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February 4, 2010

Chart of the day: journalistic innumeracy illustrated

Filed under: journalism, media, newspapers — Rocky Agrawal @ 3:38 am

This Bloomberg graphic and its interpretation in the accompanying story is full of errors.

What would readers conclude after looking at the graph above?

  1. Best Buy sales have gone up at least 10 fold in the last 2 years. (Recession, what recession?)
  2. Best Buy’s monthly sales at the end of 2009 were roughly $22 million, at the peak of holiday season.
  3. Newegg is the #2 electronics retailer, after Best Buy. Amazon, buy.com, Walmart and Target aren’t players in electronics.

That’s what the graph says, but all of those conclusions are wrong.

In reality, Best Buy did $8.5 billion in revenue in December. In fiscal year 2009, Best Buy did $45 billion in revenue. $22 million in revenue is a rounding error.

What the graph really shows is how useless these Mint.com data are for analyzing consumer spending by category.

The reporter apparently didn’t understand the methodology behind Mint’s data. Mint allows consumers to track their credit and debit transactions. Consumers enter their account information and mint pulls transaction data from their banks and presents it online. Here’s how that methodology leads to the above erroneous conclusions:

  1. The enormous growth in the graph likely represents the growth in mint.com’s user base. Mint launched in September 2007 and has grown to 1.8 million users. (Mint was recently acquired by personal-finance software maker Intuit for $170 million.) Best Buy’s comparable store sales were down for fiscal year 2009 and up marginally for fiscal 2008.
  2. Only transactions by Mint’s users are included in this number, accounting for the multibillion-dollar difference. Even then, those numbers may not be complete as not all users import all accounts.
  3. Newegg is the #2 dedicated electronics player as classified by Mint. Because Mint collects transaction level data, not item level data, it doesn’t know what to do with purchases from diversified retailers like Amazon, buy.com and Walmart. (Amazon wouldn’t even show up as a leading bookseller; on my Mint account, it shows up as “Shopping”.) By Best Buy’s own definitions, consumer electronics only account for 36% of its revenue.

There’s also zero justification in the Mint data to support the chart’s caption that Best Buy generated these huge returns by “offering discounts on laptops and flat-panel televisions.”

These kind of errors are rampant in our business news because many reporters don’t understand numbers or methodology. When I was in school at the Medill School of Journalism, most classmates took the minimal math and economics classes they could and still get a journalism degree.

One of the most frequent numerical mistakes by journalists is confusing percent increases with percentage point increases. If your credit card’s interest rate goes from 10% to 15%, it’s a 5 percentage point increase, but a 50% increase.

This journalistic innumeracy hurts us all. We can’t make informed decisions about what government is doing if people don’t understand the numbers. Even basics get confused: journalists frequently confuse millions with billions (via Paul Kedrosky).

Journalists are at least partly to blame for the dot com bubble and the housing crash. Not understanding the economics, they repeated the lines of “experts,” such as investment bank analysts and real estate agents — most of whom had clear incentives to keep pumping air into the bubbles. I read many stories about how exotic mortgages were making housing more affordable. What was actually happening was that the easy availability of credit and flood of otherwise unqualified buyers in the marketplace drove up price. Basic supply and demand.

Unfortunately this problem is only going to get worse. Many of the sharpest minds I know from the journalism business have left to go on to other careers for many reasons — the difference in pay (often 2x or more), instability and constant layoffs and backward thinking management.

Additional analysis of the data also takes time, which is becoming harder to come by as newsrooms across the nation shrink. The pressure to do more “quick hits” like charts of the day will lead to more sloppiness and misinformation.

I’ll share some thoughts on how to do better in the next post.

More on: journalism, newspapers

See also:

February 3, 2010

Plowing through the middleman

Filed under: facebook, journalism, media, newspapers, twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 7:53 am
Snow plow in Arlington County

Snow plow in Arlington County. Creative Commons image by Ron Barber.

The snow day. Growing up in Michigan, it was always a treat. Whenever a significant amount of snow was in the forecast, I’d wake up early to see if I got the day off. I’d listen to the radio as the DJ went through the school closings or watch the crawl on the local morning news. It took some patience as they went through the list, but once in a while that patience was rewarded with a day off.

Kids today don’t have that level of suspense. As a fan of Arlington County on Facebook, my newsfeed showed that school is closed today. A quick check of the Arlington Public Schools Web site also provides that information. No more listening through “Angelus Academy, Anne Arundel Community College, Anne Arundel County Schools, Apple Montessori School, Aquinas and Old Town Montessori School…” (In a large metro area, this is killer.)

It’s yet another example of how media consumers can cut out the middle man and go directly to the source.

In much of the discussion about aggregators such as Google News and digg, what’s left out is that much of the media are themselves aggregators — compiling data from school districts, local businesses, funeral homes, police and fire agencies, etc.

Newspapers didn’t really get to play in the school closing game, but compilations of local events, lunch menus, high school sports scores, police blotters and obituaries have been a key part of the newspaper content mix. Such content is an even greater proportion of What People Care About. Many of these needs are now being better served online as easy-to-use tools such as Facebook, Twitter and flickr get adopted by these news sources.

Instead of reading about promotions and awards in the newspaper, I can get that information delivered to me through LinkedIn or Facebook status updates. Sadly, I’ve found out about the death of a high school classmate through Facebook.

And it’s a much better experience than what fits in a newspaper:

  • The filter is personal. It doesn’t matter whether that person was important enough in the eyes of a newspaper’s editor. I also don’t have to read through long lists of people I’m not interested in.
  • The content is richer. Clay Reid’s Facebook page is filled with photos and remembrances from friends.
  • It’s interactive. With promotions and job changes, I can quickly reach out to friends and congratulate them.

In the case of a snow day, you can make plans with your other friends who suddenly have the day free right on Facebook. And then upload the video of you snow blading down the hill.

More on: newspapers, facebook

August 16, 2009

Building sandcastles on the Web

Filed under: journalism, newspapers, product management — Rocky Agrawal @ 2:41 pm
North American Sandsculpting Championship

2007 North American Sandsculpting Championship, Virgina Beach, Va.

As I’ve been figuring out what to do next, I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what I’ve done in the past. The sad reality of building Web products is that your work quickly disappears. Just as waves and winds tear down sandcastles, the rapid pace of innovation on the Web means that your best accomplishments get wiped away.

Despite all of the talk about newspapers having failed to innovate these are some of the things we did at the Star Tribune:

  • Created one of the first dynamic publishing systems.
  • Launched a local Yellow Pages product, complete with maps and driving directions.
  • Launched a home search with full MLS listings. Someone actually ran a tape over to the building from the MLS offices to make this work. It even had Google Street View-type pictures of all the homes in a neighborhood.
  • Created a searchable entertainment guide.

We even tried to get people to pay for news! (It didn’t work in the mid-’90s, it won’t work now.)

That work has been washed away, as has most of my other work. My work at Tellme still exists, but experiencing that requires buying a new Ford.

Sure, I have screenshots of some of the products I’ve created. But they don’t capture the essence of  the work. If a Web site can be captured in a screenshot, its creator didn’t do a good job.

My longest lasting legacy is partnering with genius designer Jamie Hutt to create the weather mascot for startribune.com. Someone had pointed out that there was a thermometer on the roof of the Star Tribune building that was recording the temperature for the Strib’s audiotext system. We decided to incorporate that reading on to the front page. To capture some local flavor, we made the weather icon a snowman. He appears differently depending on the weather. This a typical summer look:

Star Tribune Snowman

My favorite is when it gets really hot — you see a puddle with glasses and a carrot. The snowman’s look and placement have changed over the years but the essence of the idea remains.

June 7, 2009

What the AP must do now

Filed under: google, journalism, newspapers, publishing — Rocky Agrawal @ 10:13 am

I’ve written before about how the Associated Press blew it in the early days of the Web by choosing to not play in the online news space. More than a decade later, AP still has tremendous assets that it can use to become a great news source. Rather than fight expensive legal battles that it will almost surely lose, it can try to build a great product:

  • Unlock the content vault — AP content has typically been available online for no more than 30 days, which means that links to AP content goes bad quickly. AP could provide exclusive access to all of the content that it has. Not only does this provide a great service to users, it’s also great for search engine rankings.
  • Exploit the photos –- One of my favorite things when I was working in a newsroom was to look through the AP LeafDesk. AP employs some of the world’s most talented photographers and the LeafDesk was my window to the world. From there, I would choose which photos would appear in our products. In the online world with infinite space, there is no reason to have editors limit the availability of pictures to what they can fit in print. Online access to AP’s photos would be a pageview goldmine; slideshows are incredibly popular. At the New York Times, 11 million of the 49 million pageviews on the day after the inauguration went to slideshows. (Bonus tip: talk to the folks at Cooliris.)
  • Geotag the content — AP journalists are in the best position to include relevant geographic information in articles and photos. Geotagging would provide users new ways to explore AP’s content. Imagine browsing through a map with the latest photos and news. Or using geotags combined with archived content to explore a region in time. Google News tries to do this using algorithms, but often misses or adds irrelevant geotagging.
  • Organize the AP’s information and make it universally accessible – Instead of letting Google organize the AP’s information, the AP should do it. This may be hard to do given the AP’s DNA, but it needs to move from generating disposable news stories to creating longterm news resources. There is a lot of information and judgment that goes into the newsmaking process that doesn’t make it into the final story. If embedded in a database, that information could be used to automatically generate timelines of the major stories of significant news events. AP’s obit file could become a reference source about newsmakers.
  • Talk to NPR – NPR faces channel conflict similar to AP’s, yet they’ve managed to build one of the best news sites and they’ve done it under the NPR brand. NPR.org is frequently a leader when it comes to adopting new technologies, including open APIs, social media and search. Learn from their experts.

AP needs to do this under the AP brand instead of obscure local brands. It needs to focus on page performance, usability and searchability.

If AP does all of the above, it will have built an unparalleled news product. Maybe one that consumers would pay for.

More on: newspapers, geotagging

See also:

April 15, 2009

How the AP blew it

Filed under: google, iphone, journalism, media, newspapers, yahoo — Rocky Agrawal @ 9:17 pm

In the most recent round of AP getting in a huff about search engines and aggregators stealing traffic that they feel rightly belongs to them, there’s a fundamental problem they’re ignoring: AP chose not be in the online news business. More than a decade ago, AP made two crucial decisions: to not create a destination site and to license its content to news portals. Either of these decisions on their own would have been damaging, but the combination of the two has been nearly deadly.

Screenshot of AP's iPhone app

Screenshot of AP's iPhone app

As a member-owned cooperative, the AP has catered to its members, which includes newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets. Even now, if you go to AP.org, news is a footnote. Contrast that with the front page of Reuters. Instead of displaying AP content on the AP-branded site, you get AP content in obscure brands like the Lake County Record-Bee, High Desert Daily Press, Citizen-Times.com and GazetteXtra.com. AP is still hosting the content, but the strong national AP brand is subsumed by a large number of brands that have no meaning outside their region.

This might have worked if newspapers had assumed the role of the default home page and people sought out their local brands. Some papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times tried to create all purpose portals; those efforts have been abandoned.

AP also decided to license content to online media outlets. Yahoo! was an early licensee; Google struck a deal with AP more recently. Yahoo! was able to take the AP content and create a leading news destination site without employing hundreds of journalists.

Not only do Yahoo! and Google license AP content, they are doing a better job presenting it than AP. Compare this story on the AP’s site (branded oanow.com) with the same story on Yahoo! News. The Yahoo! story loads a lot faster and the layout is cleaner. On AP-hosted pages, I sometimes get pop up ads. It’s a much worse experience than Google or Yahoo! News.

The fact that AP doesn’t have a destination site presents another big problem in today’s PageRank driven environment: because the same story can be presented at hundreds of different URLs, they don’t rank highly in search results.

It’s not impossible for AP to get back in the game. But they have to play the game as it exists today, instead of trying to reset the calendar to 1995. They’ll need to focus on the things that any Web business needs to focus on today: simplicity, performance, community, analytics and search engine optimization. And they must do it under the AP brand.

One hopeful sign is AP’s Mobile News iPhone application. The app provides a solid user experience, incorporates photos and videos effectively, has acceptable levels of advertising and looks like it was designed this decade. You can even send in news tips. My only real complaint is that the AP brand is buried in favor of a generic “Mobile News Network” brand. (Probably to placate member companies.)

AP has a lot of assets that even now aren’t fully exploited by Google or Yahoo! With some creative thinking and Web-focused talent, they could use those assets to build a killer destination site. It won’t be anyone’s home page, but it can be successful nonetheless.

More on: newspapers.

April 6, 2009

Anyone can be a journalist

Filed under: facebook, flickr, journalism, media, mobile, newspapers, publishing, social networking, twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 8:59 pm

In conversations with people in the news business, I regularly hear about the need for “professional journalists.” Ask them what makes a professional journalist and the answers get wishy-washy. Is it someone who is on staff at a newspaper? What about TV anchors? What about commentators? Do you have to have a fancy degree from a top-flight journalism school? Do you have to be able to write eloquently or briefly? (I know people who work for newspapers that can’t do either.)

Unlike medicine, law or plumbing, there is no officially recognized training program, licensing or accreditation process. Actors’ Equity has more stringent requirements for membership than the Society of Professional Journalists.

My answer is none of the above. A journalist is anyone who can report a story.

Just like the best camera is the one you have on you at the time something happens, the best journalist is the person who is there when news happens. At the same time that we have newspapers across the country drastically cutting their staffs, we have an increasing number of people with the tools to do original reporting quickly and easily. (See my earlier post on flickr vs. The Washington Post.) The cameraphone is replacing the reporters’ notebook and the printing press. Not only can it record notes, it can instantly disseminate that information across the globe.

Janis Krums was a journalist on January 15 when US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River. His tweet “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” and picture were among the lasting memories of the day. The picture has been seen more than 442,000 times on TwitPic, which is greater than the circulation of all but 20 newspapers in the country. That number would be much, much higher if you were able to include the views on sites (including mainstream media sites) that hosted the pictures on their own servers.

If he were employed by a newspaper or wire service, he’d have a decent shot at a Pulitzer for breaking news photography. A key part of winning is being in the right place at the right time.

I used to wonder what I’d do if I found myself in the middle of a big news event to get the story out. Would I call someone I know at the New York Times? Now I know what I’d do: I’d upload a picture from my cameraphone to my flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Hard-hitting investigative journalism represents a small fraction of the resources spent by news organizations.

Even there, the “professional journalists” have competition. Last week, I attended a Web 2.0 Expo session by Sunlight Labs where technologists gathered to bring more openness and accountability to government. Their mission is to get access to government data that is locked up in ancient computer systems and expose it in ways that the average citizen can consume it. Their tools are XML, parsers and databases. They are journalists, too.

More on: newspapers

Disclosure: I have a fancy degree from a top-flight journalism school. I try to write briefly (on Twitter) and more eloquently here. I used to be on staff at startribune.com and washingtonpost.com. I try to commit journalism for fun.

April 5, 2009

Newspaper companies can’t unring the bell

Filed under: journalism, media, newspapers, publishing, twitter, web 2, web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 12:07 pm

American newspapers are in trouble. So far this year, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have shuttered their presses. Tribune is in bankruptcy. My first employer, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, is also there. Publishers have threatened to close the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. Much of the blame has been pointed at two things: not charging for content online and the rise of craigslist.

While those have undoubtedly had an impact, there have been structural changes that go well beyond that:

  • Consolidation among key advertisers. There used to be three or four different department stores in each major city, all of whom advertised in the paper. Now they’re nearly all Macy’s, reducing the number of potential ad buyers. The same has happened in the banking industry where many regional banks have been gobbled up. Many of the ad buying decisions that were previously made at a local level are now consolidated as well.
  • Demand for trackability. Advertisers and their agencies increasingly want to know how their ads are performing and newspapers don’t provide the level of tracking that online sites do. The key classified verticals — homes, autos and jobs — all have trackable online options.
  • Rise of information technology. Businesses can get to know their customers much better due to advances in computer technology. The airlines, banks, hotels, department stores and grocery stores I do business with know my buying habits. They can use that data to create targeted offers that will appeal to me. Harris Teeter, a regional grocery store chain, sends out an e-circular that highlights the items customers have bought in the past. These personalized offers can be delivered for little cost.
  • Competition from their own suppliers. Newspapers have long been aggregators. They get a lot of their content from other providers. Instead of relying on a newspaper for Dilbert, I can get it in my email every morning from the syndicate that distributes it. And because color is free online, I get full color seven days a week.
  • Rise of user-generated content. Anyone can be a publisher these days. Twitter is stealing mindshare 140 characters at a time from newspapers. It’s not just Twitter, of course. Many of the same experts that newspapers rely on to provide the content for their stories are bloggers as well. Although the average quality of news in newspapers is likely higher than the average quality of an article in the blogosphere, there are more experts in the blogosphere than there are in newsrooms. As Fred Wilson writes, the tools for discovering this excellent content are getting better and better.
  • Increasing cost of commodities. Producing and distributing a newspaper is very expensive. Subscriptions don’t cover the cost of newsprint and fuel. While these prices fluctuate, the general trend line is up. To cope with these increasing costs, newspapers have raised their subscription rates, further depressing the circulation that advertisers count on.
  • Increasing environmental consciousness. Consumers are increasingly going green and newspapers are no friend of the environment. Trees are cut down, turned into giant rolls of newsprint, shipped across country where massive energy guzzling presses print on them and are then distributed every morning by trucks. Then they have to be disposed of. (See my earlier post on hotels going green and requiring opt-in to newspapers.)
  • Decreasing density of newspaper subscribers. As a kid, I used to drag a pile of newspapers around in my red Radio Flyer wagon, going door-to-door delivering the paper to people’s doorsteps. With the decline in subscriptions, you really can’t do that anymore. The unit cost of distribution goes up as there are fewer subscribers. It also makes the paper less convenient: rather than getting it at your doorstep, it might be in a box at the curb. Getting to your laptop doesn’t require getting dressed and going outside.
  • Inability to develop national scale. Most of the newspaper companies competitors can’t play at a national scale. This includes both online and offline media such as Google and TV networks. This makes it easier to spread out costs and easier to generate revenue. At startribune.com, we built out online yellow pages, entertainment guides, classifieds, etc. well before the vertical players existed. But because we were a regional paper, we couldn’t generate sufficient revenue to compete with the focused vertical players. The fragmentation also makes it harder for advertisers who want to buy reach. (See my related post on How the AP blew it.)

More on: newspapers

March 16, 2009

More bad news for newspapers: hotels going green

Filed under: hotels, journalism, media, newspapers, travel — Rocky Agrawal @ 8:09 am
The Four Seasons in Austin requires guests to opt-in for newspapers.

The Four Seasons in Austin requires guests to opt-in for newspapers.

This picture should send shivers down the spines of executives at USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va.

For at least as long as I’ve been traveling for business (13 years and counting), a USA Today in front of the hotel room door in the morning has been a given. It just shows up. There’s fine print in the check in folder that says that USA Today will be delivered and if I don’t want it, I can tell the front desk and get a credit of 75 cents a day. Because I do what most people do — nothing — USA Today gets to count me as paid circulation.

At least 60% of the time, the only people who see that USA Today are the person who drops it off in front of my room and the maid who throws it away. I’ve already gotten my news from my laptop and from the TV that was showing CNN while I was getting ready.

I’m surely not the only one, and hotels are catching on.

Hotels have been steadily greening their practices while cutting costs: changing sheets only between guests, changing towels only when guests leave them on the floor, providing new toiletries only when guests have used up the previous batch.

Cutting back on newspaper delivery is the next step. This year I’ve started encountering hotels that ask me at check in whether I want a newspaper. The Four Seasons in Austin has gone a step further: if you want a newspaper, you have to put a hang tag on your door before 1 a.m. And you have to remember to do this every night of your stay.

As with Web defaults, you can guess what happens. Most people do what I do: nothing. On my floor early Sunday morning, I saw three newspaper hang tags (out of about 40 rooms). Not even a free copy of the Sunday New York Times enticed people. They were easily outnumbered by the “do not disturb” hang tags.

There are a number of unknowns: how many rooms were occupied, do the hotel’s demographics shift considerably during SXSW, etc.

But the fact that an increasing number of hotels no longer consider newspapers an essential part of their service is bad news for the newspaper industry.

See also: Who needs newspapers?

More on: newspapers.

March 15, 2009

Who needs newspapers?

Filed under: journalism, media, newspapers, web 2, web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 12:45 am

I read two thought-provoking pieces this week on the decline of newspapers from voices outside the newspaper business and one Really Dumb Idea from a voice on the inside.

Author Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

…

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

ODP/DMOZ creator and veteran geek, Rich Skrenta, The news medium has a message: “Goodbye”:

Every so often there’s a story about about a technophobe executive so out of touch a secretary has to print out their email every morning so they can read it on paper and dictate replies.

That’s what the print newspaper is, of course. Why on earth would you print all that stuff out? Over a hundred pages, most of which you’re not going to read, with the crease down the middle of the front page photo, story jumps everywhere, a carbon-footprint disaster to produce, distribute and recycle. It’s absurd.

…

I once worked out some rough back-of-napkin estimates on the number of text bytes in the paper. It was only delivered once during the day, but if you average the bytes across the entire 24 hour period it came out to be about the rate of a 300 baud modem. The newspaper was the internet.

Both make essentially the same point: the newspaper is an accident of history whose time is just about up. Rather than try to figure out how to “fix” the newspaper problem, we should focus on what’s next.

A lot of the players in the news ecosystem have already done that. I’ve written before about how most newspapers are just repackagers of information.

Newspapers have long played to the middle, and not in a political sense. They put out essentially one product and hope that the average person finds enough of value in to subscribe. The cost of print means that you really can’t go into a lot of depth on a lot of topics. You can’t cover things that are extremely important to a few hundred people.

That worked when getting that depth was a difficult thing for readers. Now, infinite depth on just about any topic is a click away. For sports, finance and politics junkies, sites like ESPN.com, morningstar.com and huffingtonpost.com are much better ways to quench their appetites.

In the meantime, the diehards in the newspaper business will come up with stupider and stupider ideas. Consider this story (via Blake Williams) about a personalized print-at-home newspaper:

MediaNews has been working with a technology company — Mr. Vandevanter would not say which one — to develop a proprietary printer for a reader’s home. It would receive and print a subscriber’s customized newspaper — with targeted advertising.

You have to have a new printer to help cut their printing and delivery costs! Maybe you’ll even have to buy special paper and ink so you can get that full broadsheet experience and can get that genuine newspaper experience of having ink rub off on your fingers. For real authenticity, the registration will be off every once in a while so that the pictures don’t look right.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to scan a link on the printed page with your CueCat to go to a Web site you find interesting.

December 29, 2008

A tale of two media companies

Filed under: YouTube, google, hulu, journalism, newspapers, television, video, web 2, web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 1:36 am

You’ve got a competitor with deep pockets, huge brand recognition and a lot of traffic that is interested in your content. What do you do?

Here are two very different approaches:

GateHouse Media is suing The New York Times Co., whose Boston Globe has been linking from its hyperlocal site to stories on GateHouse’s Wicked Local site.

Wicked awesome Hulu is co-opting archrival YouTube’s traffic. If you do a search for Simpsons clips on YouTube, you’re likely to see clips uploaded to YouTube by Hulu. Here’s one I found:

Rather than try to rewrite more than a decade of Web practices (if not copyright law), Hulu is working the system to reach a lot of interested users where they are. It’s a brilliant move and the kind of thinking that is virtually nonexistent within the newspaper industry.

The clip promotes Hulu as the destination for premium content on the Internet. Users have a clear choice: watch excerpts with an annoying Hulu ticker on YouTube or go to hulu.com where they can watch the full video in higher quality without the ticker.

In the short run, this helps Google by providing content for popular queries. In the long run, hulu is the big winner.

More on: hulu, newspapers, YouTube

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