Steve Outing again:

So, Pezzillo's simple observation about the success of phone apps points to an important truism about human consumer behavior: Most people seem to prefer to spend money on things they get to "keep." A phone app may not be a physical thing, but it's there on your phone every time you turn it on. It's "yours," even though it's just digital bits.

And that's way news organizations failed in selling content online.

Why did they fail? There are many reasons, of course, but I believe that perhaps the biggest reason is that when online news consumers were asked to pay for news, many felt that they weren't getting anything, because they received nothing tangible -- just information. And, as we've all been trained during the Web years, most information is free online.

Here's the full column.

[...] the graphic shows that 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case; the No. 1 choice (at 68% of respondents to a 2009 Belden survey) was to look to “other local media sites".

Writes Steve Outing. And concludes:

Wow. That pretty much says it all. Many newspapers are doomed without management change at the top, moving people into the executive suite who have a better grasp of reality. Or the people already occupying those offices need to get new glasses.

There's a great article by Clive Thompson in today's New York Times Magazine on so-called "social-contagion effects" - the fact that obesity, smoking, but also happiness seems to spread virally along social connections. Some excerpts:

good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.

(...)

And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

(...)

Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal.

(...)

The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.

The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness.

(...)

In essence, Christakis and Fowler’s work suggests a new way to think about public health. If they’re right, public-health initiatives that merely address the affected individuals are doomed to failure. To really grapple with bad behaviors that spread, you have to simultaneously focus on individuals who are so distant they don’t even realize they’re affecting one another.

(...)

other scientists have used Christakis and Fowler’s work to inspire more potentially practical public-health projects, some of which are now being implemented. Nathan Cobb, a smoking-cessation expert and researcher at the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, is designing an application that Facebook users can install on their pages when they’re trying to quit smoking. The application will publicly display how long they’ve gone without cigarettes, whether they are using a nicotine patch and how much money they have saved by not smoking. The idea, Cobb says, is to take your invisible, internal battle to quit smoking and make it visible so that it can influence your friends (and friends of friends) who are still puffing away.

Ich fand schon das letzten Montag publizierte "Internet-Manifest" wirklich toll. (Siehe dazu auch hier.) Aber Stefan Niggemeiers Erläuterungen dazu haben mir fast noch besser gefallen. Highlights:

Wir sind nicht die Gegner der guten etablierten Medien, im Gegenteil. Wir schreien auf, weil wir die Sorge haben, dass viele von ihnen ihre Zukunft verspielen, wenn sie glauben, die Leser müssten zu ihnen kommen und nicht sie zu den Lesern. Wir sorgen uns um diese Medien, aus ganz eigennützigen Gründen, weil wir für sie arbeiten, und aus ganz anders eigennützigen Gründen, weil wir glauben, dass eine Gesellschaft auch in Zukunft guten Journalismus braucht.

Wenn ich tagein tagaus in diesem Blog die Medien kritisiere, dann tue ich das nicht, um Argumente gegen die Existenzberechtigung und Notwendigkeit dieser Medien zu sammeln, sondern im Gegenteil: Weil ich glaube, dass wir dringend Journalisten brauchen, die uns so wahrhaftig und transparent wie möglich informieren über das, was in der Welt passiert.

Also: Ja, unser „Manifest” steckt voller Selbstverständlichkeiten, von denen ich wünschte, sie wären wirklich selbstverständlich.

Ich weiß nicht, ob Zeitungen und Zeitschriften aussterben werden, ich glaube es nicht und hoffe es auch nicht — ich liebe Zeitungen. Aber man muss schon sehr verblendet sein, wenn man glaubt, dass auch nach der Ankunft eines Mediums, das so viel schneller, vielfältiger, zugänglicher ist, das aufwändige Drucken und Verschicken von Papier die natürliche, die dominante Form der Informationsvermittlung bleiben wird.

Es ging mir (und ich nehme an: uns) nicht zuletzt um eine Haltung. Um die Forderung an die Verleger, Lobbyisten, Politiker, zu sehen, wie anders das Internet ist und was es alles verändert, und sich darauf ernsthaft einzulassen. Das klingt furchtbar banal und ist total revolutionär. Und es ging uns darum, ein paar Pflöcke einzuschlagen (ein paar zentrale Eckpfeiler sozusagen, jaha), nein: Markierungen, an denen wir sagen: Hier geht es nicht weiter. Wir können nicht ernsthaft darüber diskutieren, dass man Menschen als Bestrafung für Urheberrechtsverletzungen das Recht entziehen will, online zu gehen, wir können nicht ernsthaft darüber diskutieren, dass Links und Zitate genehmigungs- oder kostenpflichtig sein müssen, und so weiter.