Una TV acechada

En la última semana, el programa "En la Mira" de Chilevisión llegó a marcar cerca de 35 puntos. Un escenario claramente fuera de la lógica de la actual TV abierta. Todos los estudios indican que la TV está tan golpeada como los diarios por la penetración de internet. En algunos países europeos, las estaciones pierden incluso 1 punto porcentual mensual en sintonía. En EE.UU. la situación es similar. En 2007 los noticiarios registraron una baja de 4% en relación al 2006, según datos de Nielsen Media Research. Además, las tres cadenas más importantes de noticias despidieron personal el año pasado. La TV digital prepara otro gran desafío a los canales de TV frente a un negocio que se ve complejo. En Chile el 2005 los 20 programas más vistos alcanzaban en promedio 30 puntos, cifra que llegó los 22,3 puntos en 2007. Estas cifras en el siguiente artículo de Poder, la revista que dirige Iván Colodro y que ha sido ampliamente difundida por otros blogs.

Por Javiera Moraga
La elección de la norma de televisión digital que adoptará Chile es sólo el comienzo. Por largo que haya sido el proceso, equivale sólo a rayar la cancha para que los jugadores comiencen a luchar. Viejos y nuevos. Hasta antes de este proceso, el mayor cambio que había sufrido la industria televisiva chilena fue el ingreso de actores privados a comienzos de los 90. En aquel entonces todo el negocio pareció reformularse. Si se compara ese cambio con el que está por venir, no parece más que una simple anécdota. Para los involucrados, la digitalización es vista como una revolución. No sólo porque se podrán transmitir contenidos en plataformas hasta ahora desconocidas, sino porque digitalizar permite que la misma información pueda ser transmitida usando un ancho de banda menor, equivalente a casi un cuarto del actual.

“En teoría, dispondremos de muchas más señales de las que actualmente tenemos”, dice Jorge Navarrete, presidente del Consejo Nacional de Televisión (CNTV).Por lo mismo, los canales vienen desde hace tiempo preparándose para el cambio. Las nuevas señales que las estaciones actuales podrán emitir no sólo presentan desafíos, desde el punto de vista de con qué contenido surtir esas señales, sino que al mismo tiempo son la respuesta a muchos de los problemas que hoy viven estos actores. Los cuatro directores ejecutivos de los canales con mayor participación de mercado –TVN, Megavisión, Chilevisión y Canal 13– conversaron con PODER y entregaron su visión sobre los cambios que ya comienzan a sacudir a su industria.



Dame un minutoLa televisión es uno de esos extraños mercados donde los productos no son pagados por sus consumidores, sino que por un tercero. En este caso, los anunciantes. Aunque creciendo, todavía las áreas de nuevos negocios tienen un peso casi irrelevante en los ingresos totales de los canales, lo que deja a la venta de espacios publicitarios como prácticamente la única fuente de recursos. Por lo mismo, y aunque parezca paradójico, que un canal experimente una sobredemanda por minutos publicitarios puede transformarse en un problema. Por muy apetecido que sea un programa de alto rating por los anunciantes, las áreas comerciales de los canales tendrán siempre un stock limitado para vender. Si abusan y recargan un espacio exitoso con demasiados cortes publicitarios –o pocos, pero muy largos–, ahuyentarán a los televidentes y el interés por el programa decaerá.

El estado de los medios 2008

Los resultados que muestra la nueva versión del The State of The News Media, realizado por el Pew Institute, son notables. Después de 15 años desde la aparición de Netscape y el nacimiento del periodismo digital, lo medios han comenzado a sacar conclusiones con tinte de paradigma. Las pesadillas para los medios tradicionales, pero curiosamente no por la tan anunciada falta de audiencia, sino por la fuga de la publicidad. Pero hay otros datos claves para entender este proceso que aún suena esquizofrénico. A pesar del aumento de las plataformas y la fragmentación de las audiencias, los tópicos no ha evolucionado de igual manera. Peor aún. Son los webiste de noticias los que muestran menos flexibilidad que los diarios o la TV para ampliar su espectro. Los productos periodísticos ya no se pueden pensar como un producto terminado, la dinámica los obliga a pensar en "continuo", un camino sin final aparente. Contar historias y poner una agenda hoy es insuficiente. Esto ha llevado a que los medios busquen información más allá de sus organizaciones. Hoy 11 de los principales diarios estadounidenses entregan contenidos no propios. Un año atrás era sólo uno. Así se explica también que 13% del tráfico total de los 10 principales diarios de EE.UU. proviene de las visitas a los blogs del propio periódico. En realidad, es mejor el informe, indispensable para los que están mirando de cerca los medios, a las audiencias y los contenidos.

Informe Pew Institute

The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago.
And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted.
Critics have tended to see technology democratizing the media and traditional journalism in decline. Audiences, they say, are fragmenting across new information sources, breaking the grip of media elites. Some people even advocate the notion of "The Long Tail," the idea that, with the Web’s infinite potential for depth, millions of niche markets could be bigger than the old mass market dominated by large companies and producers.

The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old-media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience than they did in the legacy media. The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists.

Certainly consumers have different expectations of the press and want a changed product.
But more and more it appears that the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.

This more nuanced recognition is also putting into clearer relief what news people see as their basic challenge: somehow they must reinvent their profession and their business model at the same time they are cutting back on their reporting and resources. "It’s like changing the oil in
your car while you’re driving down the freeway," said Howard Weaver, the chief news executive of the McClatchy Company.

Avisadores Vs Avisadores

Según el último anuario de The Economist, el 2005 la inversión publicitaria global en internet apenas llegó a un 5%. Sin embargo, esta cifra esconde el nivel de crecimiento de este segmento que tiene de cabeza a las agencias y a muchos centros de investigación para saber si el actual crecimiento se mantendrá y cuáles serán las consecuencias a la hora de alcanzar las cifras que hoy muestra la inversión en el offline. Este artículo se suma a las especulaciones, pero entrega antecedentes que pueden dar una idea de lo que viene. En Chile muchos ejecutivos de agencias de publicidad creen que el "punto de venta" jamás será superado por la web. En muchos casos, los agoreros de internet terminaron rendidos frente a las evidencias. La pregunta es qué pasará con el negocio informativo en el momento que los web periodísticos tenga los recursos para reclutar a los mejores periodistas.


WHAT makes Google so valuable? This week the search engine's share price rose above $500, valuing the company at more than $150 billion. Investors' optimism stems in large part from Google's dominance in the booming field of internet advertising, which is currently worth around $27 billion a year and is expected to grow to $61 billion by 2010. In the longer term the internet is expected to account for at least 20% of global advertising spending—around four times its share now. So there are years of growth still to come. But that rosy future could be in jeopardy unless the big internet companies, including Google, do more to clamp down on some dodgy practices on the web. Concern has been growing in recent months that “click fraud” might undermine the industry.
The problem is that many of the clicks on internet advertisements are bogus. The ability to aim such advertisements so that they pop up, for example, when a user searches for a particular word, is what makes them so valuable—and makes fraud so lucrative. American law firms, for instance, are prepared to pay as much as $30 each time someone clicks on an advertisement after searching for “mesothelioma”—the name of an obscure asbestos-related disease. It is, after all, quite an efficient way to find sufferers who might be interested in launching a money-spinning compensation lawsuit.
Sadly, cheating the system is easy. It is done in two main ways. The first exploits the fact that Google, Yahoo! and other firms place ads on the websites of their affiliates, who receive a small cut of the advertising revenue generated by each resulting click. Unscrupulous affiliates can generate a stream of bogus commissions by repeatedly clicking advertisements on their own websites (or getting other people or machines to do so on their behalf). The second form of click fraud is aimed at the competition: click on a rival company's advertisements, displayed on websites or alongside the results of an internet search, and its advertising budget will swiftly be exhausted.
Estimates of the extent of click fraud vary, but it is generally thought to account for around 10% of clicks on advertisements, though some estimates range as high as 50%. Disgruntled advertisers have launched class-action lawsuits against Google and Yahoo!, and big companies are threatening to hold back spending on internet advertising unless the industry generally becomes more transparent and accountable.
Been there, done that
To some extent, these are the ordinary growing pains of a new industry. A similar problem arose with television. After the first television advertisement was screened in 1941, advertisers wanted to know how many eyeballs they were getting for their money. Television companies were at first reluctant to tell them. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, proper rules, ratings and standards were gradually introduced.
Things are supposed to move more quickly on the internet. But the big internet firms seem to have been worryingly complacent. Small-business owners, to whom click-fraud is most apparent, grumble that Google and Yahoo! have tried to play down the scale of the problem. Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, caused a storm earlier this year when he seemed to suggest at a conference that one solution to click fraud would be to “let it happen”, since advertisers would not be prepared to pay as much for bad clicks, so reducing commissions and hence the incentive for fraud. He also joked that Google's engineers were having “great fun” trying to keep ahead of the fraudsters. And Yahoo! concedes that click fraud has been a problem for years.
Stung by class-action suits, both Google and Yahoo! now insist they are taking the problem more seriously and have agreed to go along with an industry plan to draw up new standards and set up an independent auditing system to reassure advertisers by the middle of 2007 (see article). Both now provide refunds to advertisers who spot dodgy-looking referrals. Like recalcitrant teenagers, they are grudgingly giving in and doing the homework they should have done ages ago. But as well as shoring up the current system, internet firms must also devote more attention to developing new models that are less vulnerable to fraud, such as pay-per-action, in which advertisers pay up only if visitors referred to their websites actually buy something. Such new models will also require rules and standards to ensure that advertisers get what they pay for.
That will be difficult. But if the internet giants don't deliver what the advertisers want, advertisers will find other ways to market themselves. And if the advertisements evaporate, so will that remarkable $150 billion valuation.

Los caminos del Avisaje

Este artículo del The Economist describe los problemas de los diarios para retener avisaje, pero al mismo tiempo entrega ciertas pistas sobre los caminos que está tomando la publicidad y sobre el rol que cumplen los nuevos medios frente a esto.

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking
to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade
later, two reporters from the Washington Post
wrote a series of articles that brought down
President Nixon and the status of print
journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold
governments and companies to account. They
usually set the news agenda for the rest of the
media. But in the rich world newspapers are now
an endangered species. The business of selling
words to readers and selling readers to
advertisers, which has sustained their role in
society, is falling apart (see article).

Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most
to lose from the internet. Circulation has been
falling in America, western Europe, Latin
America, Australia and New Zealand for decades
(elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past
few years the web has hastened the decline. In
his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer
calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be
the moment when newsprint dies in America as the
last exhausted reader tosses aside the last
crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation
would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook
or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron
could not dismiss the way that ever more young
people are getting their news online. Britons
aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30%
less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door.
The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the
internet is a seductive medium that supposedly
matches buyers with sellers and proves to
advertisers that their money is well spent.
Classified ads, in particular, are quickly
shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook
of our age, once described them as the industry's
rivers of gold—but, as he said last year,
“Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the
Netherlands newspapers have lost half their
classified advertising to the internet.


Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in
large numbers, but it is only a matter of time.
Over the next few decades half the rich world's
general papers may fold. Jobs are already
disappearing. According to the Newspaper
Association of America, the number of people
employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990
and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper
firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005
a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the
owner of several big American dailies, got the
firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year
history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment
bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the
most august journalistic institution of all,
because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are
at last doing something. In order to cut costs,
they are already spending less on journalism.
Many are also trying to attract younger readers
by shifting the mix of their stories towards
entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may
seem more relevant to people's daily lives than
international affairs and politics are. They are
trying to create new businesses on- and offline.
And they are investing in free daily papers,
which do not use up any of their meagre editorial
resources on uncovering political corruption or
corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity
looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it
does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.

Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will
politicians therefore burgle their opponents'
offices with impunity, and corporate villains
whoop as they trample over their victims?
Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in
America, are worried about the effect of a
crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news
organisations “up to the task of sustaining the
informed citizenry on which democracy depends?”
asked a recent report about newspapers from the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.

Nobody should relish the demise of once-great
titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be
as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy,
remember, has already survived the huge
television-led decline in circulation since the
1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned
papers and papers have shunned what was in
stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it
will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest
in the kind of investigative stories which often
benefit society the most are in a good position
to survive, as long as their owners do a
competent job of adjusting to changing
circumstances. Publications like the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able
to put up the price of their journalism to
compensate for advertising revenues lost to the
internet—especially as they cater to a more
global readership. As with many industries, it is
those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor
entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than
investigating abuses or even spreading general
news; it lies in holding governments to
account—trying them in the court of public
opinion. The internet has expanded this court.
Anyone looking for information has never been
better equipped. People no longer have to trust a
handful of national papers or, worse, their local
city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google
News draw together sources from around the world.
The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly
half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists
and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to
account. The web has opened the closed world of
professional editors and reporters to anyone with
a keyboard and an internet connection. Several
companies have been chastened by amateur
postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops
or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each
blogger is capable of bias and slander, but,
taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher
after truth boundless material to chew over. Of
course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the
results of net journalism have admittedly been
limited. Most bloggers operate from their
armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen
journalists tend to stick to local matters. But
it is still early days. New online models will
spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit
group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the
work of amateurs and professionals to produce
investigative stories on the internet. Aptly,
$10,000 of cash for the project has come from
Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free
classified-advertisement websites that has
probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.

In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality
journalism will also be backed by non-profit
organisations. Already, a few respected news
organisations sustain themselves that
way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science
Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group
of serious newspapers available everywhere
online, independent journalism backed by
charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and
well-informed citizen journalists: there is every
sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.