Information Highways

Trace your career path

UpClose: Rafat Ali

PaidContent.org’s founder on blogging for the content industry

By Sue Bowness

Rafat Ali is the founder and editor of PaidContent.org, an independent blog for digital media and technology executives that provides the latest news and resources on all aspects of content from wireless to broadband. Using the Moveable Type blogging software, Ali started PaidContent.org in 2002 and by 2003 was awarded the European Online Journalism Award for News Weblog of the Year. Besides being a leading technology blogger, Ali is also at the forefront of the open source journalism movement, with a blog that is both a reliable news source and a viable business.

IH: Trace your career path.

RA: I did my undergraduate degree in New Delhi, then I went to the US to do my masters in Journalism. I moved to New York in 2000, and worked at Inside.com until October 2001, then I worked at the Silicon Alley Reporter as a staff writer, and became managing editor of that publication. I am not a US citizen, and I had a lot of problems with work visas, so I moved to London. I started PaidContent.org in June 2002 as a way to raise my profile as a journalist, and went full time in February of 2003.

IH: Why did you decide to start PaidContent.org and what feedback do you get about your blog? Do you have a sense of your readership?

RA: I’ve been blogging since 1999. I maintained a media blog while I was at Silicon Alley, and a lot of the stuff I was reporting on at the time was in the content field. I started PaidContent.org after that. The business actually has two parts: the site and the email newsletter. The newsletter has grown more in terms of prestige, it’s read by a lot of media and entertainment executives, mainly in the US but also in Europe. Quite a few Canadians too.

IH: You recently moved back to the US, to Los Angeles. How do you think your business and coverage will change as a result of your new location?

RA: I’m trying to expand. My audience is based here; most of my advertisers are based here. I’m closer to the stories I’m covering. Hopefully I’ll be able to do more coverage, meet more people, go to more conferences.

I want to do more and more US coverage but I don’t want to miss out on the wireless coverage from Europe. Or broadband content. I want to keep covering at least those two areas in Europe.

IH: What are the big issues now in North America and what do you see as the difference between the North American and European markets?

RA: Wireless is becoming bigger in the US, it’s just taking off. Broadband penetration is reaching a critical mass. Online video, online music services are also beginning to take off.

Dynamics are different to the extent that the cultures are different. In some areas the US market is ahead of the European market — online publishing, broadband. In wireless we are still catching up. In terms of paying for content, somehow Europeans seem to be more open than the US. I’m not sure exactly what the reasons are, I guess historians could try and figure it out.

IH: You just launched a new publication called European Digital Media Weekly. Do you have plans to launch other publications in the future?

RA: I have tons of other things in mind. My expansion plan is to launch more niche newsletters/blogs/Web sites, but that plan is contingent upon being able to hire more people because at this point I’m completely spread out. I have absolutely no free time. But I do want to launch different things. What I’m trying to do is launch monthly reports on different topics and try and sell those. Last month I wrote this mobile music report covering things like ring tones and it sold decently well. I was quite surprised. That was my first effort trying to sell something directly online. I’m going to continue on these niche topics and reports.

IH: Beyond developing a niche of expertise in the field of content, you’re also known for being one of the first journalists to turn blogging into a successful career. What are the challenges of blogging for a living?

RA: Well, the entry to blogging is very accessible. Since everyone can be doing it, I have to stay steps ahead of everything. I do a lot of original news, break a lot of stories, focus on being a journalist. I embrace the blogging community too, I get a lot of traffic from there. I think there’s money in focused trade blogs — for specific areas blogging makes a lot of sense.

IH: You attend a lot of technology conferences, do you think they’re addressing the most important technology issues?

RA: It’s a fact of life that you never learn anything at conferences. At most of the conferences you end up networking; if I’m covering the conference it’s content for my site. I’m quite disappointed by the same format repeated over again — the same topics, the same panel discussions in which five people talk about the same thing for half an hour and nobody can get into any kind of depth.

IH: Do you think there is a solution to that problem?

RA: I don’t know how it could be fixed, maybe making it more in-depth. I think a lot of these analysts don’t talk about the real issues in their industry — either they’re on the record so they’re afraid to talk off the record, or they have secrets they don’t want to share. But these things are true for any kind of conference, not just conferences in our industry. I don’t know how it can be solved, maybe a more intimate setting.

IH: As a journalist focussing on the content industry you’re in a unique position to recognize its problems. If you could give any advice to the content industry as a whole, what would it be?

RA: Take your head out of the sand and see what’s happening. The whole industry is in a crisis. I tell people, go and look at what your kid is doing, look at how your kid is reading content — how they’re consuming, where they’re consuming — and take that ten years down the line. You’ll see how dramatically everything’s going to change, if it exists. That’s what scares me and excites me. Things are changing so rapidly. Look at wireless content and kids in Europe, all kids do is stare at that two-inch square of space on their mobile and send text, and download ring tones. Then if they come off that they’ll be on videogames or IM or chat. That’s how content is being consumed by the younger generation. And that’s what the content companies need to figure out, how to look at the longer term. It’s good to look at the trends but look at the big picture.

IH: What do you think the content field will look like in ten years?

RA: Internet access as a discrete activity will cease to exist and it will become omnipresent. There will be computers but probably in a much different shape and size than we know now. Ultimately I think TV will win out in terms of the whole media entertainment centre as opposed to the PC. I don’t know if newspapers will exist, they will in some shape or form on a tablet PC. They’ll have a print copy but things like print will become optional.