Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

11.20.13
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Newspapers, changing paradigms and defining priorities

If you like this post and are looking for an editor or digital media leader, I’m still in the market for a full-time editorial management job, so get in touch. After a few years of working independently with news organisations including Al Jazeera, CNN International, B2B publisher RBI and India’s Web18, I’m looking to invest in a news organisation that will invest in me. 

Although John Robinson has stepped out of the editor’s chair at the News & Record in North Carolina, (a beautiful state if you haven’t been), he is still challenging his newspaper and his fellow journalists to think different. In his latest post, he looked at how he spent his time and how those priorities were reflected – or not – in his newspaper. He writes:

My newspaper isn’t alone in not reflecting how I live. It is typical of most people and their papers. And it’s not restricted to newspapers; TV news has the same news diet, and it’s not in touch with mine.

Is the disconnect between how I live and what the news covers unusual?

NewImage

This reminded me of a report from 2007, Frontiers in Innovation in Community Engagement, by Lisa Williams, Dan Gillmor and Jane Mackay, which challenged news sites to become better at “translating the lived experience of their community”. I blogged about the report at the time, and the quote that really jumped out at me then is still relevant now:

Broadly speaking, the most successful sites are most effective at translating the lived experience of their community onto the web. But only a tiny fraction of lived experience is news. One way of looking at the process of wrapping an online community around a news organization is that it’s an effort to dramatically broaden the range of lived experience represented by the news organization’s output – output that now includes content supplied by nonjournalists.

Recently, I interviewed for an executive editor’s position in the US and, during part of the interview, I did have a moment when I was possibly too honest and said the papers seemed to be “subsisting on the fumes cast off by official life”: Crime, council meetings and planned events. They did have features, in which I could tell the reporters were trying to stretch their wings a bit, and excellent coverage of school sports, but it still was a heavy diet of life as seen through the lens of cops and councillors. A bright spot was their blogs, which covered a range of lifestyle issues including local music and even video games. They promoted them in the paper (minus a link or QR code), but the blogs were hidden pretty effectively on the sites themselves.

Were I to get that job, I would love to revamp the blogs into a mixed community platform that opens up to outside contributors. For the live entertainment blog, I’d get free tickets for contributors. It would take effort and some editorial resources, but it is a formula that scales. I think a food and drink blog would be essential, and it is easy to monetise. And that is exactly what newspapers need right now, editorial projects that generate income to allow them to cover what the blogger won’t or can’t – cops and councils – while bringing in their community to cover that broad range of lived experience.

Dan Conover, left this great comment on how to choose the verticals for this type of community network:

For new media ventures to be successful, they need to fit a formula like this: It needs to assemble a coherent audience (a precise fit for a defined group of potential advertisers) with a sustainable audience-to-reporter ratio, around a topic with intense interest. Forget what people do. Forget what they tell you in focus groups or surveys. Find out what they groove on, and then see if you can do better than break-even on covering it.

To put it succinctly, Ken Sands, who set up a pioneering blog network in Spokane, told me a few years back that the sweet spot is the intersection of location and passion. Local isn’t enough, and hyperlocal plus hyper-niche simply doesn’t work. It’s too narrow to generate enough of an audience to justify the effort or to attract advertisers and sponsors.

Setting priorities

That brings me to another point. This post grew out of a post on Facebook in which John asked about rethinking beats. He quoted Matt DeRienzo of Digital First Media who left a comment on Facebook and said:

We recently established a full-time poverty beat. We are also going to be dedicating more resources to commodity breaking news, though, because competition with TV station web efforts is killing us.

I applaud Matt for establishing a poverty beat because when I’m back in the US I see green shoots of growth after the Great Recession, but I also see a lot of people struggling mightily. I also hear about the struggle to prioritise because of competition from local TV in real-time, breaking news. TV is brilliant at it, and the workflow is much better suited to it, which is something I realised during my years working for the BBC.

Newspapers are facing all kinds of challenges these days, and one of the biggest is how to set priorities in an era of scarce resources. As John says later in his post:

Mass is dead or dying. News orgs can’t do everything.

In digital, in fact, in journalism, there are so many things you can do that you have to decide what you must do. As Rob Curley at the Orange County Register says to new hires:

• Truly understand what our readers need from us
• Truly understand how our readers consume our stories
• Truly understand relevance

Relevance and needs go beyond hard news, and newsroom leaders need to figure out how to cover more of the lived experience of their communities in a way that scales and supports public service coverage. Understand relevance to set priorities and find out what people really groove on, and allow the community to help you cover those passionate niches.

UPDATE: Thanks to Francesco Magnocavallo who let me know in the comments that the original link to the Frontiers in Innovation of Community Engagement no longer worked. I’ve added the working link to the post.

11.13.13
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Highlight good discussions to encourage positive online debate

There has been a lot of handwringing about the broken-ness of comments online. Great comments take the right strategic editorial approach and a bit of effort. Did anyone really believe the only thing a media company needed to do was slap a comment box on the bottom of articles? Too often that seems like the case.

What still baffles me after all these years is the low-hanging fruit that most news organisations are missing with community. Digitally native media doesn’t miss these easy wins. For instance, Lifehacker has a Discussion of the Day. Walter Glenn sums up the idea:

Great discussions are par for the course here on Lifehacker. Each day, we highlight a discussion that is particularly helpful or insightful, along with other great discussions and reader questions you may have missed. Check out these discussions and add your own thoughts to make them even more wonderful!

It’s a simple and positive way to drive people to the editorial features focused on discussions. They even call their commenters participants. Simple touches that all communicate a positive sense about the conversations they want to create.

Why don’t newspapers do this more often and print the best responses in the paper as well? Highlighting the comments in print would be a way to reward the  best comments, and hey, it might also drive some print sales. It ain’t rocket science, just some simple strategic thinking about user engagement.

Lifehackerdiscussions

11.05.13
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Journalism: Paid content and determining the cost of free

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I’m a huge fan of NPR’s Planet Money programme. The show guides you through the arcana of finance and economics in a witty and accessible way. Recently, they rebroadcast a programme on the cost of free. In this case they were talking about free doughnuts and rumours of a longstanding grudge that US veterans have against the Red Cross. Planet Money’s Chana Joffe-Walt investigated, and sure enough, American vets do grumble about the Red Cross charging for their doughnuts. The story is a bit more complicated, and I don’t want to spoil the reveal, but the story illustrates in Planet Money’s own wonderful fashion the cost of free, or more precisely, the cost to businesses of charging for something that used to be free. In the case of the Red Cross, they still have trouble shifting the opinion of vets who once got doughnuts for free and then found themselves paying for them.

If consumers are used to one price and it changes, the change will seem more dramatic, according to economist Uri Simonsohn, who is interviewed in the piece. When that reference price is zero, consumers will have one of two reactions. They will either adjust their reference price, the price that they are accustomed to paying, or Simonsohn says a price change can be seen as a categorical change, a change in the relationship between the consumer and the organisation. Simonsohn compared this categorical change to akin if your parents charged you for a holiday meal. The Red Cross charging servicemen for doughnuts was send as a categorical change, and Joffe-Walt said that the servicemen felt betrayed by the change in price and the change in the relationship brought about by that price change.

Simonsohn says businesses make these massively damaging categorical mistakes when they start charging for things that “people don’t think are part of business”. For example, Delta Airlines made the mistake of charging to speak to agents over the telephone in the 1990s, and Planet Money host Alex Blumberg says that customers “freaked out” and were so furious that Delta were forced to reverse the decision. As Blumberg said at the top of the programme, “Free can backfire. When you take something that was free and give it a price, that is a highly a risky move.” When people view a change in their relationship with a business as categorical, their imagination starts to run wild. If a business is going to charge me for this previously free product or service, they ask, where will it end?

Some price changes, however, are accepted. People won’t stand for being charged to speak to an agent, but now many Americans and most Europeans flying on low-cost carriers have accepted paying for bags. The idea that they have to pay to move not only themselves but their baggage from one place to another makes sense, but paying someone to have a conversation, that doesn’t make sense at all.

So how can businesses, including news organisations, avoid making the mistake of a categorical change in what they charge? As Joffe-Walt says, news organisations like the New York Times are wrestling with this. Blumberg said that people can either view the New York Times as a newspaper, which they know they pay for, or they can view it in the online ‘information wants to be free’ category. “Avoid for charging for things that people would not describe as ‘hey, I got this for free’ because that mistake could be very hard to fix,” Blumberg said.

We are seeing a lot of experiments by news organisations who are trying to generate revenue from readers to help pay for journalism, but it’s important that publishers not try to charge  for things that their readers don’t see as part of the journalism business. Making a category change error could have serious ramifications, and many news organisations do not have the resilience left to survive such mistakes. The big challenge of paid content has been, and continues to be, in understanding what things (or, more often, what bundle of things), readers will pay for. Fortunately, we’re starting to figure out what works and, just as importantly, what doesn’t.

11.04.13
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Building News Apps on a Shoestring – Learning – Source: An OpenNews project

See on Scoop.it – Interactive journalism design

Source – Journalism Code, Context & Community (RT @GerardBest: How to build data-driven web apps with a shoestring budget http://t.co/q7I5tXVjl4 #dataviz #journalism @bulletpoints_)…

Kevin Anderson‘s insight:

Practical advice on how to build news apps without a big budget and with limited staff. Any small newsrooms that wants to create apps should keep this great resource handy.

See on source.opennews.org

11.03.13
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Journalism must support democracy while questioning governments

Yesterday, a series of tweets by Derek Willis, data journalist and a proper journalist-coder with the New York Times, caught my eye. I met Derek when he worked for the Washington Post as a database editor, and a lot of his work for the New York Times has been focused on “political and election-related applications and APIs”. For an example of that work, you should check out the Times’ Congress APIs, which allow you to access data about votes, bills, and biographical information for members of Congress. That’s a long way of saying that he’s deeply committed to enhancing the transparency of the US government.

The tweets that caught my eye were about engaging people in their democracy and not simply feeding their anger about government.


Coverage that calls on people to hate the ‘system’ while also exhorting them to take action to save it makes no sense. A recent poll in the US shows that a negative ‘pox on both their houses’ view of both political parties has taken hold. Republican pollster Bill McInturff was quoted by NPR as saying:

These events have deeply unsettled people and diminished the public confidence required of a great nation.

NPR links to the full results of the poll.

US voters have long needed more political choices, but I share Derek’s concerns about coverage that only drives people to disengage with the democratic process. Corrosively cynical coverage that leaves people feeling powerless will just lead to a sense of civic nihilism. Journalism has to question governments, but it also needs to engage people in creating the change they want.

10.23.13
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Advertising innovation is key to digital transformation at news organisations

When I heard that Canada’s La Presse had spent three years and $40m building its iPad app, my jaw dropped. It is one of the most expensive content development projects I have heard of, and my personal view is that such exorbitant development costs don’t make sense in the digital era. Of course, then I heard that La Presse wasn’t charging for its app or for the content, and I really couldn’t believe that this was a sane strategy.

I was not alone. Steve Faguy, a freelance journalist in Montreal, had much the same thoughts. However, Faguy landed an interview with Guy Crevier, the publisher of La Presse, about the project, and Crevier says that there is a method to their madness, a method which will very soon be tested.

Crevier says that he is very sceptical about the success of paid content strategies and believes that only a few large US and European papers with a vast offering of exclusive content, especially business content, will make paid content strategies work. Faguy quotes Crevier as comparing digital paid content to cancer treatments that merely delay the inevitable. This has led many newspapers to cut staff, which leads to a downward spiral of lower quality and lower readership.

Crevier also puts the $40m development costs in context:

“How much do you think it would cost me tomorrow morning to replace La Presse’s printing presses? It would cost me between $150 million and $200 million. And when I build a plant to print La Presse, I’m limited to 250,000 to 300,000 (copies) maximum. What does this money bring in future obligations? It brings me expenses of $100 million a year in paper, ink, trucks.”

Ok, that’s all fair enough for $40m is far cheaper than $300m. But how will the app generate enough revenue to pay for a staff of 200-plus journalists if the app and content are both free? The answer is premium ads. The app was designed to include special ad slots that La Presse hope they will be able to charge $16,000 for. In Faguy’s original critique of La Presse’s strategy, he highlighted a Radio Canada report that points out that this is much higher than other digital advertising in the Canadian market, and that the app doesn’t use standard digital ad formats so advertisers will need to do custom work to advertise in the app.

Raju Narisetti, Senior Vice President and Deputy Head of Strategy for the new News Corp, sounded a sceptical note on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/raju/status/392941072827310080

It is a bet-the-farm strategy, and one that requires that the app be a runaway success. I have to applaud La Presse in putting some thought and innovative effort into their future ad strategy. But will the audience be big enough and engagement be high enough to entice advertisers to pay the premium? We will have to see, but it will be a fascinating experiment.

La Presse’s experiment is just one of many now being run by different organisations, and this innovation, whether it is Buzzfeed’s native advertising play or Quartz’s novel in-stream advertising, is not only a good thing but an essential thing for the industry. Frédéric Filloux has an in-depth look at Quartz’s business/advertising model: it’s novel approach is bolstered by being in The Atlantic stable of print and digital publications, but the site has been able to attract very high value advertising. Filloux writes:

A year ago, the site started with four brands: Chevron, Boeing, Credit Suisse and Cadillac. Today, Quartz has more twenty advertisers from the same league. Unlike other multi-page websites, its one-scroll structure not only proposes a single format, but also re-creates scarcity.

The limited number of ad slots may create a cap for growth, but as he points out, Quartz is powering towards its break-even point ahead of schedule.

I’m a journalist, and I am thrilled to see a level of commercial innovation that we haven’t seen since the late 90s. I don’t think it will address all of the issues that journalism faces in the attention economy, but at least we’re starting to fight the good fight.

10.09.13
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FT’s digital shift attempts to answer question: What does a newspaper do in the digital age?

The Financial Times has just announced a major shift that will see it move to single global print edition, deadlines driven by peak web viewing times and print stories that focus on context and added value of major stories of the day, according to The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade.

Roy said it appeared “to be the penultimate step towards becoming a digital-only publication”, and he quoted FT editor Lionel Barber as saying in a memo to staff:

The 1970s-style newspaper publishing process – making incremental changes to multiple editions through the night is dead. In future, our print product will derive from the web offering – not vice versa.

And Barber added:

journalists will publish stories to meet peak viewing times on the web rather than old print deadlines.

That doesn’t mean that the newspaper will be neglected or de-emphasised. Instead, it is a simple recognition that the format has to change to meet the needs of readers in a digital era. The paper will create pages that add context and value by helping make sense of “the most important issues of the day”.

Most newspaper organisations have not had the confidence to rethink print. They have focused their efforts on transforming digitally while doing little to change the print model. One leader, Clark Gilbert, president and CEO of Deseret News Publishing Co and Deseret Digital Media in the US, has been the leading proponent of a dual transformation that sees major changes at the ‘legacy’ print and broadcasting business as well as the creation of a new ‘disruptive’ digital business.

Between 2007 and 2010, the Deseret News saw their display advertising drop by 30 percent and their classified ad revenue collapse by 70 percent. Gilbert changes after joining the company in 2009 have stopped the death spiral. Digital revenue has grown by an average of 44 percent since 2010, but more than that, he grew print circulation, growing weekday circulation from 69,519 in 2011 to 91,638 in 2012 and Sunday circulation from 93,658 to 176,096, according to the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. On Sundays, the company has begun to print a national edition.

This print transformation has been almost entirely overlooked by the industry. The newspaper industry in the US has lost $40bn in revenue since 2007, but it hasn’t rethought newspapers, says US journalism revolutionary Clark Gilbert. At the International Symposium of Online Journalism in Austin in April, he said:

In a post-disruptive world, why would anyone pick up a paper at all? There are answers for that, but if an organisation is not asking that question, there is no future for that organisation.

This question of the place of a newspaper in a digital world needs to be asked and answered by more industry leaders. To answer this question, Gilbert follows the advice of his former Harvard Business School colleague, Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. In the Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen says that people have jobs that they want to do, and those jobs remain constant. What changes is how people do those jobs.

Like the FT, Gilbert believes that the newspaper of the future will have much more context and perspective. This isn’t opinion as much as it is analysis, content that makes sense of and explains events and information. This is content that relies on expertise and insight and moves the newspaper up the value chain; it will still be fresh the next morning after people know the breaking news from broadcast, digital and social media.

Print needs to change, and it is great to see that visionary leaders in the industry have the confidence to meet this challenge.

10.07.13
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Aalto, Helsingin Sanomat: Super stats on digital subscribers and mobile from #wpe13

John Thompson of Journalism.co.uk has tweeted some great stats about paid content and mobile from World Publishing Expo 2013. In particular, a string of recent tweets highlight some fascinating numbers from Finland’s largest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat.

The conversion figure, the stat that 42 percent of all subscribers pay for digital content, is pretty incredible, and I hope that John provides some more detail. With a lot of paid content strategies, you hope for between 5 to 10 percent conversion. How do they achieve that?

10.03.13
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ProPublica, This American Life and acetaminophen: $750,000 to state the obvious

ProPublica and This American Life, both which I love, are making some waves for a story highlighting the risks of taking too much acetaminophen (known as paracetamol in the UK). They found that “taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum dosage – or just two additional extra strength pills a day – has been reported to cause liver damage”.

In a more than 10,000 word piece, they say that over the past decade 1,500 people have died from accidental overdoses of the drug in the US. The story is very critical of “McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the unit of Johnson & Johnson that has built Tylenol [the brand name of the drug in the US] into a billion-dollar brand and the leader in acetaminophen sales”. The story claims that:

McNeil opposed even a modest government campaign to educate the public about acetaminophen’s risks, in part because it would harm Tylenol sales.

They also criticise the FDA, the US drugs regulator for not taking tougher action, but the agency said:

FDA officials said the agency saw the benefits of keeping acetaminophen widely available as outweighing the “relatively rare” risk of liver damage or death. Some patients cannot tolerate drugs such as ibuprofen, and for them acetaminophen may be the best option, said one agency official.

I do appreciate that the story gave a bit of context in quoting the figures for accidental deaths of ibuprofen, another non-prescription pain killer. The article says deaths due to ibuprofen overdose are negligible.

Massive coverup? Hardly

But is the fact that acetaminophen can cause liver damage being hidden by an avaricious company with complete disregard for public safety or by an over-stretched US drugs regulator? Hardly. Google “acetaminophen risk”. The first result in the US is WebMD. See risks:

When taken incorrectly, however, acetaminophen can cause liver damage. And your risk of liver damage may be increased if you drink more than three alcoholic drinks every day, take more than the recommended dose (overdose), or if you take any additional drugs that also contain acetaminophen at the same time.

Read a little further along under the next subhead, How to Use Acetaminophen Safely.

Make sure to use the correct dosage. Don’t take more acetaminophen than directed or take it more often than directed. Taking more than recommended can damage your liver — and won’t provide any more pain relief.

We’ve got a couple of bottles of acetaminophen that we have bought in the US. One bottle from US pharmacy Walgreens says, “See New Warnings Information”. It has a specific liver damage warning. It has in bold: “Overdose warning: Taking more than the recommended dose (overdose) may cause liver damage.” Both bottles warn not to take with other drugs that contain acetaminophen or if you drink three or more alcoholic drinks per day.

Ok, I thought. Maybe McNeil is trying to protect their brand, Tylenol, as the story says over and over again. I went to the Tylenol site, the official site for McNeil’s acetaminophen brand, and at the bottom of the page, granted not prominently displayed but there, is a link called: Tylenol labeling change.

New Dosing Instructions: Beginning Fall 2011
Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in TYLENOL®, can be found in more than 600 over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription medications, such as TYLENOL®, SUDAFED® Triple Action™, NyQuil®, Percocet® and Vicodin®.* Acetaminophen is safe when used as directed, but when too much is taken (overdose), it can cause liver damage. Some people accidentally exceed the recommended dose when taking multiple products at the same time, often without realizing they contain acetaminophen or by not reading and following the dosing instructions.

To help encourage appropriate acetaminophen use, the makers of Extra Strength TYLENOL® have implemented new dosing instructions lowering the maximum daily dose for single-ingredient Extra Strength TYLENOL® (acetaminophen) products sold in the U.S. from 8 pills per day (4,000 mg) to 6 pills per day (3,000 mg). The dosing interval has also changed from 2 pills every 4 – 6 hours to 2 pills every 6 hours.

Emphasis mine. Was McNeil against educating the public because they worried about damaging sales of their flagship brand? It would seem not.

Education Campaign: Get Relief Responsibly™
In addition to the new dosing instructions on the OTC label, the makers of TYLENOL® launched Get Relief Responsibly™, an initiative designed to educate consumers about the appropriate use of OTC and prescription medications, particularly those containing acetaminophen, and the importance of reading and following medication labels. As a part of this initiative, the makers of TYLENOL® have created a new website www.getreliefresponsibly.com. The site includes an interactive Acetaminophen Finder tool to help consumers identify products that contain acetaminophen and build a personal acetaminophen medication list to share with their healthcare provider or pharmacist.

I don’t know how prominent the campaign was, as I live in the UK. And I thought that maybe they launched this quietly in response to the ProPublica investigation. Nope, the date on the page is autumn 2011. This would be consistent with the “See New Warnings Information” label on our bottle of Walgreen’s Pain Reliever PM. It undermines all the assertions in the investigation that McNeil has resisted efforts to reduce dosages or engage in public education.

Stating the obvious in thousands of words

These are facts hidden in plain view: Don’t take too much acetaminophen, especially with alcohol. Taking more than recommended won’t do you any good, and it could wreck your liver. As a matter of fact, we’re going to recommend taking less of our flagship product.

It took me 30 seconds to find the relevant info on WebMD, and another 30 seconds to quickly scan the Tylenol site. How long did it take ProPublica and This American Life? TWO YEARS AND $750,000. 

As an editor, I keep saying to myself: Where’s the story here? The headline, anodyne even by American standards, is “Use Only as Directed”. My response: No shit. I mean, really? If you use a drug above the recommended dosage, there is a risk. If McNeil has ruthlessly tried to cover up the idea that if you take too much of the drug it will wreck your liver, they’re doing a really poor job.

Labelling on US acetaminophen bottles undermine repeated assertions in the investigation that the FDA has resisted calls for clearly labelling about overdose risks, especially with respect to liver damage. It is clearly listed under Warnings, in bold, on both bottles of acetaminophen we have.

Where is the breaking news? Has the FDA covered up the fact that if you take too much of the drug you can die? No, it hasn’t. Easily available information, both online and on the packaging, is clear about the risks of taking an overdose. But the key thing is that if you take too much of anything, even water, it can kill you. In technical terms it’s called LD50, the median lethal dose.

Whist Pro Publica’s piece does remind the reader to be more careful about taking other medications that might have acetaminophen and to more carefully monitor dosage, it isn’t revealing any new information, nor is it exposing a cover-up.

The story includes a clock, counting how long it has been since the FDA created an expert panel to evaluate the safety of over-the-counter pain relievers. The agency has not yet completed its work. This is about as damning as the revelations gets:

From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths amounted to about twice the number attributed to all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to the poison control data.

In 2010, only 15 deaths were reported for the entire class of pain relievers, both prescription and over-the-counter, that includes ibuprofen, data from the CDC shows.

If acetaminophen, at roughly 150 deaths per year, is twice the number of all other over-the-counter and prescription pain relievers combined, then doesn’t this undermine the entire assertion that the there is a pressing need for the FDA to have this expert panel deliver its findings? It doesn’t seem that pain killers as a class of drug are particularly dangerous at all.

Back to acetaminophen, in 2010, the last year the article has figures for fatal accidental acetaminophen poisoning, 166 Americans died. The CDC reported that 2,468,435 Americans died that year. The number who died from acetaminophen poisoning is 0.007 percent of total deaths in the entire country. Tragic? Yes. Common? Hardly. Ibruprofen deaths are negligible, especially compared with the 32,788 Americans who died in road traffic accidents. Journalists are incredibly poor at communicating relative risk, and this over-the-top investigation only serves to reinforce that. What pressing public health crisis has been identified at a cost of $750,000?

I don’t mean to dismiss the suffering of the nearly 150 people who died or of their friends and loved ones, and I think that this story is worth reporting, but in the right terms. For stories like this, I can even see the need to remind people every few years, just to drive home the point that taking too much acetaminophen is risky, especially if you drink a lot. However, I don’t think this story comes even close to rising to the standard of a two-year investigation costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Opportunity costs

Peter Osnos at The Atlantic praises the story and asks who will pay for expensive, investigative coverage. The piece seems to be equating the cost with impact. To me, as I said in a comment on the piece, this is not a piece for which we should be getting out our “yay investigative journalism” pom-poms. It proves that investigative journalism can be expensive, yes, but is it going to have an impact? This story will have no more impact than a run-of-the-mill public service piece that could have been bashed out in an afternoon.

Not all investigations lead to publication, and I know that some investigations take time to develop, but I cannot see why this story took two years and three-quarters of a million dollars to reveal information that can be found with a quick search online. As a journalist and editor, I have to ask what is the opportunity cost? The opportunity cost is:

The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.

In this era of scarce resources, it is even more important to ask what opportunities are foregone because resources are deploying elsewhere. It’s Econ 101, but it is an incredibly important question that we need to ask. Two years and three-quarters of a million dollars is a huge investment. It’s the kind of resource that most journalists would give their spare kidney for, but if we’re going to sink that kind of time and precious coin into a story, that story better be worth it.

When I started this post, I thought this was simply about an overly expensive investigation. It took me almost no time at all to undermine the core elements of this story with basic online research. McNeil, if they trying to bully the FDA into inaction, appear to have failed. If a minimal bit of online research calls into question key elements of this story, there are even bigger problems than the excessive cost and time.

UPDATE: I did originally post this under the headline “30 seconds to debunk”, which in retrospect is a bit harsh. ProPublica has meticulously documented their points to the point where I think they completely diluted the impact of the piece. If as a journalist, you want to draw attention to the dangers of the drug, the piece should have been much, much shorter, highlighted the low margin for error in taking more than the recommended dose, especially with alcohol and been done with it. The story has problems, and one of the biggest is that it is incredibly self-indulgent. It fails the most basic commandment of a good piece of journalism: Get to the point.

UPDATE 2: To clarify, the $750,000 is only the amount that ProPublica spent. I was just listening through the The American Life (TAL) report thoroughly, and ProPublica and TAL found that 86 percent of Americans know that acetaminophen can cause severe liver damage and two-thirds know that it can kill you. Yet, Ira Glass said that although many of his listeners already knew this, they were still going to spend an hour on the story.

09.27.13
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Journalism transformation: Break down silos and innovate strategically

News organisations are still facing a lot of challenges in 2013. Tribune newspapers is reportedly looking for $100 m in savings, which will probably mean more staff cuts. Gannett recently eliminated 200 jobs at its local newspapers. Reuters has been the focus of a lot of rather unflattering coverage of how it blew through an estimated $20 m on a consumer website revamp that failed to deliver a working website.

I don’t mean to be a “prophet of doom” to borrow a line from Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics, but times are still tough. However, Charlie looks at some recent research to find out management strategies of news organisations that are successfully navigating this disruptive period and transforming themselves into multi-platform news providers. In a recent piece in inPublishing, Charlie says:

Recent research on the most progressive newsrooms says that the successful ones are those that combine commercial, technological and editorial management most closely. This is not just a case of slavishly following the money by following the clicks. Instead it is more a case of linking editorial tactics to a clear plan for revenue growth.

This reminds me of a conversation I had this week with my former editor at the BBC, Nic Newman. In the past, we had editorial, commercial and technical silos in news organisations, and we need a lot better coordination. There is a lot of discomfort from journalists about breaking down the wall between editorial and commercial, but I believe Charlie has found the right way of putting it. We have to link editorial strategy to revenue growth if we want to have sustainable, independent news organisations, and I think that there are a lot of ways to build the business of journalism to support the mission of journalism. However, as Nic says, we’ve all got to work together, commercial, technical and editorial.

Joy Mayer, the director of community outreach for the Columbia Missourian, the newspaper run by the faculty of the University of Missouri and staffed by journalists there, wrote a great piece on how to create editorial tactics that work. Speaking specifically about social media strategies, she says that to create an effective strategy, you need to ask three questions:

1. Why am I doing this?
2. What do I hope to happen? (Is your answer measurable or trackable?)
3. How will I track what works and use that feedback to craft future strategies?

With print, broadcast and digital strategies, we need to ask why we are doing something, and I think that this is really important in terms of opportunity costs. What is the cost of doing this as opposed to something else? Let’s stay on the topic of social media. This week there was quite a hullabaloo about Popular Science shutting off comments on all but a handful of debate focused articles. PopSci associate editor Dan Nosowitz said in a radio interview: “we think that the current form we have for comments wasn’t doing our readers much of a service”, according to a post on Poynter.

Let’s step back and look at a different way. What is the opportunity cost for PopSci of comments in their current form? What would it cost in terms of staffing to improve the experience? Is that staff time better spent elsewhere? Of course, I skipped to question two on Joy’s list. Going back to her first question: Why do they have comments in the first place? Is there a better way for them to achieve their goal another way? What are the metrics for success of this new strategy? If you answer the why question, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively to staff what they’re trying to achieve, and as an employee, I can remember examples when editors or managers helped me be more effective by giving me clear guidance. Yes, we want to experiment a lot, but we also need focus to be effective.

This is what transformational management looks like: Clear goals that achieve the journalistic mission and help generate revenue to support that mission.