Category Archives: Innovation

10.22.10
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#ONA10: Real-time, mobile coverage

My road trip kit

Tomorrow I fly to Washington ahead of the Online News Association conference. I’ll be doing a pre-conference session next Thursday on real-time coverage with Kathryn Corrick, digital media consultant and ONA UK Chair, Gary Symons of VeriCorder Technology. Kathryn is going to focus on desktop-based real-time coverage. There is a lot that is possible from the newsroom, and often when you’ve got a lot of journalists in the field, you need someone back at base to help collate and curate all the content. Gary is going to focus on multimedia, especially some of the tools that Vericoder offers. I’m going to focus on a wide range of mobile tools and techniques highlighting some of the examples of what news organisations and innovative journalists are doing.

Two years ago, I was traveling across the US on my way to Washington covering the 2008 elections. It was my third presidential election. I covered the 2000 and 2004 elections for the BBC. Every election, the mobile technology got a little more sophisticated and a lot more portable.

In the 2000 election, Tom Carver and I traveled across the US in six days answering questions from the BBC’s international audience. We used portable satellite technology, a mini-DV camera and webcasting kit to do live and as-live webcasts. The satellite gear was similar to what would become standard for live video feeds from Afghanistan. We used it in much less threatening locales such as a bar in Miami to talk to college students about apathy amongst youth. The gear weighed about 70 pounds, and it was a bit temperamental. I had to buy a toolkit in Texas and perform emergency surgery in a Home Depot parking lot. That definitely wasn’t in the job description when I was hired, but we got the job done.

In 2004, everything had changed. I used an early data modem to file from the field. The BBC content management didn’t quite work in the field, but we could at least send text and images. Richard Greene and I worked to engage our audiences, again fielding their questions and bringing them along on our journey. I blogged through election day, and that blogging experiment would send my career in a radically new direction.

It would be 2008 when I finally realised my dream of being able to work almost constantly on the move publishing via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and the Guardian blogs via a laptop and mobile modem and a state-of-the-art multimedia mobile phone, the Nokia N82 . The picture above shows my road trip kit. It did more with much with so much less weight than the gear I lugged around in 2000. I could fit it all easily in a backpack. I had my laptop, a data modem, a power inverter, a Nikon D70, a geo-tagger and my Nokia. I geo-tagged all of my pictures, posts and most of my tweets. Before anyone knew what Foursquare or location-based networks were, I saw an opportunity to geo-tag content to map it and eventually deliver relevant content to where people are. I have a detailed explanation of how I did it.

The trip was the realisation of a journalistic dream; I could report live while staying in the middle of the story. I could use my phone to tweet and upload pictures from the celebrations on the streets of Washington. This was two years ago. The technology has moved on, and now it’s easier and the the video, images and audio are better. It’s now easy to broadcast live video with nothing more than a mobile phone.

We’ll cover the latest developments and then go out on the streets of Washington just days before Americans go back to the polls in this critical midterm election. There are a still a few slots left so if you’re coming, come join us from 2-5 Thursday 28 October.

Obama celebrations Washington DC

10.20.10
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Journalists: Create your own future

There is good advice from Andy Serwer, Fortune magazine’s managing editor, in the summary of a talk that he gave business journalists in Canada. Dana Lacey writes for the Canadian Journalism Project:

Serwer’s advice for journalists in the digital age? Build a brand, work for a start-up, be the “baddest-ass investigative journalist” you can be, work for the New York Times and help that paper figure out what the next business model will be (think beyond the paywall). In other words: don’t be victims of the change washing over print journalism.

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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Are journalisms start-ups being appropriately funded?

If you’ve been paying close attention, you might be aware that myself, Kevin and our friend Stephanie Troeth are working on a journalism start-up called NoThirty. Kevin and I have been thinking of ideas for a journalism project for about two years now, talking over different concepts and throwing out the ones that didn’t seem feasible. In January we started work in earnest, bringing Steph on board as our co-founder. We are now at the stage where we need to find funding so that we can get our prototype built.

I have always been keen on the idea of using grant funding wherever possible, certainly in the very early days. Grants are hard to get, slow to arrive and come with strings attached. Almost all money has strings and the key thing is to understand which strings are acceptable and which are deal-breakers.

Last week, we were alerted to two possible grants that we could apply for, one independently and one via a university partner. As I read through the grant details, I was struck by how some of their requirements would immediately undermine our start-up’s business models.

I’ll talk first about JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, which supports the use of technology in research and higher education (as we are not in HE/FE, we’d be applying as a partner of a university). They are currently running a programme aimed at improving and expanding the use of digital archives through collaboration between educational bodies such as universities, private business partners and the general public. NoThirty would fit into the remit of this programme, but JISC require “software outputs” to be open source and for there to be enough supporting information for that software to be reused. They also require content to be open access.

Because JISC are focused on an entirely different sector to the one we live in, I don’t say the above as a criticism. Indeed, I fully support their drive to ensure that publicly funded work done by educational bodies should be made available to everyone. But it became clear that their grants are not aimed at people like us, in the position we’re in, and their requirements would scupper us.

Our main aim is to create a sustainable business, so any requirement to open source our code has to be considered very carefully. Whilst we could release libraries rather than the full code base, until we are further down the road we won’t know if that is an appropriate route for us to take. Committing right now to open source/open access could turn out to be commercial suicide and it’s not a decision we can make yet.

Note that I am fully in favour of opening up as much as possible, as I believe that it helps create a healthy ecosystem around one’s service, but until you know the exact shape of what you’re building it is hard to predict what can be made open source/open access. There isn’t an open-closed dichotomy -both can live quite happily side by side in the same business – but one has to be able to make choices based on what is best for the health of that business.

The second funding source we considered was the Knight News Challenge which opens for applications on October 25th. But looking through the FAQ, which is the closest thing I can find to terms and conditions, I came across the same requirement for us to go open source at the end of the grant:

By “open-source” we mean a digital open-source platform that uses a code base that can be used by anyone after the grant period to either replicate your project in their community or to build upon it. You will own your platform, but you will have to share under GPL or Creative Commons licensing.

Again, I understand why they are doing this, but in this case, I feel that Knight is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Where JISC exists to encourage the use of technology in education, Knight exists to help create new journalism organisations and a healthy journalism ecosystem. But by insisting on full open source, not just libraries or other separable parts, they immediately limit the type of projects they attract.

Most of the people I’ve spoken to about it attribute this insistence on open source to be a result of EveryBlock’s acquisition by MSNBC.com. EveryBlock got $1.1m from the Knight News Challenge over two years to fund development and were bought for, rumour has it, $5m to $6m. Whether Everyblokc is the cause or not, Knight’s open source clause causes problems.

If your project is a public service journalism tool or project, opening up your code makes sense. But if you’re looking at creating a financially sustainable business, then making your site/service/platform/product easily replicable by anyone could be a daft thing to do. If you have created something genuinely new and compelling, the result of making it easily replicable could be that someone with more money and bigger guns comes along and wipes the floor with you.

How does this motivate journalism entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs work very hard to make their dreams a reality, they take risks not just with their money, but with their time, reputation and their career. What’s the pay-off for all that risk? In the rest of the start-up world, it’s the dream of a big exit, a windfall that make the hard work worth it. Most start-ups never get there, but you still want to have that hope.

Taking that option away from the very beginning will put off journalism entrepreneurs who have an eye on commercial viability. It stunts the growth of the start-up community. It damages the news ecosystem over all and will have knock-on effects for years to come as projects that could have made good businesses remain scribbles of the back of a napkin because of a lack of suitable, early-stage support.

I think Knight are being short-sighted by insisting that grantees go open source. If the only projects they fund are public service projects, what happens when the grant runs out? How will those projects become financially sustainable? How will they provide employment for journalists? We desperately need to find new business models for news and there are untold thousands of journalists searching for work. This means we need to foster start-ups that could become commercially viable, that could develop new business models, and that means they could wind up in a big exit.

I know what some of you are probably thinking now: If a project is so commercially viable, let the angels and VCs fund it. That’s what they do, after all. But I don’t think that’s an answer. We’re going to need a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning, a lot of slow growth before we get to the point of understanding what the new commercially viable business models are for news. Clearly it’s not a problem that is easy to solve, because if it was, we would have solved it by now. I love the quote from Barack Obama in his recent Rolling Stone interview:

[T]ypically, the issues that come to my desk — there are no simple answers to them. Usually what I’m doing is operating on the basis of a bunch of probabilities: I’m looking at the best options available based on the fact that there are no easy choices. If there were easy choices, somebody else would have solved it, and it wouldn’t have come to my desk.

There are no easy choices in journalism innovation. If there were, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I certainly don’t want to generalise about the motivations of angels and VCs, but generally speaking I don’t think that they have the stomach for the kind of long-term investment and support that news ventures are going to need. Private equity investors seem to prefer start-ups with simple concepts, potential for mass market adoption and a quick route to profitability.

Journalism innovation certainly isn’t simple – all the simple stuff has been done already. It’s not mass market either – the fragmentation of the market is one of the key problems that any start-up would have to overcome. The fact that audiences are time- and attention-poor and have a myriad options to choose from when it comes to how they spend that time and attention has pretty much destroyed the ‘monetise eyeballs’ business model, so any new model has to depend on niche markets. And as for profitability, given the potential need for extensive research, experimentation and change, I don’t think that many journalism start-ups will find profitability within three years, and it’ll probably be more like five. How many VCs would be happy to fund a start-up that is complex, niche, and slow to profitability?

It turns out that, indeed, VCs aren’t flocking to fund media start-ups. Matthew Craig-Greene recently wrote on The Media Briefing that (original emphasis):

Private-equity firms are not really investing in young, entrepreneurial media start-ups.

Whilst cash invested in media buyouts has grown nearly six-fold since the late nineties, investment in fast growing, maturing media businesses has less than doubled and, worst of all, venture-style investments in new, disruptive media technologies and service models has remained absolutely flat.

So far in 2010, the only significant venture capital deals in the European media sector to grab my attention have been Rockola.fm, a Spanish online music and radio business, and pr2go, an innovative, online PR agency with a distinctive “pay as you go” pricing model. The two investments together total less than 2 million.

If grants like those from Knight are inappropriate and private equity investors don’t have the guts for it, who exactly is going to fund and support innovative journalism start-ups? Matthew suggests that perhaps large media organisations should create investment funds, but many of them are preoccupied with their own survival and lack the skill to both spot promising start-up and let them develop in their own direction.

Where does this leave NoThirty? Well, we’ll keep looking for grants that have more acceptable strings and we’ll almost certainly be trying alternative funding models early next year. Keep your eye on the blog for news.

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.

09.20.10
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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.

 

08.09.10
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Two projects to watch: Ben Franklin Project and TBD.com

TBD.com's Near You zip code news filter

TBD.com's Near You zip code-based news filter

At 428 am in Washington DC a new news site, TBD.com, launched, and it is definitely one worth watching. Why? They have assembled an all-star staff, brimming with passion. The general manager for the project is Jim Brady, the former executive editor and vice president of Washington Post Newsweek interactive. Steve Buttry, the site’s head of community engagement, has a long history in traditional journalism, training and innovation.  (For any journalist struggling to come to terms with the unrequited love you feel for the business, read this post by Mimi Johnson, Steve’s wife, as he left the newspaper business to go all digital at TBD.) They have some great staff who I have ‘met’ via Twitter including networked journalists Daniel Victor and Jeff Sonderman.

When he was hired, Jeff described his job as a community host as this:

developing ways to work with bloggers and users to generate, share and discuss content.

He described TBD.com as this:

Our goal is to build an online news site for the DC metro area, and do it taking full advantage of the how the web works — with partnership not competition, users not readers, conversation not dictation, linking not duplicating.

If you look on Twitter this morning, Jeff and Steve are very busy on their first full day as hosts for the new news service.

Digitally native at launch

The site is clean and clear, easy to navigate with a lot of excellent touches. TBD.com launched with an Android app and are awaiting approval for their iPhone application. They zip (post) code news filter to find out content not only from TBD but also from bloggers in the area is excellent. I lived in Washington from 1998 until 2005 as the Washington correspondent of BBCNews.com. I know the city well. I typed in my old home zip code, 20010, and got news about Mount Pleasant including from a blog called The 42 Bus, which was the bus that I used to take to work everyday. Their live traffic information is template for how city sites should add value for such bread and butter news. You can quickly pull up a map showing traffic choke points in the area. They even have a tool to plot your best travel route. The traffic tools are pulled from existing services, but the value is in the package.

They had a launch event last week, and they explained their networked journalism strategy. Steve Myers at the Poynter journalism institute said half of the links at TBD.com would point to external sources, much higher than at most sites. said that At launch, 127 local bloggers had joined their network. Steve Myers had this quote from Steve Buttry about their linking strategy:

“If we’re competing on the same story, we’ll do our story and we’ll link to yours,” said Steve Buttry, director of community engagement for the site. If another source owns a big story, “we’ll play you at the top of the home page and we’ll cover something else with our staff resources.”

Wow. Personally, I think that this is smart. With resources declining at most news organisations, they have to be much more strategic about how they use their staff. They need to focus on what value that they add. Jeff Jarvis says: “Cover what you do best and link to the rest“, and this is one of the highest profile tests of that strategy.

Ken Doctor, brilliant news industry analyst at Newsonomics, has 10 reasons to watch TBD.com. Harvard’s Nieman Lab for journalism has another six reasons why they are watching the launch. Of Ken’s list, I’ll highlight two. Bucking the trend for many new high-profile news projects in the US, this is a for-profit business. Ken’s seventh point is huge:

7) It’s got a big established sales force to get it going. Both TV stations salespeople with accounts — and relationships. So TBD is an extension of that sales activity, not a start-up ad sell, which bedevils many other  start-ups.

The other thing that TBD.com has going for it is that it has the commitment of someone who already has seen some success with new models, Robert Allbritton. A few years ago, he launched Politico.com, bringing in two high profile veterans from the Washington Post to compete not only with their newspaper but also specialist political outlets like Roll Call. Politico has managed to create a successful print-web product, “not profitable every quarter but says it’s turning a profit for any given six months,” Allbritton told paidContent.org. What is more important though is his commitment to his ventures. He’s got the money and commitment to support projects past the short term.

“The first year of Politico was pretty ugly in terms of revenue,” he admitted. “You’ve got to have some staying power for these things to work.”

The Ben Franklin Project

The other project that I’m watching is John Paton’s Ben Franklin Project at the Journal Register Company. What is it?

The Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project is an opportunity to re-imagine the newsgathering process with the focus on Digital First and Print Last. Using only free tools found on the Internet, the project will – from assigning to editing- create, publish and distribute news content on both the web and in print.

Succinctly, this company is looking to disrupt its own business. Instead of attacking costs by cutting more staff, they are looking to cut costs by eliminating the price of their own production using free tools. It’s not something that every organisation could do, but with 18 daily newspapers and 150 non-daily local publications, it shows the ambition of their project. This is not a tiny organisation.

In practice, the organisation set the goal for all 18 of its newspapers to publish online and in print using free online and free open-source tools, such as the Scribus desktop publishing application. They are also pursuing the same kind of community engagement, networked journalism strategy that is at the heart of TBD.com.

On 4 July, 2010, Independence Day in the US, they published their 18 daily newspapers and websites only using free tools and crowdsourced journalism. Jon Cooper, Vice President of Content, Journal Register Company wrote:

Today — July 4, 2010 — marks not only Journal Register Company’s independence from the costly proprietary systems that have long restricted newspapers and news companies alike. Today also marks the start of a revolution. Today marks the beginning of a new path for media companies whose employees are willing to shape their own future.

This is just part of Paton’s turnaround strategy for the Journal Register Company. However, in 2010, which is proving to be another tough year for the US economy (especially in some of the areas the company covers), Paton just announced that the company is 15% ahead of its revenue goals. He said:

Our goal is to pay out an extra week’s pay this year to all employees for hitting our annual target of $40 Million.

That is an amazing investment in journalists and an incentive for them to embrace the disruptive change he is advocating, but it’s so heartening to see journalists engaged and benefitting from change in the industry.

With all the talk about innovation in journalism, it is rare to see projects launch with such clear ambitions. After a lot of talk in the industry, we’ll now see what is possible.

08.05.10
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APIs helping journalism “scale up”

A couple of days ago, I quoted AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on developing tools to help journalists “scale up” what they do. ?In a post on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Megan Garber has a highlighted a good practical example of what I meant .

One thing that computers and other technology can help journalists to work more efficiently is to cut down or eliminate frequent, repetitive tasks. Derek Willis at the New York Times talks about APIs (as Derek describes APIs as “just a Web application delivering data). Derek says:

The flexibility and convenience that the APIs  provide make it easier to cut down on repetitive manual work and bring new ideas to fruition. Other news organizations can do the same.

Derek also points how savvy use of data is not just good for data visualisations and infographics, but it is also an excellent resource for New York Times’ journalists.

So if you have a big local election coming up, having an API for candidate summary data makes it easier to do a quick-and-dirty internal site for reporters and editors to browse, but also gives graphics folks a way to pull in the latest data without having to ask for a spreadsheet.

And as he said, the biggest consumer of New York Times APIs is the New York Times itself.

Projects such as building an API can be quite large (although new companies and also organisations like the Sunlight Foundation in the US and MySociety in the UK have great public service APIs and data projects), but with the benefits to both audiences, designers, developers and journalists, it makes it easier to justify the time and effort.