Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

10.14.10
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Murdoch shifts from sites to ‘digitally delivered editions’

Following The Times and The Sunday Times going behind their Fortress of Solitude paywalls, Rupert Murdoch continues his new digital strategy by moving the tabloid News of the World to an online subscription model. Dominic Ponsford of the Press Gazette sums up the move nicely:

Both are examples of the fact that, for Rupert Murdoch the internet is so over. Without any inbound or outbound links, and invisible to Google and other search engines, the NotW, Times and Sunday Times don’t really have internet sites – but digitally delivered editions.

I suppose that if you’re a true, blue believer in the apps versus open web idea, I guess this makes some amount of sense.

I have a feeling that as we move forward, digital editions will actually be a bundle of apps that work on the desktop, a tablet and even on flat screens via Google TV, Apple TV and alternative set-top box software like Boxee. Two years ago, Nick Bilton at The New York Times showed Suw and I a concept of the Times’ content following you through the day. As you moved from desktop to mobile to couch, New York Times followed you seamlessly, completely enveloped you. Sure, it was content from a single site, but the ease of use meant that it was effortless, frictionless. Of course, it helps to have the depth and quality of content of the New York Times. That was compelling. That is something I would pay for, but we’re still in the early days of constructing such a vision.

When I’m feeling really generous, I might think that News International’s strategy might be a step in that direction, but mostly, I still think that Murdoch’s paywall experiments are more for News International’s benefit than a bold step to create a compelling new digital offering.

10.13.10
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Apologies for the multiple posts

I just wanted to apologise to those of you who saw your RSS feeds or Google Reader overwhelmed with multiple posts of the same Delicious links over the last few days. We’ve long auto-posted our bookmarks from Delicious, and something happened over the weekend in which it posted the same link about every hour for several hours. We’ve disabled the feature or have tried to disable it.

Hopefully that will sort things out. We’re going to investigate another way to share our bookmarks. We’ve long used Delicious as much for the great community there as anything, but sadly, Yahoo hasn’t really done much to move the service forward. In the meantime, we’ll probably just do a lot of short posts here in Strange Attractor.

Apologies again, and we’re monitoring the situation to make sure that it is resolved. Thanks for your patience, and thanks to the readers who politely emailed or sent us a direct message on Twitter to flag up the issue.

10.12.10
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Evolution of comments needed

Amidst all of the brouhaha of the latest instalment of bloggers versus journalists, George Brock, the head of journalism at City University, hits on something that is important: Comments on news sites need to evolve.

They’re rarely rewarding, many comments overlap, the sequence is incoherent and quantity of rewarding reads very low.

This isn’t to say that comments and user contribution are problematic, but in many ways users comments have become a victim of their own success. When I was doing research about blogging in 2005 for the BBC, I quickly realised that something happened when you brought blogging technology to large media organisations. The scale of audiences and the potential level of participation, even considering participation inequalities, would quickly overwhelm these systems. I could see if first hand in the BBC News online newsroom that summer.

I often wonder if we need to go back to first principles with comments. Why are we doing them? I’m serious. We need to ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve with comments. In some ways, I often feel as if comments are just vox pops, or man on the street at an industrial scale. Are user comments just another way to canvas public opinion? Mostly, comments are seen as a way to increase user time on site, which isn’t in itself a bad thing.

I’d argue that user interaction can be so much more. I think we should be using interactivity to capture the expertise in our audiences asking them what they know not just what they reckon. I think more active interaction on the part of news organisations begets better contributions, and I’ve got five years of examples and personal experience to prove that. It’s not a quick hit for traffic like writing a shouty comment piece is, but it helps build a loyal audience over time, one that comes and stays because they see value in the interaction, not just because they like to let off some steam or enjoy verbal jousting.

There is also increasing evidence that asking people to display a certain level of commitment might not only improve the quality of comments but also the quantity. Josh Benton at the Nieman Lab has written about Gawker’s ‘tough love’, what they refer to as a tiered commenting system, introdcued in mid-2009. It initially led to a drop-off in comments, but now growth has increased and at a faster rate than before the system was in place. As a Gizmodo reader, Josh believes that the comments have improved as commenters are in essence made to audition. For news sites, Josh sees a lot of lessons from the project and writes:

In any event, complaining about awful commenters seems to be the first thing any gaggle of journalists does when lamenting the new news reality. The default solution has been to say every commenter should have to use his or her real name — a solution with practical as well as ethical problems. (Although Facebook Connect may be taking away some of the practical concerns.) Still, there’s a whole world of ways a news site can improve the tenor of its comments while keeping itself reasonably open. Gawker Media’s success is one example of how.

And last month, Josh says that growth trends are continuing. He says that the systems strike the best balance between complexity and simplicity of any comment system. It’s definitely worth a look.

I couldn’t agree with Josh more. There are so many ways that we could improve the tenor of comments. The first step might be rethinking the content. The constant shouting of columnists begets shouting from commenters. Shrill comment pieces beget shrill comments. It doesn’t require a PhD in psychology to see that content meant for another age might not work as well in this age of rapid response from thousands of online commenters. Honestly, the lack of evolution of content is one of the first stumbling blocks in terms of community strategies. As Clay Shirky says, technology won’t solve what are fundamentally social problems.

The most sophisticated commenting system in the world won’t prevent a blow up when your writing style is akin to wielding a flame thrower in a forest of tinder dry wood. Venomous columnists defend their right of free of expression but condemn the blow back. You can’t square that circle.

Now, you might argue that this is my personal choice if I don’t like shrill columnists. I never read them, and as busy as I am, I doubt I ever will. However, my response is that a content strategy akin to filling a swimming pool full of acid and adding demon piranhas is, for most sites, bad business. That kind of poisonous environment is very expensive to manage and moderate, and advertisers will avoid it like the plague. Also, and I know this from seeing the stats, often this content might have a quick hit in traffic while people rubber neck online to watch a good fight, but they are mostly drive-by visitors. They are here and gone in less than five seconds, no good for you unless you believe the juiced metrics that include these fleeting clicks.

We have a lot of options. The content needs to get smarter just as the commenting systems need to evolve. I know a lot of people working in community on news sites know this. What’s holding us back?

10.11.10
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Many journalists see numbers as ‘research rather than journalism’

That’s a paraphrase from my former colleague and good friend, Simon Rogers, the editor The Guardian’s Datablog. Simon is a true champion of best practise using data in journalism, and here is what he had to say to Chris Elliot, The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor:

First, I think there’s a cultural challenge. Many journalists are arty types who traditionally have thought of anything to do with numbers as ‘research’, rather than journalism. That’s combined with an unwillingness to ask difficult questions about data, or read the notes that get attached to spreadsheets [that journalists receive]. This doesn’t apply to everyone – the specialists know all about this.

I applaud Simon for his frankness. As Suw and I talk about frequently, many of the issues that we deal with in our work are relate to culture. I wrote recently how journalists’ identity is often a barrier to the adoption of technology, and in some ways, technology and statistics are lumped into the same bucket by a number of journalists (unless you’re a stats-junkie sports journalist).

Chris also interviews Ben Goldacre, author of the Bad Science column in The Guardian, for his column about statistics. Ben hits on one of the issues that drives me nuts about my profession, statistics inflation. Sure, we can shout to the hills about a 200%  CORRECTION 100% (thanks Vincent) increase in the number of children who have been killed by albino elephants in zoos, but if that dramatic increase is from one child to two children, it’s not really a story. As a journalist, I can spot statistics abuse from a mile off, and I tend to think that many readers can too. Big percentages are always a tip off, especially if the reporter obscures or leaves out the actual figures entirely. Ben also raiss the issue of dealing with relative risk.

Another issue raised in the article is basic innumeracy in journalism. It’s shocking to see how often journalists conflate mean with median or use mean when it’s actually not representative or skewed by outliers. Mean is a simple average whereas median is a the middle value in a set of values. Depending on your set of numbers, mean and median can diverge by quite a lot. It’s not a hard and fast rule that one is better than the other. It’s worth checking the distribution of values first to decide which one is more representative of the data, and reasonable people can disagree about which one is more representative as Chris Elliot points out in the piece. The problem is that too few journalists know the difference.

There is a comment on the article from a biological scientist that is worth reading:

May I just ask why Journalists don’t have to study a minimum level of statistics before they are employed?

Don’t you people have to have some common level of understanding of the world you live in before you describe it.

And the:-

“who traditionally have thought of anything to do with numbers as ‘research’, rather than journalism.”

I take (that) means (sic) your writers value writing more than they value understanding what they write about.

I can see why journalists score as well as they do on respect polls.

I’m a biological scientist, I have have had (sic) to study statistics and ethics as part of my training.

I have to take and pass courses on toxins/hazards, clinical ethics, animal ethics and quite a few other courses, every year.

If I were to treat choice of mean, medium or mode as a matter of personal choice I would be torn apart by my referees.

With the number of choices that people have for information, we journalists need to step up our game. We do need to do more to understand the world we live, ask tougher questions and be more serious about the flood of numbers that inundate us everyday. Again, as a journalist, I know when a reporter has written around a hole in their reporting, relating to numbers or not. It’s pretty easy to spot. (I’ve had to do it myself.) It’s foolish to think that our readers can be duped so easily.

10.08.10
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HTML5, touch and new interfaces for news

I feel like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Woah. When Zee at Next Web posted this HTML5 news timeline from AP Labs, I was blown away. It’s such an intuitive, rich interface for exploring news from multiple angles, and after a lot of years of stagnation in terms of interface design, I’m really excited to see HTML5 and touch interfaces motivating designers and coders to explore some new ideas.

You can explore stories by time, choosing different subjects as you go. The stories drop into the timeline with colours related to their topics.

AP HTML5 Timeline News Reader

Clicking on a story in the timeline opens up a small preview window.

AP HTML5 Story Preview

You can then open the full story that brings up this three-pane window in which you can make adjustments to the text, see additional information about the image with the story and read the story itself.

AP HTML5 Story Preview

Now, as Conrad Quilty-Harper says on Twitter, it “runs like a dog on the iPad”. I was viewing it in Chrome on a four-year old, much-repaired MacBook. It was very fluid on the MacBook. I should probably try it in Safari and see if it has something to do with Safari’s support for HTML5. That might explain why it’s slow on the iPad. However, Conrad has a point. Creating a site in HTML5 should allow it to run on an iPad, but it looks like it might take some optimisation. However, designing the interface is half the battle. As a first effort, it’s an excellent starting place, and it’s very exciting to finally start seeing some experimentation with interface like this. HTML5 might not be production ready, according to the W3C, but it’s very promising to see this level of sophistication at this stage.

10.08.10
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Innovation: Focusing on finding “The Next Big Thing” leads to performance pressure

This cross-posted from The Media Briefing, a new site in the UK for media professionals. ?I like the cut of their jib. They are not only creating content, but they are also adding value to their content using semantic technologies to make it easier for busy professionals content relevant to them.

You want innovation? You can’t handle innovation.

Seriously though, once they’re established, most companies are geared toward stability, not disrupting their own operations. Newspaper and magazine companies are no different.

And print media had no real impetus to change radically until recently. Newspapers and magazines took the challenge from television and radio in its stride – but it took the combined impact of multi-channel television, video games and the internet to challenge print media’s dominance. But if you thought the last five years were disruptive, brace yourself for the next five.

The change in media economics has been a shift from scarcity – with few sources of information and entertainment – to more content choices than the human brain can possibly process. In this super-saturated media market, it’s about to get even more crowded.

AOL and Yahoo have decided to focus their strategies on content, although Yahoo in particular has tried this before and failed. Even if AOL fails, its efforts will put additional pressure on print media. AOL launched a local news service, Patch, in the US: Warren Webster, Patch’s president, recently told Ken Doctor in the that he can match the content production of a like-sized newspaper for 4.1 percent of the cost. As Ken wrote:

“Patch can produce the same volume of content… for 1/25 the cost of the old Big Iron newspaper company, given its centralized technology and finance and zero investment in presses and local office space. (Staffers work out of their homes.)”

Demand Media is already operating in the UK, bringing its model of consistent work for freelancers at ridiculously low rates. They march to the beat of Google‘s drum, commissioning content based on popular search terms. The content may be easy to parody, but Demand is preparing for what many are predicting will be a US$1.5bn floatation on the market.

So how will you turn staid institutions into nimble players in the new media environment?

One strategy that won’t work is locking a bunch of smart people in a room to come up with The Next Big Thing. The Economist, as successful it is, tried to do that with Project Red Stripe. It didn’t work, leading to a kind of performance anxiety and creative paralysis.

The industry has spent a lot of time hiring innovation officers and investing innovation in a few positions. In the not-so-distant past, the people in these positions have had no budget, no staff, an ill-defined role and, therefore, little impact. Clay Shirky in his seminal blog post, Newspapers: Thinking the Unthinkable, said that these people saw what was happening and simply described it to their colleagues. Clay says:

When reality is labelled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en bloc.

Innovation is about creating a culture of constant of improvement. If you could do one thing that would save every single journalist in your organisation ten minutes on every story – it might not be sexy – but these cost savings are necessary to compete with someone who does what you do for a fraction of the cost.

Steve Yelvington, a digital content pioneer in the US, worked on the NewspaperNext Project, and he’s been working on digital projects long before most media execs even knew what a computer was.

The NewspaperNext project looked at disruptive innovationthrough the lens of Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. The basic question was this: “How and why (did) simple, low-end, inadequate, ‘junk’ products and services so often topple the big guy?”

These insurgents do it by starting with a product that is “good enough” and then constantly improve it. Insurgents start out “beneath” the incumbents, but then move upmarket. Recent hires by the Huffington Post, Yahoo and The Daily Beast show how pure digital companies are now starting to lure top talent away from the once imperious names of US journalism.

Wracking your brains for the next Big Thing is not the answer. The rules of the media market have already changed and it’s time to listen to the people you once thought were barking mad. Your survival might just depend on it.

09.27.10
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Journalists’ identity as a barrier to tech adoption

As I mentioned last week, I’ll be speaking about the Future of Context at the Social Media Forum in Hamburg tomorrow. Bjoern Negelmann has been helping to frame the discussion ahead of the conference and, after our interview by email and blog, he’s posted a follow-up looking at possible evolution of Google’s Living Stories concept (in the original German and also in English via Google translate).

After outlining how he sees this working, Bjoern asks what’s standing in the way of the implementation of such a platform. As he points out, the technology exists. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Part of the problem is that cash-strapped organisations aren’t prioritising this kind of work over other strategic goals. However, I also see other road blocks.

I responded:

You ask why such an approach hasn’t been implemented. The main reason is culture, and that is an issue not just for journalism but for many industries. New technologies often challenge not only existing roles but also existing organisational structures. That means that managers often assess new technology not in whether it delivers a better product or experience but whether it will undermine their authority.

Have you ever developed what you thought was an excellent social media strategy only to see it collapse due to lack of implementation by key managers? You can have the best technology and clear performance targets, and it still will fail without buy-in from key gatekeepers hidden within the organisation.

The other issue is really about professional identity. Journalists are very tribal, meaning that they have always been very sensitive about who is and isn’t a journalist. Economic uncertainty has only heightened this sensitivity. Many journalists still define themselves not only by their jobs but by very specific ways in which they do their jobs. Case in point, in the UK, a proper journalist must know shorthand or they aren’t a proper journalist. In the US, where I’m from, shorthand isn’t a requirement for journalism training. Although I can type faster than most people can do shorthand, I’m not really a proper journalist because I don’t know shorthand. It’s not difficult to implement technology in journalism organisations that doesn’t affect journalists’ roles, but it is devilishly difficult to implement technology that impacts how they do their jobs because it challenges their identity.

Discuss.

09.20.10
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Social Media Forum: My thoughts on the future of context

Next week, I’ll be giving the keynote at the Social Media in Hamburg, and I’ve been asked to speak about the future of context. Bjoern Negelmann asked me a few questions via email about the subject, and he’s kindly allowed me to cross-post the interview for the Social Web World blog.

1) Kevin, as an expert for new digital media strategies you will be giving a talk on the “future of context” at the upcoming Social Media FORUM on Sept 28. Can you give three keywords that describe what we can expect from your talk?

Relevance, insight, value

2) Is “context” the turning key for the misled strategies of media companies in the Internet? And if so what is the explanation?

First I should say, as much as everyone in the industry wishes it, there are no silver bullets, no single solution that will solve the problems that media companies are facing. The iPad won’t save us. Paywalls won’t save us, and simply finding ways to increase context won’t on its own save us.

That being said, most current digital media strategies are fundamentally flawed. They are mostly based on the premise that internet really is just another distribution medium like radio, television and print. They rely on a media landscape of scarcity instead of abundance. These outdated assumptions are rooted in the era of mass media. In 20th Century mass media models, which relied on just a few sources of information and entertainment, success relied upon building the biggest audience possible and using paid content and advertising to make loads of money.

As Edward Roussel of the Telegraph, said, the link between rising audience and higher returns was true until the spring of 2008. Then something happened. Yes, it was partly due to the recession, but it is also due to an oversupply of online advertising space. As Paid Content says, premium and mid-tier publishers are creating too much content, creating a surplus of content to run ads against. As in any market, if supply outstrips demand then you have downward price pressures.

There are exceptions. With the online advertising recovery, The Daily Mail in the UK has been able to outgrow the competition and translate that into commercial success. Big still sometimes wins. There are still lucrative verticals such as business in which returns have stood up or actually grown during the recession. The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The Financial Times are all enjoying success, partly due to increasing interest in business and finance due to the recession. However, most other publishers find themselves under severe pressure.

To change our fortunes, we first need to question the assumptions underlying 20th Century media business models. Until the 1980s, both audiences and advertisers had fewer choices and media owners could charge monopoly rents for advertising. But when the multi-channel world, whether broadcast or online, arrived, the media’s first reaction was to create more channels and content to try to take advantage of increased distribution opportunities. We’re now seeing the limits of such an approach as the law of diminishing returns takes hold.

Context is about adding value to content in ways that benefit audiences and advertisers. It makes it easier for audiences to find and make sense of relevant content. Adding context, rather than simply creating more content, is about realising that content is no longer scarce, but audiences’ time and attention is. It helps advertisers by providing opportunities for more highly targeted advertising.

3) But this strategy means allocating resources for producing context? Isn’t this against the recent strategies of media companies that are just cutting costs because of the “lousy pennies” of online advertising?

While media companies, especially newspapers, have been cutting staff to cut costs, they have also been creating more content. Digital production techniques make this possible but, again, we’re starting to reach the limits of that strategy. Basically, we have an oversupply of content driving an oversupply of digital advertising space, and traditional markets have one way of valuing a surplus: returns plummet.

The market is already flooded and the last thing we need is more content. A study commissioned by the Associated Press  (PDF) found that young audiences were shutting off because they were lost in a deluge of episodic updates. The key conclusion was: “The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.” In essence, the news industry is acting against its own economic interest by producing more content and exacerbating the problem of information overload. It’s like trying to save a drowning man by giving him a glass of water

We need a much more focused approach. Allocating resources to producing context around existing content while making strategic choices about what not to produce will create opportunities by adding value and creating differentiated products. Yes, we live in a world of flow, with constant streaming updates, but mining that flow for context and value-added information will be where sustainable business models are.

4) So putting the weight on the “context” – what are the formats and examples of this strategy?

Thomson-Reuters has a service called Calais. It analyses thousands of mainstream media and non-traditional sources of information every day. It powers services such as Zemanta, which allows bloggers and traditional journalists to  easily add images and links, which add context, to articles. As a platform, Thomson-Reuters can sell Calais to enterprises to make sense of the data and information they create, but it’s also a tool the company itself uses to algorithmically find meaning in the flow of information from traditional and non-traditional news organisations, e.g. finding new companies to watch before they show up on the traditional news radar.

One of my favourite examples right now is Sunlight Foundation’s Poligraft. Using public information about political contributions and a service like Calais, they reveal details about donors and major campaign contributions to members of Congress. It quickly adds a layer of context in any story involving political leaders.

The Guardian is achieving some great things with their Datablog and Datastore. Data is a key part of many stories that journalists write everyday, but in the past, the only thing we with did with those numbers was highlight a few. Now, the Datablog not only allows everyone to see the full set of numbers, but by hosting them on Google Docs for others to download, people with skills in data visualisation are able to present these numbers in new and creative ways. The Guardian has a group on Flickr to allow them to highlight their work.

The BBC also had another great example during the World Cup this year. They called it dynamic semantic publishing, and it took the official FIFA statistics to dynamically create a rich store of information about players, teams and groups. Not only was it a rich presentation of the facts around the World Cup, but it also helped their audience discover BBC coverage of their favourite teams and players.

5) If you take a look ahead in the future – what kind of media companies are able to adapt to that strategy?

The kind of companies that have been able to adapt to this strategy have been ones that see beyond traditional containers of content. For news, they realise that the written story is no longer the atomic unit, the indivisible unit, of journalism. There is data and context within the story, context that can be linked and used to draw connections between seemingly unrelated events in our increasingly complex world. Context is not just about adding value to pieces of content, but it also helps make it easier to organise and add news ways for audiences to find and discover what is relevant and interesting to them.

09.04.10
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Real-time search: The web at the speed of life

Real-time search: The web at the speed of life

This is the presentation that I gave this week at the Nordic Supersearch 2010 conference in Oslo organised by the Norwegian Institute of Journalism. To help explain the presentation, I was looking at the crush of information that people are dealing with, the 5 exabytes of information that Eric Schmidt of Google says that we’re creating every two days.

I think search-based filters such as Google Realtime are only part of the answer. Many of the first generation real-time search engines help filter the firehouse of updates being pumped into Facebook and Twitter, but it’s often difficult to understand the provenance of the information that you’re looking at. More interestingly, I think we are now seeing new and better ways ways to filter for relevant information beyond the search box. Search has been the way for people to find information that is interesting and relevant, but I think real-time activity is providing new ways to deliver richer relevance.

I also agree with Mahendra Palsule that we’re moving from a numbers game to the challenge of delivering relevant information to audiences. In a lot of ways, simply driving traffic to a news site is not working. Often, as traffic increases, loyalty metrics decrease. Bounce rates go up. (Bounce rates are the percentage of visitors who spend less than 5 seconds on your site.) Time on site goes down. The number of single-page per visit visitors increase. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is too often the case. For news organisations and other content producers, we need to find ways to increase loyalty and real engagement with our content and our journalists. I believe more social media can increase engagement, and I also believe that finding better ways to deliver relevant content to audiences is also key.

Google’s method of delivering relevance in the past was to determining the authority of content on the web by looking at the links to that content, but now we’re seeing other ways to filter for relevance. When you look how services such as paper.li filter content, we’re actually tapping into the collective attention of either our social networks or networks of influence in the case of lists of influential Twitter users. In addition to attention, we’re also starting to see location-based networks filter based on not only what is happening in real-time but also what we’re doing in real-space. We can deliver targeted advertising based on location, and for news organisations, there are huge opportunities to deliver highly targeted content.

Lastly, I think we’re finding new ways to capture mass activity by means of visualisation. Never before have we been able to tell a story in real-time as we can now. I gave the examples of the New York Times Twitter visualisation during the Super Bowl and also the UK Snow map.

I really do believe that with more content choices than the human brain can possibly cope with, intelligent filters delivering relevant information and services to people will be a huge opportunity. I think it’s one of the biggest challenges in terms of news organisations that in the battle for attention, we have to constantly be focused on relevance or become irrelevant. Certainly, any editor worth his or her salt knows (or thinks he or she knows) what his audience wants, but there are technology companies that are developing services that can help deliver a highly specialised stream of relevant information to people. As with so many issues in the 21st Century, it won’t be technology or editorial strategies alone that will deliver relevance or sustainable businesses for news organisations, it will the effective use of both.

 

08.24.10
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Skills for journalists: Learning the art of the possible

I’m often asked at conferences and by journalism educators what skills journalists need to work effectively in a digital environment. Journalism educator Mindy McAdams has started a nice list of some of these skills in a recent blog post. A lot of journalists (and journalism educators) scratch their heads over what seem an ever-expanding list of skills they need to do digital. It feels like inexorable mission creep.

I can empathise. One of the most difficult parts of my digital journalism career, which began in 1996, has been deciding what to learn and, also, what not learn but delegate to a skilled colleague. I’m always up for learning new things, but there is a limit. Bottom line: It’s not easy. In the mid-90s, I had to know how to build websites by hand, but then automation and content management systems made most of those skills redundant. It was more important to know the possibilities, and limits, of HTML. When I worked for the BBC, I picked up a lot of multimedia skills including audio recording and editing, video recording and basic video editing, and even on-air skills. I also was able to experiment with multimedia digital story-telling. However, with the rise of blogs and social media, suddenly the focus was less on multimedia and more on interaction. All those skills come in handy, but the main lesson in digital media is that it’s a constant journey of education and re-invention.

What do I mean about choosing what not to learn? In the mid-90s, I was faced with a choice. I could have learned programming and become more technical, or I could focus on editorial and work with a coder. I did learn a bit of PERL to run basic scripts for a very early MySociety-esque project about legislators in the state where we worked, but after that, I handed most of the work off to a crack PERL developer on staff. I knew what I wanted to do, and he could do it in a quarter of the time.

I knew that my passion was telling stories in new ways online and, whilst I didn’t learn to programme, I did pick up some basic understanding of what was possible: Computers can filter text and data very effectively. They can automate repetitive tasks, and even back in the late 1990s, the web could present information, often complex sets of data, in exciting ways. I realised that it was more important for me to know the art of the possible rather than learn precisely how to do it. My mindset is open to learning and my skillset is constantly expanding, but to be effective, I have to make choices.

One thing that we’re sorely lacking as an industry are digitally-minded editors who understand how to fully exploit the possibilities created by the internet, mobile and new digital platforms. Print journalists know exactly what they want within the constraints of the printed page, which often in presentation terms is much more flexible than a web page. However, they bring that focus on presentation to digital projects. They think of presentation over functionality, largely because they don’t know what’s possible in digital terms. As more print editors move into integrated roles, they will have to learn these skills. They will eventually but, by and large, they’re not there yet. Note to newly minted Integrated editors: There are folks who have been doing digital for a long time now. The internet was created long before integration. We love to collaborate, but we do appreciate a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

In terms of learning the art of the possible, my former colleague at The Guardian, Simon Willison, has summed this up really well during a recent panel discussion:

I kind of think it’s the difference between geeks and the general population. It’s understanding when a problem is solvable. And it’s like the most important thing about computer literacy they should be teaching in schools isn’t how to use Microsoft Word and Excel. It is how to spot a problem that could be solved by a computer and then find someone who can solve it for you.

To translate that into journalism terms, it’s about knowing how to tell stories in audio, text, video and interactive visualisations. It’s about knowing when interactivity will add or distract from a story. It’s an understanding that not every story need to be told the same way. It’s about understanding that you have many more tools in your kit, but that’s it’s foolish to try to hammer a nail with a wrench. It’s not about building a team where everyone is a jack of all trades, but building a team that gives you the flexibility to exploit the full power of digital storytelling.