Nestoria Blog

This year we kick off our Nestoria interview series with Lloyd Shepherd, one of the co-founders of new UK blog network MessyMedia. Lloyd has a long history of being at the intersection journalism and technology innovation having worked in senior roles at Yahoo! Europe and the Guardian Unlimited before starting MessyMedia. Messy was launched in September 2007 and is developing a portfolio of blogs marked by their ability to both entertain and inform. So far they’ve launched Westmonster (covering politics) and Glitterditch (covering London nightlife).

Lloyd’s personal transition from traditional offline media to the pure online blog format is indicative of the great state of flux in media today. We face a situation in which new technologies allow us to spend more and more time interacting with ‘media’ while simultaneously forcing long-established media brands face to challenge many of the assumptions of their long-standing business models.

Lloyd, thanks for meeting with us.

1. Explain a bit the idea behind MessyMedia and what role you see blogs playing in the media landscape going forward.

We launched MessyMedia with two fundamental propositions:

i. The tools to publish online are now so extremely low-cost they are effectively free. This has led to an explosion in online publishing, most of it in the form of amateur writing (ie, “blogs”). People have written a lot about how blogs represent a new form of free expression and how it’s going to change journalism, etc. etc. etc., but really all blogs are is a manifestation of the sudden ubiquity and access to online publishing tools. Less than a decade ago, you’d have spent getting on for half a million quid on a content management system, an ad-serving system and a stats/user-tracking system. These days, those things are effectively free. Just like the Gutenberg press powered new forms of expression, so Movable Type (named after that press) is enabling people to reach audiences with what they want to say.

ii. In the UK, those new tools have led to a great many new sites appearing, but very few of them have attempted to take on established media players. Contrast that with the US, where blog networks and large special-interest sites running on blogging platforms have attracted massive audiences with sharp, pacy words written to professional, or near-professional, standards. We perceive a gap in the market between amateur publishing such as blogs on the one hand, and mainstream media on the other. We want to play in that gap.

So those two propositions - cheap publishing technology combined with a gap in the market - led to MessyMedia.

2. How do you see established offline media brands adapting to the shift in consumer attention online?

They’ve already shifted enormously, something they’re often not given credit for. The interesting thing in the last couple of years has been the extent to which newspapers in particular have embraced “blogging” as a format - not just a technical format, but an editorial format. A looser, chattier, more direct style has emerged, and it’s often very powerful. What’s interested us is how specialist offline publications like the Spectator have plugged into a whole new way of talking about their specialist areas. It’s interesting - most commentators have focused on the dread term “user-generated content”, while the really interesting stuff has been happening in journalist-generated content, which has changed rapidly and interestingly to adapt to the new medium.

3. One of the traditional foundations of newspaper revenues has been classifieds. What are your thoughts on the developments in the classifieds sector in the last 18 months?

Newspapers have already seen their classifieds revenues collapse as a result of online. But we may be reaching an interesting point here. All a classifieds advertiser wants is response - that’s much more important than cost. If newspapers can drive response, online and offline, they’ll still have a business. As more and more classifieds providers come onstream, what will happen to the response rate of any one of them? Will older, established media continue to keep some audiences, and thus guarantee some response?

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

I think the main challenge for any new online player is establishing a brand and an audience quickly, and then ensuring some loyalty. People are creatures of habit, so you need to be habit-forming. This is the main advantage existing brands have - they’ve already become a habit for their audience. If you can provide functionality which is cool, original and useful, and if you can get in front of people often enough to become a habit, the sky’s the limit. That’s why the Web’s so exciting.

Thanks Lloyd. We agree the web’s an exciting place. We’ll be making a few announcements about Nestoria’s role at the intersection of web2.0 and ‘old media’ in the coming weeks. For those looking to see the future of online journalism (or just an entertaining read) we recommend subscribing to Westmonster. You can follow MessyMedia, predictably, via their blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Adam Samuel, Gabor Cselle, Gregory Marler.