Is NYT's David Carr Right? Has Business Media Changed Forever?

New York Times media critic David Carr has written an interesting article about the state of business media in his column, "Business Is a Beat Deflated."

In the article, Carr wrote, "While the business of business may be back, the business of covering it with heroic narratives and upbeat glossy spreads most certainly is not. And probably never will be."

I think that the nature of business coverage will have to change, that we're not going to see many CEOs-as-gods stories (with one exception, Steve Jobs still gets adulation).

That's not to say we won't see cover stories on CEOs. We will. They just won't be as glowing profiles, for the most part.

I don't think that's a bad thing since the CEOs I've met have generally been very smart but also very human, too.

Yet More Reactions to FTC Rule on Bloggers Must Disclose Free Products and/or Payment

I liked the New York Times' print headline better than the online headline: "Fessing Up About Freebies" over "New F.T.C. Rules Have Bloggers and Twitterers Mulling" in the online version.

Seems like disclosure is a big issue in the fashion industry. And also with the software reviewers.

This is article also points to the discrepancy between how bloggers and print reporters are being treated.

I think the FTC will expand its regulation to include print media, too. Or at least have a good reason for not including print media.

Metrics from Online Sharing -- the numbers are not high, which is both good and bad news

If you've got a blog or a Twitter feed, or you're an online marketer (including PR), you want to drive traffic to your site, Twitter feed, etc.

And if you're an online marketer, and your client or boss is reluctant, one of the things you need to do is defend the ROI of social media.

And that has not been easy to do.

As I've discussed, each organization brings different skill sets, goals, experience and connections with their target audiences -- so the metrics that matter may be vastly different. My metrics may not be relevant to yours, unlike circulation figures for print magazines, which is an apple-to-apple comparison.

In "Share the Moment and Spread the Wealth: The Big Business of Driving Traffic Back to a Web Site," the New York Times' Brad Stone goes beyond an introductory article on the topic. (The paper of record finds itself often covering the basics so that it can then write deeper articles.)

Stone gets someone to provide hard metrics.

Ok, so Justin.TV disclosed that visitors to its site now share links from the site 6,000 times a day (up from 2,000 per day), now that it uses Meebo. That 200-percent increase translates into 68 percent growth in traffic to the Justin.TV site -- a big drop off, but a much, much better return than direct mail's typical 1-percent response rate.

What's interesting is that the CEO ShareThis reported hard numbers for retweeting. ShareThis provides sharing tools to major sites like FoxNews.com and ESPN.com. According to the Times,

When readers post a link from a ShareThis site onto Twitter, their followers often “retweet” the link to their own Twitter groupies. As a result, 18 Twitter users, on average, click on that link and visit the site. A single link to a story posted on LinkedIn, the professional social network, generates around eight visitors; Digg gets five clicks for every link posted to the site," ShareThis reported.

So, the good news: above are some metrics with which to compare your efforts. You may not be doing as badly as you thought.

The bad news: That's a lot of effort to generated 18 click-throughs, and that's for content from some very professional sites. And perhaps those 18 new visitors can help boost page view and stickiness metrics to tout to advertisers, but it still seems like a long way to go before that gets monetized.

Will Bay Area Residents Turn to the New York Times for Local News?

The New York Times is regarded as a national newspaper of record (check Wikipedia for a description of "paper of record") but the Times is now trying to more closely cover San Francisco.

The Times currently a Sunday circulation o f65,000, but hopes to boost that number by devoting more resources to covering news from San Francisco.

Not coincidentally, the Times' arch-competitor, the Wall St. Journal is also devoting more space and resources to covering San Francisco news in order to boost its circulation.

Interestingly, while Times did not disclose its plans, the Journal leaked its plans.

The Journal plans to start in Nov. or Dec., "by adding a page or two of general-interest news from California, probably once a week, produced by the large staff it already has in the Bay Area."

Doesn't seem like much of an increase in coverage, but it's an experiment.

One worth watching since newspapers are cutting space and resources, and this goes in the opposite direction.

For more details, check out "The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Plan San Francisco Editions."