WSJ’s Kara Swisher discusses opening up the walled garden mentality at big media sites with Digg’s Jay Adelson

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital interviews Jay Adelson of Digg (10min). They discuss where news is going on the internet. Digg is up to 27mm uniques, still growing and expanding past just tech (world and business dominates; politics is big; video is big) and has a lot of highly engaged mirco-communities.

At the 5:15 mark, Kara asks Jay what he thinks big media needs to do to address the downturn they are experiencing. Jay responds by saying that their assets are extremely talented and creative journalists and editors. They still need to focus on creating the great content that their users come to them for, but “the way that they expose their content on-line has to shift. It can’t be “everyone has to come to me”. It needs to be through distribution networks, it needs to be less about this sort of walled garden mentality and more about an open platform. Also, to some extent, if you love something set it free. When they come to the big media site, expose some of the other stuff on the other sites; users will appreciate that and they will comeback.”

Kara (employed by the Wall Street Journal) comments that she agrees and has tried to push that mentality within the WSJ but it is hard to do under such a highly competitive situation. Jay states that he has been talking with many of the large media companies and this line of thinking is slowly progressing and becoming more acceptable. He states that the big media companies will benefit from exposing what their users find interesting as well as from moving from the traditional early morning and late afternoon publishing cycle to a more real-time publication cycle.

I have certainly experienced this reluctance to change with some of the publishers I have approached to add PlayerSearch to their site.  They always wonder how they would benefit from sending users to other content sites…I always wonder if these publishers realize that these readers will go to other sites anyway.  As Jay states, make it easier for them to find the content they are looking for (they have probably read your content already) and they will appreciate it and come back more often.