Anyone who’s met Kerry knows that she is a huge fan of The Daily Show, hosted by silver-haired satirist and TV funnyman (and star of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) Jon Stewart.

During a bit of a catch-up session, Kerry caught Stewart’s chinwag with Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and former managing editor of Time Magazine. Isaacson has recently written a Time cover story entitled ‘How to save your newspaper’, and appeared on The Daily Show to talk micropayments with Stewart.

You can view the segement at The Daily Show’s website.

On top of suggesting that newspaper ink, notorious for rubbing off and staining the reader’s fingers, be made in the future with a “highly addictive narcotic”, Stewart makes two very valid points.

Firstly, he argues that micropayments for music (the product most commonly associated with online micropayments) is different, because we buy a song. We can keep it, listen to it as much as we like and use it for mixtapes etc. Secondly, he points out that it’s very difficult to charge for anything which has been given away for as long as online news has.

Luckily, he presented a business model which has been added to my mental list of solutions to the so-called Death of the Newspaper. Stewart calls it a cable TV or radio model. I’m calling it something else, and here it is:

The Jon Stewart Model

So, how would it work?

1. Newspapers become content houses with no distribution process. These stripped-down operations can concentrate, hopefully, on quality news without directly considering circulation numbers
2. The news produced by those outlets is distributed, wire-style and licensed, to aggregators. The example given is The Huffington Post. The licensed content is, of course, paid for by the aggregators
3. The other money exchange in this process is not between the aggregators and their readers, but between advertisers and aggregators. Stewart says that HuffPo et al hold all the cards when it comes to advertising at the moment. This enables content to be consumed for free, because the aggregators a) do not have to (fully) fund professional-quality journalism and b) attract readerships large enough to provide value to advertisers

I’m not going to bang on about this because I’ll be boring, but I must say I kinda like this idea. But what do you think?

Cross-posted from Silent In Flames

Those of you who use Twitter are no doubt already fed up by the recent spate of coverage which paints the micro-blogging service as a complete waste of time or something that we use only to service our narcissism or prove that we are alive. Those of you that don’t use Twitter probably don’t do so partly because of such coverage, as well as a desire not to be seen as a narcissistic eejit who can only validate their existence through the exchange of brief messages on a web site with other equally narcissistic strangers.

So it’s nice to see a balanced article in today’s Financial Times, pg 10 if you have the hard copy or online here, which gives a decent overview of the mechanics of the site, a brief examination as to why it is so popular and its future prospects. All without one reference to it potentially rotting our brains or how dull it is that celebrities are on there, over-sharing.

The only element of the article which I find slightly confusing is where it states that Silicon Valley financiers ‘sense that this could be the next big thing’ which is why they are so keen to invest. That seems like a statement from six months ago. Most people seem to accept now that Twitter is mainstream, its UK audience has trebled in 2009 already, entering into the top 100 most visited UK sites in early February for the first time.

The article does address the issue that seems no closer to creating a revenue generating model,  quoting Todd Chaffee, a USA based VC, who feels that if Twitter can find a mass audience then there will be lots of revenue generating opportunities, though what they are exactly is omitted. Comparisons are also made to YouTube and Skype, the poster children of the ‘build it and they will come’ strategy, which as yet seems to result in not actually making much money. A concern that this pieces skips over.

All in all though it is worthwhile read and worth flagging to any Twitter-sceptics friends and colleagues you may have.

Pic: Noise Comms

Here at Porter Novelli we’re vociferous advocates of the merits of ‘listening’ online. That is where social media can add value to a public relations, crisis communications or even customer service programme. But it’s all too often that we read about these media being used simply as added channels through which to broadcast messaging.

In this approach, social media acts in exactly the same way as print and broadcast media. In other words, it’s one-way marketing. To say you miss a trick by treating it in this way is something of an understatement.

It’s an understandable approach. The traditional marketing brain rightly sees a huge opportunity to get its messaging under the skin of the internet. It’s just that such a simplistic method nullifies the real opportunity presented by these emerging technologies. Of course, the business early adopters get it right, by and large. But when the idea spreads, more old-school industries dip in a toe and miss out on the real benefits.

New research by the Hansard Society, “the UK’s leading independent, non-partisan political research and education charity”, concluded that Members of Parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom see the internet as a way of talking to voters rather than a medium for listening to them.

Some key findings:

• Only 11 percent of MPs blog
• Less than one in four MPs uses social networking sites
• MPs see the internet as a way of informing constituents rather than engaging with them

Politicians, policy makers and council officials should seriously consider learning the art of social media and throwing themselves in at the deep end. It’s a great source of ideas and opinions, and a lightning-fast pipe for problems and concerns. That is, of course, if one listens.

Andy Williamson, director of the Society’s eDemocracy programme, told the BBC that “[MPs] use the internet as a tool for campaigning and for organising their supporters, rather than opening up two-way communications with constituents,” and that sums up beautifully why this could be termed ‘misuse’ of the internet.

The message is starting to get through, though. It may not quite have reached Parliament yet, but it’s begun to filter into local government. After a recent snowy spell in London, I half-jokingly tweeted about the ice on my street. I was delighted with the response from a local councillor, James Cousins, who seems to have his social head screwed on.

He’s listening, he knows how to respond and he does so with the intention of setting in motion a solution. The beauty of social media is that those three things, along with being human, are all it takes to be welcomed with open arms, regardless of your political persuasion.

In a quote given to me for another article, General Charles Krulak, a board director at Aston Villa, said “The fans are where the rubber meets the road… Listening is learning and learning is good.” That’s an approach that would serve politicians well. They just need to take the plunge.