pas substitutif du numérique hertzien terrestre. 95 % du territoire sera couvert par la TNT classique, le reste grâce au satellite. La France est en retard sur la haute définition (HD). Qu’allez-vous faire pour la promouvoir ? J’ai veillé à ce que la HD soit une réalité pour France Télévisions. Nous sommes en train de préempter les canaux et j’ai bon espoir que nous soyons au rendez-vous en HD pour le Tour de France. Tous ces investissements technologiques ne se font-ils pas au détriment de la création ? Au contraire. Les nouvelles technologies vont stimuler l’industrie des programmes, car des taxes supplémentaires vont permettre de financer la création.
10 RSS Delivers Web’s Best Deals (Wired du 11/12/06)The holiday season is in full swing, and more and more people are using the web as a giant shopping mall. Thankfully, the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies is giving birth to a new breed of shopping site that can help navigate this crowded marketplace. Sites like Offertrax, StyleFeeder and Mpire don’t sell anything at all. Rather, they improve purchasing intelligence by keeping an eye out for bargains and sending electronic alerts when it’s time to swoop in for the kill. Instead of wasting time browsing the virtual aisles at dozens of sites, just tell Offertrax what you’re shopping for. The site aggregates price-change notifications and special offers from various online shops and delivers them through an RSS feed. "Gone are the days when customers simply land on a merchant page and expect to only see a Buy Now button," says Ben Carcio, co-founder and COO of Offertrax. "As customers grow more sophisticated, so must the sites that serve them." Offertrax users create "tracks," or simple collections of bookmarks pointing to products found on the web. The service checks all of its customers’ tracks every hour, sending out RSS notifications whenever it encounters a price change or special offer. If a shopper doesn’t use an RSS reader, the notifications are available on the company’s website. (Offertrax was previously reviewed on the Wired News blog Monkey Bites.) Predictive pricing is another way some sites are helping shoppers find the best deals. Using past data as a guide, predictive-pricing services attempt to tell consumers whether an item’s price is likely to go up or down. Mpire, for example, uses a customized Firefox plug-in to serve Mpire price data with a single click, no matter which shopping site the user is currently browsing. If you’re shopping at Amazon.com and you want to know an item’s price at another retailer, the plug-in will tell you. It will also make guesses about future price fluctuations so you know whether to buy now or wait. (Read a full review of Mpire on the Monkey Bites blog.) Predictive pricing has proven effective for airline ticket shopping site Farecast. However, unlike the fairly static market for airline fares, retail goods come and go and stock levels fluctuate. Also, users may be influenced by concerns other than price. "People aren’t necessarily that patient," says Patti Freeman Evans, an online retail analyst with JupiterResearch. "The question isn’t just, ’Is the price going to drop ?’ but also, prices have to drop in the time frame in which a customer is interested." Mpire has found that its predictive-pricing model works best on auction sites like eBay. "The thing our users like the most is to be able to see new and auction-based prices in a single view," says Dave Cotter, Mpire’s founder and chief marketing director. Both Mpire and Offertrax utilize social-networking components, but neither site offers anything quite as extensive as popular shopping site StyleFeeder. The site hosts a community where shoppers can create profiles and build wish lists made up of products they’re interested in. Users can share wish lists by posting them on their profile pages at MySpace and other social-networking sites. Friends can subscribe to a StyleFeeder member’s RSS feed to keep track of the user’s most-wanted items. The extensive use of RSS technology shows that these shopping sites are consciously moving away from traditional methods of communication like e-mail, which has become less reliable for alerting users to money-saving deals. As Offertrax’s Carcio points out, e-mail has been so badly abused by spammers that RSS, blogs, opt-in offers and other "user-controlled technologies" will soon become the most effective way for sellers to reach out to interested buyers. Putting the user in control might be the fastest route to online sales success, says JupiterResearch’s Evans. "These new sites are a great opportunity for consumers to get into the game and get information themselves rather than relying on the retailer for that information," she says.
11 L’internet sur téléphone mobile ne s’utilise pas comme sur PC (InternetActu du 08/12/06)Une étude ComScore (octobre 2006) montre que 28 % des internautes français de 15 ans et plus se connectent à l’internet (exclusivement ou non) via leur téléphone mobile. Les grands portails type Yahoo !, Google et MSN représentent seulement un quart du trafic, à égalité avec les portails des opérateurs mobiles et loin devant les sites de commerce (2%). La dernière livraison de XitiMonitor souligne que le nombre de pages vues par les internautes via un mobile est supérieur à ce qu’on observe sur les autres connexions - 9,1 contre 6,3 -, mais que le temps par page est 2,5 fois plus court en moyenne (19 secondes contre 48) : probablement l’effet de la petite taille de l’écran et des tarifs. Les visites internet via mobile privilégient l’actualité (46 % des visites contre 8,6 % pour les autres modes de connextion), les nouvelles technologies (32 % contre 16 %) et les sports et le jeux (18 % des visites).
12 France : La Nouvelle République lance son édition du dimanche au format tabloïd (Media Cafe du 23/11/2006)Ce 26 novembre, la Nouvelle République Dimanche sera dans les kiosques. Nouveau journal, nouveau format (tabloïd), nouveau logo, nouveau design... mais, plus important, nouveau contenu. Car la NR a décidé de ne pas faire un quotidien du septième jour. La NRD aura son propre concept rédactionnel différent de celui de la semaine et se concentrera sur sa cible : les + de 50 ans. Info locale : se mettre au service de la communauté La première grande partie du journal sera locale et départementalisée. Messages de fond : "désinstitutionnaliser" l’info locale, se rapprocher de plus en plus des préoccupations des lecteurs, faire rendre des comptes à ceux qui gèrent la communauté, ouvrir et aider au débat, faire rentrer les anonymes dans le journal et mettre en avant les réussites locales. Dans cet objectif, ont été mises en place des sous-rubriques comme : "Ce fait-on avoir ?", "On attend quoi ?", "Ca devient quoi ?", "Le débat", "On parle de vous", "Parcours réussite"... Info nationale et internationale : expliquer Convaincue que son rôle n’est pas dans l’exaustivité, la NRD a décidé de se concentrer sur l’explication de l’information nationale et internationale. Deux sous-rubriques répondent à cette volonté :
Le journal sera aussi "balisé" par une série d’encadrés, à utilisation transversale, appelés "smart boxes", par exemple : "l’avis de l’expert", "pratique", "dates clé", "les étapes suivantes", "paroles de rue", "débat"... Une dizaine au total. Info loisir et pratique : aider à bien-vivre La rubrique Bien-Vivre se composera de onze pages qui couvriront : le jardin, la santé, la table, la maison, la mode, le voyage, l’argent, les nouvelles technologies et le culturel. Une foule d’info pratiques. Le tout se concentrant, une fois encore, sur les besoins et les centres d’intérêts des lecteurs de la zone de diffusion. La fin de cette rubrique sera marquée par une double page "en coulisses". L’idée : faire découvrir la face cachée d’un événement, d’une réussite, d’un lieu... Elle se fermera sur une série de pages jeux. Info sport : plus de locale et de résultats Un cahier sport détachable de 16 pages permettra de donner les résultats du samedi. Il donnera aussi la possibilité de couvrir, encore plus, l’info sportive locale avec sept pages qui seront départementalisées. 5W Mignon-Media a accompagné, pendant plus de dix mois, l’équipe dédiée de la NRD conduite par Odile Moniot dans sa réflexion marketing, éditoriale, organisationnelle et graphique. Notre équipe était composée principalement de Francis Lambert (éditorial), Yvon Mezou (organisation de la rédac), Elisa Riteau (journalism visuel) et Nancy Wang (business et marketing), sous la direction de Jeff Mignon.
13 The coming collapse and rebirth of newspaper journalism (netBtoB.com du 11/12/2006)The near-total collapse of the American newspaper industry as we know it is inevitable. Anything newspapers could have done to stop it should have been done years ago (Slate recently wrote that newspapers saw this coming in the mid-70s). All the social, demographic and economic trends are lined up against the industry. Over the next decade, there will be agonizing rounds of layoffs, consolidation and bankruptcies. It will be painful to watch, but it will be a necessary process for the industry to reinvent itself. Click here for Advertisers Website ! In this essay, I’ll outline the reasons I believe this and propose a new and very different model of publishing and journalism that will take hold as this cycle plays out. This will be a very exciting evolution but it will be very painful, too. A broken business model First, some background and assumptions. The business model of metropolitan daily newspapers was developed over 150 years ago to support a delivery method that is becoming irrelevant. Huge staffs of people were needed to create content, turn it into type, print it on paper and distribute it on a timely basis. It was very expensive, but it was necessary because there was no alternative way to deliver information on a daily basis. Large editorial staffs were needed to create proprietary content. A few alternative sources of content were available, such as news wires, but there was almost nothing at the local level. In any case, running wire copy didn’t differentiate a newspaper from its competition, so staffs of salaried reporters were needed to turn up original news. At some newspapers, these staffs can run to several hundred people. Newspapers had to maintain large circulation operations and massive subscriber lists in order to justify their ad rates. Circulation is expensive. While renewal rates for daily papers have always been high, it’s costly to acquire new subscribers through advertising and direct mail. For most papers, the cost of circulation didn’t come close to matching the small revenue it generated. Circulation revenue at newspapers has also been falling in recent years due to price cuts and competition, further squeezing margins. Capital costs inherent in buildings, presses, paper, ink and people to run all those machines were astronomical. Labor unions added to those costs. In some cases, the unions have succeeded in preserving jobs that were automated out of existence years ago. People go to work and literally have nothing to do. Add it all up and a metropolitan daily newspaper must employ several hundred people to produce the product. Newspaper advertising is very expensive because of the large fixed costs. The Chicago Tribune, for example, charges $755 per column inch in the daily paper ($1,135 on Sunday). That business works as long as advertisers are willing to pay for it and for many years they have. That’s because newspapers were one of the most effective means for businesses to reach consumers in certain geographies. The upside, though, is that newspaper model has traditionally been profitable and predictable. Once a newspaper achieved dominance in its market, it was practically unassailable. As consolidation reduced the total number of daily newspapers (there are about 1,500 in the U.S. today), competitive pressure eased and the winning papers were able to drive their ad rates higher. Until the mid-1990s, this was a pretty nice state of affairs. Even the Internet didn’t put much pressure on newspapers, at least during its first decade. That is all about to come to an end. The business model of metropolitan daily newspapers is poised for a collapse that will be stunning in its speed and scope. The cause is Web 2.0 and the vastly superior economics of that emerging business. A new model A recent story in Business 2.0 magazine revealed the income of some popular bloggers. Read this article if you want to understand the emerging economics of blogosphere. This new medium is far more cost-efficient than the ones it will replace. “Blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale,” the Business 2.0 article says. “They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.” Take the Fark.com example. The site generates 40 million page views a month with a staff of one full-time person and two contractors. Its only real operating costs are bandwidth charges. It produces almost no original content and has no capital costs. Members contribute their own content, so no editors are needed. The site almost runs itself. Yet this could approach $10 million in revenue before long. Another example is Craigslist.org . It’s is the fifth most popular site on the Internet, with global reach and an estimated four billion page views a month. It is absolutely killing the newspaper classified ad business. One published report estimated that Craigslist had cost San Francisco newspapers $70 million in revenue in just one year. The entire staff is 23 people all part-time. Google Blogoscoped, which is the best independent source of information about Google, is run by one person in his spare time. It’s averaging four million page views a month. Gizmodo grew to become one of the top five blogs on the Internet with only a single contributor. Digg.com, which is barely two years old, is already among the top 25 sites on the Web. Its traffic outstrips all the largest media sites. It has a staff of 15. Outsourcing everything None of these sites is making piles of money yet, but that’s only a matter of time. Michael Arrington is pulling in $60,000 a month writing TechCrunch. BoingBoing.net is on target to gross more than $1 million. Fark.com founder Drew Curtis says he’s on track to soon log sales of $600,000 to $800,000 per month. Companies like John Battelle’s Federated Media and Nick Denton’s Gawker Media are figuring out the business side. And it’s not like these blogs have to make a lot of money to keep going. Adrants.com generates over $100,000 a year in advertising and that’s plenty to keep Steve Hall plugging away at his one-man operation. He’s got almost no costs and he’s getting paid to do something he’s passionate about. How do these keep their overhead so low ? They outsource everything * Editorial content is outsourced to an army of individual enthusiasts and bloggers who find interesting information on the Web and feed it to the site operators. Editorial expenses, which account for about a third of the operating costs of a daily newspaper, are practically zero. * Circulation is outsourced to Google and links from other sites. In fact, there really is no concept of circulation in these new media because there’s no way to “own” the reader. This is a very different model from conventional publishing, which relies heavily on subscriber lists to validate advertising rates. The Web approach is much less controllable but also much cheaper. * Production is outsourced to Typepad, Blogger or any number of other hosted services at minimal cost. There’s no need for designers because everything is templated. Some sites practically run themselves. Bandwidth costs can be steep for popular properties, but that’s true for newspaper websites as well. * Sales is outsourced to Google Adwords, Federated Media or other sales agents. This may change in time, but for now, most Web 2.0 companies can’t be bothered with a captive sales force. Marketing and promotion aren’t even done. In the new Web, your marketing is your content. People either link to you or they don’t. This creates a lot of pressure on the site operators to be fresh and innovative, but that’s not a bad thing. This model is so compelling that it will almost completely upend the existing mainstream media model. Newspaper death spiral New competition from Web 2.0 companies along with continuing demographic shifts are about to send metropolitan daily newspapers into a spiral of decline from which few will emerge intact. Why now ? People have been wrongly forecasting the death of newspapers for years. Why is this time different ? The first decade of the consumer Internet was very different from that which we’re now entering. Web 1.0 was the display Internet. It was a decade when organizations put their brochures online and users got comfortable with the idea of a global network. Search tools were rudimentary, Web content was difficult to create and interactivity was limited. The brands that dominated the pre-Web days were able to extend their brands online. While a few important new sources of information did emerge, media giants like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Associated Press continued to dominate online media. There was little threat to their underlying businesses. That’s all changed. It’s now easy for individuals to create Web content. Computing power, storage and bandwidth costs are declining rapidly. The open-source software movement has dropped the price of software to near zero. Search engines have become a more effective marketing channel than e-mail. Google AdSense and affiliate marketing networks can generate income for website operators, even at low traffic levels. Today, a small group of people with a few thousand dollars and a good idea can build a self-sustaining web franchise in a matter of months. You couldn’t have done that five years ago. Layered on top of that is a demographic shift that is about to move a large new group of Web-savvy consumers into the economic mainstream. This new generation simply doesn’t have the loyalty to established media that their parents do. And they don’t read newspapers at all. The spiral begins So here’s where the spiral begins. Newspapers’ profitable classified advertising business will be all but gone in 10 years, a victim of the vastly superior results and economics of search-driven online advertising. Display advertising will be under intense pressure from alternative media, including not just Web sites but an emerging class of small print publications and supermarket advertisers that serve local audiences (print publishing is getting cheaper, too). The department stores and cell phone companies that sustain newspapers’ display advertising business will apply intense pressure on papers to bring down their prices. Newspapers will be forced to lay off staff in order to maintain margins. Cuts in services will lead to cuts in editorial coverage, making papers less relevant to subscribers. As circulation declines, advertising rates will have to come down to remain competitive. This will put more pressure on margins, leading to more layoffs, more cost cuts, more circulation declines and more pressure on margins. Once this spiral begins, it will accelerate with breathtaking speed. And it has already begun. Experience has shown us again and again that business models based on vertically integrated, proprietary products quickly collapse when confronted with competition that is open, standardized and much less expensive. It’s happened in consumer electronics, telecommunications, computers and household appliances and there’s no reason it won’t happen in media. Advertisers will rebel at having to pay newspapers’ high fixed costs when they can get the same audience through other channels at a fraction of the cost. The sole advantage that newspapers have is their reach in local markets. Small businesses that sell aluminum siding, flowers and cleaning services have have few alternatives to newspapers for their ad dollars. That, too, is changing. The declining cost of electronic composition and offset printing is leading to resurgence of local newspapers and Web 2.0 technology is making it cheap for citizens to launch their own community websites. Search engine makers are figuring out how to provide value in local search. These forces are converging to attack newspapers’ last refuge. In 10 years, probably a third of metropolitan daily print newspapers will be gone. Some will go entirely online, while others will merge with regional competitors. What will replace them ? And what will the new journalism look like ? Rebirth What emerges from the rubble of the newspaper industry will be a fresh, vibrant and very different kind of journalism. It will make a lot of traditionalists uncomfortable. It will force us to re-examine our assumptions about everything from readership to libel law. But it will ultimately be an evolution of the profession into something that is richer, more inclusive and much more dynamic than anything we have ever known. Print newspapers are modeled on assumptions that were defined by physical constraints but which are outmoded and irrelevant online. Basically, information is scarce and publishing is archival. In most metropolitan areas, the newspaper has been the principal or only source of news for many years. This required editors and publishers to take a very serious view of everything they set into type. Layout, headline selection, story lengths, story placement and design were critical considerations in a space-constrained world. The importance of a story was reflected by its location in the paper or on a page, the weight of the headline and the number of column inches dedicated to it. Once a story was in print, it was permanent. This necessitated an almost obsessive attention to detail and fact-checking. All facts had to be assembled before the story was written. Often, multiple editors were assigned to review and challenge information in the article. If information wasn’t verified, it wasn’t published. Structure was critical. Because stories were cut from the bottom, newspapers invented the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, in which more important information was placed higher in the story. Good information was omitted because there wasn’t enough space. Online publishing changes all the rules Of course, all that is irrelevant online, and the new journalism will be based on an entirely different set of assumptions. Any report may be quickly and easily updated and corrected. Search engine results and referral links are the principal drivers of readership. Layout is almost irrelevant to a web site. Blogs have no hierarchy at all. Stories can be as long for a short as they need to be, or can even be composed of many links to other content. Stories may appear in many places at once and even in many forms, depending on how they are tagged. Readers are able to comment upon and contribute to articles. Graphics, audio and video illustrations are easily linked to text. If something is wrong, you can always go back and correct it. In short, the online world challenges nearly every assumption of conventional newspapering. It will dictate a very different approach to journalism. For one thing, the craft of journalism will evolve to include far more aggregation and organization that has in the past. Editors will assemble their reports from a vast library of resources located across the Internet. Some information will come from paid staff writers, others from freelancers and still more from reports and opinions published by independent third parties and even competitors. Editors will still have a critical role, but their value will increasingly be in assembling and organizing information for readers who don’t have the time to sort through the vast Web. The craft of reporting will become faster and more iterative. Rumor, speculation and incomplete information will be published far more readily, on the assumption that errors can be corrected. Stories will, in essence, be built in real time and in full public view. Reporters will file copy directly to the Web, often without a review by an editor. Readers will be a central part of the process, correcting and comment upon articles as they are taking shape. Reporting will become, in effect, a community process. This new model will be very disruptive and very controversial. The idea that a news organization would publish information it did not know to be true flies in the face of all of our expectations. The concept of actively involving readers - who have no formal relationship with the news organization - in the reporting process will be too much for some editors to accept. There will be hand-wringing over fears of libel suits and other litigation. It is going to be an unholy brawl. But this is where journalism will go, and it is happening now, every day, on blogs and community media sites across the world. There authors knowingly publish information that is unverified and unreliable. They do so with the expectation that their readers will set them straight and that the truth will be arrived at through a process of publishing and correction. More than half a million blog posts are logged every day, yere there has not been a single successful libel suit resulting from any of them. Libel law, after all, is based on the expectation of archival permanence. Nothing is permanent Online. The future is taking shape New models are already being tested at community-journalism sites like Backfence, iBrattleboro.com, Northwest Voice and Korea’s OhMyNews.com. The Washington Post recently reported on a Gannett experiment to reinvent news journalism in Fort Myers, Fla. More will follow. Many more. Journalism will become much more local. As the cost of publishing falls to near zero and citizens become more comfortable with the tools of publishing, thousands of mini “newspapers” will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation sites will emerge to sift through and organize the reports and conversations going on in these small communities. Many of these sites will involve human editors who understand the needs of their audience and monitor online activity on their behalf. This will be nothing less than a complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap. Instead of 1,500 print newspapers, there will be perhaps five to ten national “super-papers” and many thousands of regional and special interest community news sites. The process of getting there will be wrenching and controversial, but the new model will create a more dynamic and diverse information landscape than we have ever known. It will be incredibly exciting. I hope to be around for the ride.
14 Wikia, un nouveau pavé dans la mare du Web payant (lemonde.fr du 13/12/2006)Le succès de l’encyclopédie interactive libre Wikipédia a fait des émules : les sites participatifs "wiki", développés avec des outils de construction et des logiciels libres, bousculent de plus en plus les modèles économiques payants, obligeant les gros acteurs du marché à réagir. Wikipédia, sixième site le plus visité sur Internet, est devenu en quelques années la plus grande encyclopédie numérique du monde (cinq millions d’articles dans deux cent cinquante langues, cent millions de visites par mois), notamment grâce à la fondation Wikimédia à but non lucratif, financée uniquement par des dons. Mais les critiques sont également une constante dans la jeune vie de cette encyclopédie libre : des reproches allant de l’anonymat et l’amateurisme des rédacteurs, à l’absence de responsabilité juridique et aux plagiats ou autres moyens masqués de propagande, tout a été dit. Pourtant, au fur et à mesure des contributions, les erreurs se lissent et finissent par être corrigées. La communauté reste vigilante, mais il ne faut pas prendre toute l’encyclopédie pour argent comptant. Le libre libéré D’argent, il ne sera bientôt plus question : Jimmy Wales, l’un des fondateurs de Wikipédia, et Angela Beesley, qui ont créé fin 2004 la société Wikia Inc., créateur et hébergeur de wiki, ont décidé lundi 11 décembre de mettre désormais gratuitement à disposition des internautes tous les outils nécessaires à la construction de sites wiki et de leur laisser la totalité des recettes publicitaires qui pourraient être générées par les sites ainsi créés. Wikia va rendre disponibles prochainement un ensemble d’outils (logiciels de conception) et de services gratuits (bande passante, stockage, contenu), baptisés "OpenServing". Amazon croit au wiki Wikia, très impliquée dans le développement des logiciels libres, se rémunérait jusqu’à présent uniquement sur les revenus publicitaires générés par le site wikia.com. Mais un investisseur de taille vient de faire son entrée dans le capital de l’entreprise : Amazon, l’un des premiers sites de vente en ligne a décidé de participer à l’aventure wiki. Grâce à cette participation, dont le montant n’a pas été dévoilé, Amazon pourrait prochainement proposer des wiki relatifs aux produits de consommation qu’il vend. Cette technique de marketing est en plein développement sur le réseau, car plus ciblée. Wikia a par ailleurs indiqué le même jour le rachat, pour plus de 2 millions de dollars, du site sportif collaboratif ArmchairGM (développé avec Mediawiki), de quoi augmenter un peu plus les domaines de compétences des sites participatifs hébergés : Wikia est devenu en quelques années un véritable portail du savoir, puisque actuellement, l’hébergeur compte plus de quatre cent mille articles écrits en quarante-cinq langues par soixante-cinq mille contributeurs, et répartis en plus de deux mille sujets. Gil Penchina, ancien directeur d’eBay, recruté il y a quelques mois par Wikia, a par ailleurs annoncé que d’autres rachats allaient intervenir prochainement. Le communiqué paru lundi se veut optimiste quant à l’avenir, mais toutefois sans certitudes économiques : "Les gens adoptent les nouvelles techniques pour travailler ensemble et réaliser de grandes choses, et Wikia est l’un des principaux bénéficiaires de cette tendance. Nous n’avons pas toutes les réponses concernant le modèle économique, mais nous sommes confiants que la sagesse de notre communauté prévaudra." D’autres exemples de portails et sites wiki ("vite" en hawaïen) ont le vent en poupe, à l’image de Wetpaint - qui, six mois après son lancement, compte déjà plus de soixante mille wiki créés - ou de Wikihow - véritable manuel multilingue contributif en ligne.
15 Le prochain média sera le blog (AFP du 12/12/06)60 millions de blogs recencés dans le monde fin septembre, trois millions créés par mois et 100 000 par jour au troisième trimestre 2006, le blog est devenu un média incontournable sur la Toile Dans dix ans, le blog sera "un média comme les autres", selon deux observateurs de la "blogosphère", Dave Sifry, fondateur et Pdg du moteur de recherche américain Tecnorati, et Alexis Helcmanocki, un responsable de l’institut de sondage français IPSOS, présents au "web 3", troisième rendez-vous international des acteurs du Net à Paris (11-12/12). "L’idée que nous sommes à la fois producteurs et consommateurs et que nous pouvons contribuer activement à nos propres décisions et celles de nos amis et voisins sera aussi naturelle que lire le journal aujourd’hui", pousuit M. Sifry. Ainsi, “les consommateurs d’aujourd’hui seront les "consom-acteurs" de demain", a rajouté pour sa part Alexis Helcmanocki. Le dernier recencement de Tecnorati (www.tecnorati.com) présenté au Web 3 montre que l’explosion du blog gagne rapidement de nouveaux espaces linguistiques, notamment chinois (10%) et japonais (33%) qui talonnent désormais l’anglais (39%) dans la blogosphère mondiale. Cette étude n’accorde au blog francophone qu’une modeste part de 2% de la Toile, mais selon Dave Sifry, cela tient au fait que beaucoup de plates-formes hébergeuses de blogs francophones ne se font pas recenser chez Tecnorati. Selon une autre étude réalisée par IPSOS auprès de 2 214 internautes en France, Grande-Bretagne, Italie, Allemagne et en Espagne, 61% d’entre eux, et 90% des internautes français, connaissent les blogs. En outre, le blog influe sur les comportements de consommation, puisque les internautes européens (34%) ou français (44%) peuvent renoncer à un achat après avoir lu des commentaires négatifs sur un blog. A l’inverse et pour 52% des internautes européens, des commentaires positifs sur un blog renforcent le consommateur dans son choix, selon l’étude d’IPSOS.
16 Les principaux défis des éditeurs de presse selon SEPREM (AFP du 27/11/06)Selon le cabinet Seprem, la gratuité de l’information, l’évolution des contenus rédactionnels et le changement de modèle économique sont les 3 défis à relever pour les éditeurs de presse Les nouvelles technologies de l’information (NTIC : internet, téléphones portables...), ne sont citées comme principal défi que par 9,1% des éditeurs selon cette enquête sur "les priorités des éditeurs de presse" rendue publique le 26 octobre et dont les résultats complets seront dévoilés lors du 15e congrès européen de la presse française (22 au 24 novembre). Les NTIC constituent néanmoins une priorité à court terme pour 34,7% d’entre eux, mais elles sont plus particulièrement considérées comme un important support publicitaire. En effet, pour faire la promotion de leurs publications, la quasi-totalité (90,9%) des éditeurs envisagent d’investir de plus en plus sur internet, alors que seuls 24,9% pensent investir davantage dans les grands médias (affichage, radio, TV, ciné). En outre, 71,8% ont déjà recours aux médias électroniques — ou envisagent d’y avoir recours à court terme — pour assurer la promotion au numéro de leur édition papier ou vendre des abonnements. Pour mémoire Le congrès, organisé par la Fédération nationale de la presse française (FNPF), aura pour thème : "De l’imprimé à l’écran : à la rencontre des lecteurs, à la conquête des acheteurs". Pendant deux jours et demi, les principaux éditeurs et acteurs du secteur débattront notamment de l’évolution des contenus rédactionnels face au phénomène du numérique et du problème de la distribution de la presse en France.
17 Informez-vous, c’est donné (Stratégies du 14/12/06)Les Français sont devenus des consommateurs d’information gratuite et 64 % des 15-34 ans déclarent s’en contenter. Le payant est-il mort ? Non, mais l’offre a intérêt à être à la hauteur. L’année 2006 restera-t-elle celle de l’avènement de la gratuité des contenus ? Après avoir commencé par un débat sur la licence globale de la musique en ligne, elle devait se terminer par le lancement attendu d’un quotidien gratuit du matin, signé Bolloré et Le Monde. Entre les deux, Direct soir a été créé, 20Minutes et Metro se sont hissés parmi les cinq quotidiens nationaux les plus lus, les majors du disque EMI et Universal ont annoncé leur intention de financer par la publicité un accès libre à leur catalogue, la vidéo partagée s’est imposée sur Internet, la TNT gratuite n’a cessé de monter en puissance, etc. Si on ajoute la fréquentation accrue des portails ou des sites de presse, une idée s’est imposée comme une évidence : l’info, c’est donné ! Un sondage Ipsos en témoigne : 53 % des Français considèrent que demain, toute l’information sera accessible gratuitement, que ce soit sur le papier ou en ligne. Si les plus de 35ans continuent majoritairement à donner leur préférence aux journaux payants, 64 % des 15-34ans déclarent pouvoir se satisfaire d’une information gratuite. Faut-il en déduire que, pour une génération née avec le numérique, la presse payante est un peu comme la bougie au moment de l’invention de l’électricité : une industrie bien établie, mais vouée à la raréfaction ? « Le gratuit a gagné en termes de média de masse. Il est aujourd’hui la norme », estime Hervé Barbot, directeur général adjoint d’Ipsos Média. Il profite en cela non seulement d’une capacité à informer au même titre que les payants, mais aussi d’une valeur d’usage fondée sur la commodité : il permet d’accéder rapidement à l’actualité ou d’occuper un temps de transport. Cela ne va pas, bien sûr, sans dommages collatéraux : « Celui qui touche l’argent n’est plus celui qui édite l’information, mais celui qui l’agrège, analyse le sociologue Jean-Louis Missika. L’enjeu pour la démocratie, c’est que l’information générale, qui a pour but d’informer le citoyen, n’est plus perçue comme devant être payante. Alors que l’économie de la presse continue d’être caractérisée par des coûts très lourds de fabrication et de distribution, il n’y a pas de renouvellement des générations dans la consommation des journaux. » Question de valeur ajoutée L’avenir des éditeurs de contenus payants passe-t-il alors par le gratuit ? « Il n’y a plus de débat sur Internet. L’accès est gratuit, tout est "open". Ceux qui ont fait le choix d’être en partie payants sont attaqués par les contenus gratuits », relève Marc Feuillée, président du groupe Express-Expansion. Les sites de presse grand public ont tous choisi de rester en grande partie en accès libre. Blogs, vidéos, photos... Les contenus se sont enrichis avec des équipes spécifiques encore difficiles à rentabiliser, le coût publicitaire pour mille lecteurs en ligne étant très faible en France (15euros, soit trois fois moins qu’au Royaume-Uni). Pourtant, cela ne signifie pas qu’il n’y a plus d’avenir pour l’info payante. « À vrai dire, explique Hervé Barbot, 65 % des gens déclarent : "Peu importe le prix et la publicité, je choisis les journaux parce qu’ils me plaisent et que je leur fais confiance". C’est la relation à la marque qui prime. » Ce qui témoigne aussi d’une réalité : les lecteurs ont encore du mal à faire la différence, en termes de contenus, entre payant et gratuit. « La question en suspens, commente Jean-Louis Missika, est de savoir si les grandes marques d’information arriveront à augmenter la qualité de leur service d’info de manière à se distinguer nettement de l’info de commodité, gratuite. » Car les Français sont prêts à mettre la main au porte-monnaie pour une valeur ajoutée, un engagement éditorial, un service particulier... « Mais on ne paye plus pour un attentat en Irak, ou quand l’euro grimpe », conclut Hervé Barbot.
18 Les élites, des Français presque comme les autres (par Gérard Mermet, sociologue) ; (La Tribune, du 30/11/06)Ils sont environ 20.000 et appartiennent à ce que l’on appelle communément l’« élite » de la nation. Le plus souvent acteurs de la société, plutôt que « people » ou « héritiers », ils sont sélectionnés par le Who’s Who in France pour leur apport dans différents domaines : économique, social, politique, scientifique, artistique, intellectuel, médiatique, sportif... Un groupe de « happy few » au fond mal connu des Français, mais suspecté par eux de porter une responsabilité particulière dans la dégradation de la situation nationale. Il est donc important (c’est une première) de s’intéresser au regard de ces « élites » sur l’état du pays, de le comparer à celui de la population dans son ensemble (qui fait lui l’objet de multiples sondages). Afin de savoir si la « France d’en haut » et celle « d’en bas » se ressemblent suffisamment pour se rassembler. L’enquête conduite avec le Who’s Who fait d’abord apparaître une proximité dans le diagnostic. Ainsi, pour 58 % des personnes ayant répondu, c’est le mot « immobilisme » qui qualifie le mieux l’évolution récente de la société française. Il est suivi de « déclin » (29 %), alors qu’une faible minorité (13 %) choisit le mot « progrès ». Des chiffres à rapprocher de ceux d’un récent sondage (La Tribune-Ipsos, novembre 2006) selon lequel 54 % des Français estiment que le pays « décline », 12 % qu’il « progresse », 33 % « ni l’un ni l’autre ». De même, près de la moitié des « élites » (46 %) se disent insatisfaites du fonctionnement de la démocratie en France, une proportion assez proche de celle de l’ensemble des Français (53 % selon l’Eurobaromètre TNS Sofres de juillet 2006). Pour l’avenir, l’inquiétude des « élites » rejoint aussi de toute évidence celle de leurs concitoyens : 49 %estiment que les générations futures « vivront moins bien qu’aujourd’hui », 33 % « à peu près comme aujourd’hui », 19 % seulement « mieux ». Les principaux écarts mesurés concernent la relation au monde et les adaptations à mettre en œuvre. Européens convaincus Les membres du Who’s Who se déclarent plus volontiers « mondialistes » et « européens » que la population : 90 %considèrent ainsi que l’appartenance de la France à l’Union européenne est une « bonne chose », contre 49 % seulement de l’ensemble des Français. Ils sont aussi plus confiants dans le rôle joué par les entreprises et par la technologie (respectivement plébiscitées à 85 % et 95 %). Surtout, la liste des problèmes qu’ils jugent prioritaires diffère de celle des Français : d’abord, le système éducatif (41 % contre 9 % pour l’ensemble de la population), puis le chômage (30 % contre 65 %) et la situation économique (24 % contre 27 %). L’insécurité ne recueille que 13 % contre 28 %, l’inflation 2 %contre 18 %(mais l’immigration 18 % contre 11 %). Enfin, les personnes interrogées semblent davantage convaincues que leurs concitoyens du caractère obsolète de certaines « exceptions » nationales : 38 % les considèrent aujourd’ hui comme des handicaps, 34 % seulement comme des atouts pour le pays (les autres sont réservés). C’est pourquoi elles souhaitent en majorité engager des « réformes radicales, en rupture avec le passé » (59 %) plutôt que « progressives » (41 %). Dans les enquêtes récentes, les Français apparaissent plus partagés et attachés aux acquis. Sans doute parce qu’ils craignent davantage les effets des réformes dans leur vie personnelle. S’ils se montrent aussi sévères que leurs concitoyens à l’égard de l’État et des institutions, ils se sentent investis d’une responsabilité particulière dans les changements à initier (74 %), confirmant ainsi l’affirmation de Saint-Exupéry : « On ne saurait être à la fois responsable et désespéré. » Au regard de ces chiffres, le scepticisme des Français envers les « élites » (qui va parfois jusqu’à la détestation) apparaît excessif. Il est en partie la conséquence d’une recherche de boucs émissaires, d’exutoires à l’inquiétude et à la frustration ambiantes. La réconciliation est en tout cas nécessaire ; elle est possible, sur la base d’un diagnostic commun. Mais elle implique d’abord que les représentants de la « France d’en haut » assument aux yeux de leurs concitoyens leur mission d’observation, de réflexion, de pédagogie, de proposition, d’entraînement, de décision et d’action. Avoir la foi Elle ne pourra être obtenue que par une écoute réciproque, hors des prismes idéologiques déformants et paralysants, entre individus de bonne foi et de bonne volonté. La foi est celle que chacun doit avoir dans le pays et dans la nation. La volonté est que la France retrouve son optimisme, son dynamisme, sa capacité d’adaptation et d’invention, son rang et son image dans le monde. Tout un programme pour les candidats de 2007. MÉTHODOLOGIE 2.535 personnes ont répondu à l’enquête, mise au point en collaboration avec Gérard Mermet, et effectuée en ligne par l’institut Panel on the Web. L’échantillon a été redressé afin d’être représentatif de l’ensemble des personnes inscrites dans le Who’s Who in France. Il compte 90 % d’hommes. 19 % des répondants sont âgés de moins de 50 ans et 33 % ont entre 51 et 60 ans. 74 % sont mariés et 9 % célibataires. 88 % sont diplômés de l’enseignement supérieur et 2 % sont autodidactes. Enfin, 27 % sont chefs d’entreprise, 18 % fonctionnaires ou diplomates, 9 % chercheurs, universitaires ou médecins.
19 Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World ? (Survey by the University of Southern California, Center for the Digital Future)USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project Finds Major Shifts in Social Communication and Personal Connections on the Internet Is the online world as important to Internet users as the real world ? Large numbers of Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities, according to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. Among a broad range of findings about rapidly-evolving methods for online communication, the 2007 Digital Future Project found that 43 percent of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they “feel as strongly” about their virtual community as they do about their realworld communities. “More than a decade after the portals of the Worldwide Web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. “The Internet has been a source of entertainment, information, and communication since the Web became available to the American public in 1994,” said Cole. “However, we are now beginning to measure real growth and discover new directions for the Internet as a comprehensive tool that Americans are using to touch the world.” The findings about online communities and more than 100 other issues are published in the 2007 Digital Future Project, the comprehensive annual examination of the impact of online technology on America. The project surveys more than 2,000 individuals across the United States, each year contacting the same households to explore how online technology affects the lives of Internet users and non-users. It also examines how changing technology, such as the shift from Internet access by modem to broadband, affects behavior. The 2007 Digital Future Project found that Internet use is growing and evolving as an instrument for personal engagement - through blogs, personal Web sites, and online communities. Online communities : a catalyst for connection and activism Online communities and offline action — The Digital Future Project found that involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community. (An “online community” is defined as a group that shares thoughts or ideas, or works on common projects, through electronic communication only.) Social activism - Participation in online communities leads to social activism. Almost twothirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet. And more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities. Online communities : daily use — A significant majority of members of online communities (56.6 percent) log into their community at least once a day. Member interaction — Online communities are online havens for interaction among members ; 70.4 percent of online community members say they sometimes or always interact with other members of their community while logged in. Internet users : reaching out across the Web Posting information — Growing percentages of Internet users are going online to post information, whether on a blog, posting photos, or maintaining a personal Web site.
The Internet and social links The Digital Future Project found continuing growth of the Internet for connection to family and friends - but with virtually no negative effects on time spent in person with them. New friends, online and in person — Internet users are finding growing numbers of online friends, as well as friends they first met online and then met in person. Internet users report having met an average of 4.65 friends online whom they have never met in person. Internet users report an average of 1.6 friends met in person whom they originally met online — more than double the number when the Digital Future Project began in 2000. Does the Internet increase regular contact with other users ? — Responding to a question last asked in 2002, 42.8 percent of Internet users agree that going online has increased the number of people they regularly stay in contact with — marginally less than the 46.6 percent who voiced the same response four years ago. Internet users and communication with family and friends — Although more than 40 percent of users say that the Internet has increased the number of people with whom they stay in contact, a lower percent say that since starting to use the Internet they are communicating more with family and friends. Of Internet users, 37.7 percent agree that since they started to go online they are communicating more with family and friends — down from 45.5 percent in 2002. Does the Internet change the amount of time spent with friends and family face-to-face ? — While large percentages of Internet users say that going online increases contact with family and friends, almost all users report that the Internet has no effect on the time spent with close friends or family faceto-face. The USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project : Six years of exploring the digital realm The USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future created and organizes the World Internet Project, which includes the Digital Future Project and similar studies in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. The center is supported by public foundations and private companies, including Accenture, America Online, Time Warner Companies, Sony, AT&T, Microsoft, and the Coca-Cola Company. The Digital Future Project provides a broad year-to-year exploration of the influence of the Internet and online technology on Americans. Since 2000, the project has examined the behavior and views of a national sample of Internet users and non-users, as well as comparisons between new users (one year or less of experience) and very experienced users (more than nine years of experience). The project also explores differences in online behavior among users of telephone modems compared to broadband. For highlights of the 2007 Digital Future Project or to order a copy of the complete report, visit www.digitalcenter.org. Highlights : 2007 USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project Among key findings in more than 100 major issues, the 2007 USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project found that : Americans on the Internet — more than three-quarters of American are Internet users ; 77.6 percent of Americans age 12 and older go online. The Internet at home - more than two-thirds of Americans (68.1 percent) use the Internet at home, a substantial increase from the 46.9 percent of users who reported home Internet use in 2000 (the first year of the Digital Future Project). Hours online — the number of hours online continues to increase, rising to an average of 8.9 hours per week, an average of one hour more than 2005. Internet connections at home : modem use plummets — Use of telephone modem to access the Internet continues to decline. Last year, the number of Internet users who reported that they went online through a telephone modem dropped to less than a majority (45.6 percent) for the first time in the Digital Future Project. Use of telephone modem for access dropped again, to 37 percent of Internet users. Access to the Internet through a broadband connection grew slightly, increasing to 50 percent, compared to 48.3 percent in 2005. Time spent online : modem users vs. broadband users — As use of broadband for Internet access has increased, the Digital Future Project has identified significant differences in online behavior among Internet users who go online through a telephone modem and those who connect with a faster broadband connection. Although some Internet activities could require less time through a high-speed connection, the Digital Future Project continues to find that broadband users spend more time online than modem users in all of the most popular Web activities (e-mail, chat rooms, entertainment, information for work or school, information-seeking for personal use, and transactions). Men and women online — For the first time the percentage of women going online was higher than the number of men. Electronic dropouts : why do users stop going online ? — The more than one-quarter of Internet non-users who have previously gone online (27.2 percent) continue to report a variety of reasons for not going online, but the attitudes have shifted considerably. In the current study, a much lower percentage of electronic dropouts report that the reason they stopped going is “no computer available” - a continuation of the decline that began in 2005 and by far the lowest level reported thus far in the Digital Future Project. Electronic dropouts : will you go back online ? — Less than half of non-users who previously used the Internet (46.3 percent) say they will go back online, the lowest level in the history of the Digital Future Project. Will non-users go online ? — In the current study, of the 22.4 percent of respondents who do not currently use the Internet, 40.1 percent say they are somewhat likely or very likely to go online next year - down marginally from 41.6 percent in 2005. The Internet and television : how important as sources of information and entertainment ? - The Digital Future Report continues to find that the Internet has a solid position as an important source of information and entertainment for the vast majority of users, consistently outranking television. Among users age 17 and older, almost two-thirds of Internet users (65.8 percent) consider the Internet to be a very important or extremely important source of information for them — up from 56.3 percent in 2005. Information on the Internet : is it reliable and accurate ? — The number of users who believe that most or all of the information on the Internet is reliable and accurate grew sharply over 2005, reversing a three-year decline. Well over half of users (55.2 percent) say that most or all of the information online is reliable and accurate - up from 48.8 percent in 2005, but still below the peak in 2001 (55 percent). Which Web sites are reliable and which are not ? — The number of Internet users who say that most of the information posted by established media and government Web sites is reliable and accurate remains generally consistent with 2005 and 2003 results. Web sites mounted by established media (such as nytimes.com and cnn.com) ranked highest, with 77.1 percent of users saying that most or all information on those sites is reliable and accurate — down slightly from the peak of 78.5 percent in 2005. Faith in government Web sites declined even more, to 74.8 percent of users saying that most or all information on those sites is reliable and accurate - down from 78.2 percent. Internet use and its effect on time spent watching TV - More than one-third of Internet users (35.5 percent) say that they spend less time watching TV since they began using the Internet — a modest increase over 2002. Internet purchasing : who is buying online ? — The number of online purchasers rose to its highest level in the history of the study (51.1 percent). Internet purchasing : how much do you spend ? — Online buyers spend an average of $50 a month more than in 2001. Internet purchasing : spending per month — Increasing are the number of users who spend between $1 and $100, and the small number who spend more than $1000 per month. The number of users who spend more than $100 but less than $1000 remained about the same compared to 2005. The first internet purchase : how long do users wait before they buy ? —New Internet users are waiting longer before making their first online purchase. Internet users who buy online say that, after going online, they waited an average of 35.2 months before making their first purchase, an increase of more than two months over 2005. The first Internet purchase : why did users wait ? — The number of Internet purchasers who said that their concern about giving a credit card number was the main reason for delaying their online purchases dropped to its lowest level in the study so far. Concern about giving a credit card number was cited by only four percent of Internet buyers — down from 14 percent in 2005 and 32 percent in 2003. Concerns about privacy when buying online — All six years of the Digital Future Project have shown that most respondents report some level of concern about the privacy of their personal information — such as name and address, phone number, and purchasing habits — when or if they buy on the Internet. The intensity of that concern had been declining in the first four years of the study, and increased slightly in 2005. However, concern about the security of personal information again declined. Overall, the total percentage of respondents age 16 and over who report some concern about online personal information is very high ; during the years this question was asked, between 88 and 94 percent of respondents report some concern. Among respondents age 16 and over, 86.8 percent express some level of concern about the privacy of their personal information when or if they buy online — down from 89.5 percent in 2005. The percentage who report the highest level of concern (very or extremely concerned) declined to less than half of respondents (46.5 percent) — down from almost two-thirds of respondents (65.8 percent) five years ago. Concerns about credit card information : high but stabilizing ? — Concerns about credit card security, such as worries about personal privacy online, continue to remain high among all respondents to the Digital Future Project. However, the percentages of those with the highest levels of concern have stabilized over the three most current years of the study — and at much lower levels than five years ago. Those who said they were very concerned or extremely concerned declined to 53.1 of respondents, the lowest level in the five years this question has been asked. Do you use e-mail ? — About 90 percent of Internet users use e-mail — statistically the same as in 2005. Given that 77.6 percent of all Americans go online, and 89.8 percent of those users have email, this means that 69.7 percent of Americans now use e-mail. Children and the Internet Internet use and watching television : the right amount of time for children ? — A small but growing percentage of adults say that the children in their households spend too much time using the Internet — a number that has grown in each of the three most recent years of the study. Almost 70 percent of adults (69.6 percent) say that the children in their households spend the right amount of time online, a number that declined modestly for three years in a row. Throughout the Digital Future Project, more than 40 percent of adults say that the children in their households spend too much time watching television. That percentage has risen steadily for the past five years, and has now reached the highest level in the six years of the study (48.6 percent). Schoolwork and the Internet : children’s views — Children and adults continue to express conflicting views about the importance of the Internet for schoolwork. Of Internet users age 18 and under, 80.5 percent say that going online is very important or extremely important — slightly less than the 83.5 percent who reported the same responses in the previous study. However, almost three-quarters of adults (74.1 percent) say that since their household acquired the Internet, the grades of children in their households have stayed the same. Political power and influence The Internet’s importance in political campaigns — Even though 2006 was an election year, a slightly lower percentage of respondents age 16 or older say that the Internet has become important to political campaigns ; 59.5 percent agree or strongly agree that the Internet has become important for political campaigns — down from 64 percent in 2005. The Internet and political knowledge — Belief that the Internet can be a tool for learning about the political process continues to remain high, with 59.3 percent of users agreeing that by using the Internet, people can better understand politics — down marginally from 60.4 percent in 2005 (the peak year for this response in the study). Does the Internet give people more say in what the government does ? — The number of Internet users who believe that using the Internet will give people more of a say in what government does declined. Less than 20 percent of users (18.9 percent) agree or strongly agree that the Internet gives people more of a say in government — down from 20.7 percent in 2005, and the lowest level in the five years this question has been asked in the Digital Future Project. Is the Internet a tool to help gain political power ? — In spite of the recent growth of online communication by political parties and candidates, the number of users who say the Internet can be used as a tool to gain political power declined. After increasing in 2005, the number of users 16 and older who agree or strongly agree that using the Internet can give people more political power dropped to 31.4 percent, from 39.8 percent in 2005. More than half (53.6 percent) disagree or strongly disagree that the Internet can give people more political power — an increase from 49.5 percent in 2005. The Internet at work Using the Internet at work : hours online — Use of the Internet at work for professional reasons has increased steadily for each year in the Digital Future Project. Internet users who go online at work say that they actively use the Internet for work an average of 7.8 hours each week — an increase from 5.6 hours in 2005, and better than three hours more per week over when the question was first asked in 2001. The Internet at work : personal use — A small but increasing number of Internet users say they can’t visit Web sites for personal reasons while at work. Of users with Internet access at work, 85 percent say they can visit Web sites at work that are not related to their jobs ; 15 percent of users cannot visit non-work oriented Web sites while on the job, an increase of 4.3 percent over 2005. Does the Internet make workers more productive ? — The percentage of users who say the Internet at work makes them more productive has continued to increase overall for all six years of this study. Almost 70 percent of users who have access to the Internet at work (69.7 percent) say that by going online at work their productivity has improved somewhat or a lot, an increase from 66.3 percent in 2005, 65.8 percent in 2003, 64.5 percent in 2002, 60.9 percent in 2001, and 56.7 percent in 2000. While large numbers of respondents continue to report that they use the Internet for personal reasons at work, only 1.5 percent of those who go online at their jobs say their productivity has worsened because of Internet access at work. For highlights of the 2007 Digital Future Project or to order a copy of the complete report, visit www.digitalcenter.org. |
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informer : c’est le rôle du media "chaud" par excellence >>> les sites web et nouvelles technologies ; pour les institutions donc >> intranets, sites internets, flashs électroniques ou webzines, e-mailing etc,