Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

12.11.07
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Commissioning for audiences not platforms

I got a late call on Monday inviting me to the roll out of Channel 4 Education’s new line-up. Hats off to Steve Moore for mentioning me and getting me invited. Steve thought I should be there because Channel 4 was shifting its educational focus from TV to other interactive platforms including social networks, online games and consoles.

The Media Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has the full write up (Yes, the Guardian is my day job):

Channel 4 has unveiled a slate of “high risk and experimental” projects based around social networking sites that it says will tackle the crisis of motivation in education.

The new commissions for 2008 – announced today – are part of the £6m educational budget for 14- to 19-year-olds which involves Channel 4 dropping much of its TV programming in favour of online projects.

What impressed me were a few things that Matt Locke and Alice Taylor – both ex-BBC and now Channel 4 Education – said about the process. Matt said that when they were thinking about the projects, they focused on five characteristics:

  • About being playful. That’s not about being trivial, but about participation. Matt says that this teen audience does things without permission such as creating blogs, podcasts or their own music. They do this without training. “This is about playful exploration.”
  • A social element. Teens go through a lot of change 14-19. They are trying out different selves and normally getting feedback from other teens, their parents and teachers. But now there are so many ways for teens to experiment with themselves and get feedback from a much broader context. Many projects will have social network component, but not just because social networks are the new media fascination de jour, Matt said. Social networks will provide teens with this broader context for social feedback.
  • Exploration. BBC tells you what you need to know. Channel 4 helps you ask the right questions.
  • The projects are built around tools and spaces that teens use – Bebo, MySpace, Flickr or YouTube – instead of creating our own tools
  • They had to be fun.

But the big thing that Matt said was about cross-platform commissioning:

Cross platform commissioning is not about asking: Is it tele or is it web? But where is the audience? We have to commission for our audience wherever they are.

That’s huge. That’s platform-busting, open thinking. That’s the kind of thing that explodes content silos and realises the real revolution in digital content. It gets us past the newspaper versus TV, internet versus newspapers, this versus world of false platform choices. I also think that Matt’s formulation of focussing on the audience translates well to content makers who might otherwise be sceptical of cross-platform commissioning.

Alice did some ground-breaking research for the BBC, and I could tell both from Matt and Alice that they were excited at being able to put their ideas into practice. The Channel 4 Education projects will involve alternate reality games and Alice is keen to consider not only the internet but also consoles and handhelds.

If you’re a journalist and you think that games aren’t something to consider, look at World Without Oil. It was a “collaborative alternate reality simulating an oil shock”. ARGs can be like strategic games used by business, government and the military. They get people to consider scenarios and outcomes.

One of Channel 4’s game will be called Ministry, an online, networked ARG that challenges teens to think about online privacy and identity and how they apply to their lives. How do you develop trust with people you can’t see? Do you think about the information that you are posting online when it “remains persistent and public”? Those are issues that everyone, not just teens, should be thinking about.

They are also considering widgets not as signs of consumption but as a nuanced form of self-expression. Matt, Alice and the rest of the Channel 4 Education team have set themselves and ambitious agenda, and from the questioning, they face some scepticism from traditional educational circles. But they are moving into new areas, and they don’t have established models to use. Not everything will be a raging success, but they have a three to four year plan that will incorporate feedback from the projects and teens uptake and participation.

I also think Janey Walker, Channel 4’s Head of Education, challenged (possibly inadvertently) the idea that to cope with the dizzying array of choice that people have when it comes to information and entertainment that quality is the only solution. She said that Channel 4 Education had been making quality programmes but showing them when teens weren’t at home. TVs were being taken out of schools, and teachers were reluctant to push play on the VCR or DVD player to show a half hour programme. What happens if you make great, quality programming and no one is watching it?

As Matt says, it’s not about tele or the web, or 360 commissioning but about taking your content where the audience is. You can’t do what you’ve always done and hope or think that sooner or later people will consumer your content the way you want them to.

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12.11.07
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12.10.07
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12.08.07
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12.07.07
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12.04.07
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12.04.07
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Embracing the limitations and possibilities of the web

Mark Friesen at NewsDesigner.com pointed out a brilliant post by Khoi Vinh in August that I missed in my hundreds of feeds. Khoi is the design director at the New York Times and was writing about the differences between print and online design.

The original post was pitched at designers, but I think it’s equally important reading for editors, both in print and broadcast as they approach the web. It’s probably uncontroversial to say that editors get what they want, and sometimes coming to the web from another medium, they get something suited for print or television that is poorly suited for online audiences. It’s not unsurprising that TV sites still suffer an over-reliance on Flash because the animation reminds them of their home medium, and most print sites suffer from an altogether too literal translation from print to the web.

For designers, he suggests learning HTML and CSS before diving into Flash because:

(Flash) leads too easily to the assumption that a similar amount of authorial control can be exerted in online design as can be achieved offline — which is a fallacy.

Print editors do not realise that the level of control they exert on the printed page is almost impossible to exert on the web, and sometimes trying to exert that control gets in the way of thinking about the possibilities of the web as opposed to its limitations. It’s sad to say that in 2007, we’re still doing too much shoveling of content onto web sites and too little of creating content best suited for the web.

Khoi says it this way:

The prerequisite for doing something meaningful with any of these skills — HTML, CSS, Flash or whatever — is first embracing the medium as something different from print. Indeed, there’s no point in learning these skills unless as a print designer you’ve made a prior shift in your understanding of how design works in digital media. Specifically, come to grips with the fact that, on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it’s a method for making behaviors possible.

Coming to the web, he says designers, and I would say, editors are too focused on fixing type faces, point sizes, while “ignoring usability and expediency”. The way that I put it is that most editors think the web is a magical place where Harry Potters wave their magic wands and anything is possible. It’s really a lot more like the Matrix, rules can be bent and some broken, but most of the time, it’s about being creative within those rules.

But there is one line that from Khoi’s post that stuck out. In the closing paragraph, he encourages designers to experiment “to begin understanding how a page is put together, how it is delivered to a browser, how it behaves and, crucially, how the designer’s intention maps to how it is used by real people.” We’re still making basic mistakes in building news sites, lessons that we learned in late 90s but might have been lost in the dot.com bust.

  • News sites should be designed around the information needs of your users not your desk structure, org chart or programme schedule.
  • Design is important, but we also need to consider information architecture. What’s that? Jesse James Garrett says: “Information Architecture: Stuctural design of the information space to facilitate intuitive access to content.”
  • Editors should sit in on a user-testing session. We build the sites and know them inside out. Our users don’t have that inside knowledge.

Sitting in on user-testing is humbling and enlightening. It starts to break down our own notions of how we use our sites and replaces them with how users navigate our sites or in many cases fail to find the information they want. It might even surprise editors about the kind of information readers want.

Khoi ends with another way of putting the importance of mindset as well as skillset:

Without that basic sense of curiosity, that insatiable desire to experiment and understand new ways of doing everything, the Web isn’t much fun at all, regardless of how much experience a designer has under her belt.

Curiosity and passion. The web isn’t print, and it isn’t television. It’s something different, and it’s an amazing, incomparable place to do journalism.

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12.02.07
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