Category Archives: Journalism

06.07.11
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The FT and NPR: HTML5 as part of a multi-platform strategy

I had heard that the FT and Apple were struggling to come to an agreement on digital subscriptions, so it came as no surprise to me that the FT has launched an HTML5 web app. Some folks have added sneer quotes around app, but I’m not going to. The HTML5 version of the FT’s app looks, behaves and has even more functionality than their native iPad app.

Robert Andrew of paidContent: UK has a great interview with Rob Grimshaw, The Financial Times’ online managing director, on the issues that separate the two companies. The subscription issues are well known, and it’s not just Apple’s 30% take that has publishers pissed off. Publishers are also uncomfortable letting Apple get between them, their customers and customer data. I’m impressed with the maturity that the FT has demonstrated here. Rather than play up the conflict and engage in an all too typical media industry drama queen spat, the FT used the potential impasse to explore what would be possible with HTML5, the next version of the web mark-up standard. Grimshaw said:

It’s not just Apple versus FT – there is more to it than that. We started to look at HTML middle of last year when we realised how complicated it would be to develop applications for all these different platforms.

The FT believes that it hasn’t had to compromise. I gave the app a spin this morning on our first gen iPad. The execution is extremely polished, walking you through every step from adding it to your home screen to giving the app increased offline storage space. The app is not only identical to the native app experience, it also has a few extras. The native app allows you to choose a live or a downloaded version. The web app automatically caches the content on load. Unlike the native app, the web app also supports the FT’s video content offline. That’s a real bonus – I often read the FT on the iPad on flights and missed the video content. (I actually prefer the iPad version to print. When I don’t travel with the iPad and get the paper, I often struggle not to punch my neighbour when wrestling with the broadsheet. I have no such issue with the iPad.)

I will agree with some comments online today that said it is a little sluggish on the first gen iPad. On the iPad 2 and Xoom, dual-core tablets with better graphics, I would expect the web app to fly. On Suw’s now creaky iPhone 3G, the app gently let us know that the device was too slow before elegantly redirecting us to the FT’s excellent mobile website. Nice. It puts most other UK mobile newspaper sites to shame, though for my money, the New York Times still has the best mobile site – fast, clean and easy to use. For comparison, I’d also recommend that you check out Firstpost.com, a site that Suw and I helped Network 18 of India launch in May.  The site uses WordPress and launched with a great mobile version through the use of the Mobile Detector plug-in, which can detect more than 5000 mobile devices and serve and experience relevant to the device.

The FT head of mobile, Steve Pinches, has an explanation about the work that went into the FT HTML5 app. He echoes Grimshaw’s point about development costs:

developing multiple ‘native’ apps for various products is logistically and financially unmanageable. By having one core codebase, we can roll the FT app onto multiple platforms at once.

For another example of what’s possible with HTML5 and cross-device coding, check out NPR’s app for Chrome.  It looks exactly like the US public radio broadcaster’s iPad app, but it runs in Google’s Chrome web browser. NPR explained how it was done:

Like to get your geek on? Well, you’ll be happy to know that NPR for Chrome leverages the power of HTML5. Using a technology called Sproutcore, this web app has the potential to work in other modern browsers, on tablets, and even be repurposed for other app stores.

Smart. Ben Ayers, formerly of ITV, and I had little discussion this morning about how HTML5 might allow these apps to run not just on smartphones, tablets and computer web browsers but also on connected TVs.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/benayers/status/78009292824907776″]

Leaving Google TV to one side for a moment, LG’s new smart TV platform uses webkit, which underpins many browsers including Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. From an interface standpoint, I’m not going to suggest an interface for a mobile phone would appropriate for the “ten-foot” experience of TV, but device detection and CSS can help serve up an appropriate interface.

As HTML5 matures over the next few years, this will be the standard that enables the next wave of cross-platform innovation. The combination of APIs, CSS and HTML5 could make the painful process of developing apps for multiple platforms and multiple screen sizes a thing of the past. In the meantime, it’s great to see what HTML5 is capable of.

05.23.11
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Understanding Grímsvötn

Another Icelandic volcano has blown its top and, as you might expect, the media has gone batshit. Even otherwise commendable publications like Nature have lost their heads and are calling Grímsvötn “the new Eyjafjallajökull” (hint: it’s completely different). So here’s a quick look at the key information sources you need to understand what’s going on.

Firstly, let’s just talk about pronunciation. Whereas I could understand the reluctance to attempt Eyjafjallajökull, even though it’s not that hard once you’re got your tongue round it, Grímsvötn is much easier. An Icelandic friend says the í is like the ‘ea’ in ‘eating’ and ö is a bit like the e in ‘the’ or the u in ‘duh’ so basically a bit of a schwa. Repeat after me, then: Greamsvuhtn. Easy. Yet despite it being a relatively simple name to pronounce, at least one BBC news presenter bottled it and said something like “A volcano in Iceland” and, instead of tackling Eyjafjallajökull said, “Another volcano in Iceland”… Wimp.

Right, so, horses’ mouths. There are plenty of them, so there’s no excuse for asking the Independent’s travel editor for comment (BBC, I’m lookin’ at you again!), who frankly probably knows jack shit about volcanos. Your key sources for Icelandic eruptions are:

1. The Icelandic Met Office
The IMO provides so much data that it’s hard to see why so many news orgs ignore it. You don’t get much closer to the horse’s mouth than this and, shock-horror, they speak English! Good lord, who’d’ve thunk it. Key pages on the IMO website:

  • News: Not updated very often, but still an important source
  • Updates: Updated more regularly, more useful info and links
  • Earthquakes: Last 48 hours worth of earthquakes. It’d be awesome if someone captured this and made a nice visualisation. And if you’re missing data, just email and ask them – they’re very nice, as I found out last year when they sent me the archival data for Eyjafjallajökull.

The IMO have a lot more data, such as tremor, inflation, and seismic moment, but it will take an expert to interpret that for you.

2. The VAAC
The Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre is run by the UK Met Office and provides maps of the ash cloud forecasts, which it updates regularly. Key links:

 

If you look at the full size version of this, you’ll see more clearly that there are three coloured lines: The blue line is labeled FL350/FL550, the green line is FL200/FL350 and the red line is SCF/FL200. The blue line is the highest part of the ash cloud between FL350 and FL550, i.e. between 35,000 and 55,000 feet. FL means “flight level” and the number is how many hundreds of feet above ground level you’re looking at. The green line is between 20,000 and 35,000 ft, which is about where jets cruise (at 33,000 ft), and the red line is between surface and 20,000 ft. VAGs are produced regularly and include four forecasts at 6 hour intervals.

The thing to remember about these VAGs is that they are forecasts based on current volcanic activity and wind forecasts, so they can and do change.

3. Regulators & air traffic control
At this stage, I’d love to say that the regulators and air traffic control bodies are a great source of info, but they’re not. That’s not going to stop me giving you their links, though.

  • UK Civil Aviation Authority. They also have a Twitter account, but haven’t yet got to grips with the idea of giving people useful information.
  • NATS: The National Air Traffic Services are giving regular updates, but it’s not particularly detailed. I’m pretty sure that the now ‘unofficial’ Twitter account was official this time last year, but either way, NATS should sort out their Twitter presence.
  • EuroControl: The EU air traffic control, also on Twitter, but doing a slightly better job of it.

I would like someone to slap the CAA, NATS and to some extent Eurocontrol round the chops and insist that they get their online acts together. They may think they have something better to do than communicate with the public, but frankly, I can’t think what it might be. At times like this, we need informed voices from the organisations making and implementing policy decisions to be communicating directly with the public, to counteract the uninformed nonsense we’re fed by our media. Right now, it’s just one great big mess of fail and it’s very disappointing. If any one of you organisations get in touch with me, I’ll go so far as to give you a discount just to see you actually start to engage properly.

4. Erik Klemetti
Frankly, Erik’s work on the Eruptions blog, gathering links and keeping us up to date with what’s happening, blows all the official sources out of the water. Erik has created an awesome community of  people who are constantly on the look out for news and information and sharing it in the comments and, from that smorgasbord, he picks the best links for his posts and provides an expert view on what’s happening as well as some highly accessible explanations. This, to be honest, is the kind of stuff we should be seeing from the UK Met Office, the CAA, NATS and Eurocontrol, not to mention the media.

5. FlightRadar24
Always a fascinating site, FlightRadar24 has now added an ‘Ash Layer’ which superimposes the current forecasts on to their radar map of all the planes currently in the air. Well worth a peek.

6. Mila
Mila have a number of webcams up around Iceland. Currently there’s one working webcam trained on Grímsvötn, and although the picture’s a bit wobbly, when the sun’s up you can clearly see what’s going on. Or not going on: Right now, there’s no plume, but that can of course change at a moment’s notice.

 

So, that gives you a bunch of sources to check when you want to know what’s going on and you can’t find any actual information in the media. And if you’re like me, you’re still left with a question: What’s going to happen with Grímsvötn and its ash cloud? It’s impossible to predict precisely, but we do know that the ash is heavier and coarser than Eyjafjallajökull’s. We also know that the weather patterns are not the same, and that the eruption is unlikely to go on for as long. So we are probably not looking at a replication of Eyjafjallajökull’s disruption. (“Probably” means that nature can still confound the most sensible of predictions!)

All that said, Iceland is volcanically a highly active country and the lull in activity we’ve seen throughout the history of aviation is not something we should be taking for granted. I wouldn’t panic, though. But nor would I believe everything I read in the media.

05.23.11
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The iPad and mobile: ‘How does information relate to movement?’

Last year, days after I took a buyout from The Guardian, I wrote a fun little rant about publishers and their delusional approach to the iPad. Since then Suw and I have bought an iPad and have tried out a number of apps, and one of those apps was The Daily.

The shortcomings of the interface and the app have been well covered. (The Daily, now with 20% more crash-tastic badness.) However, rather than focus on the poor interface or lousy execution, I’d like to focus on the bland content, something you don’t usually get to say about Murdoch content. You can say a lot of things about Fox or The Sun but you can rarely criticise Rupe for making boring content, until now. I’m from the US. I read a lot of news about home, as any expat does, but for the life of me, I don’t understand why I should care about 95% of the stuff that I have read in The Daily. It’s like a crappy CD-ROM version of USAToday on a day when they’ve given the staff writers the day off and have all the interns write about their pet issues. The Daily: The publication that doesn’t know what it is, and in digital content (or any content for that matter), meh never wins.

Michael Wolff, who is no fan of Murdoch, has a scathing piece in Adweek that raises the question of just how long the mogul will support The Daily.

Is The Daily the Heaven’s Gate of mobile? Not just expensive, but inexplicable. Not just a bomb, but an albatross.

Ranting aside though, Wolff points out something really key, thinking of the iPad as a mobile device:

Meanwhile, the mobile form expands and grows, driven by a basic question that most publishers have seemingly not asked: How does information relate to movement?

Moreover, how does the iPad relate to real-time information or time-shifted but frequently updated information? One of my favourite apps on the iPad is the FT. The ability to easily shift from live to downloaded content is amazingly functional. It is so useful that it has driven my use of the FT. In the couple of weeks that I used The Daily, neither the information or the format did anything for me. I’d rather have the more traditional site paradigm and the simple yet elegant functionality of the FT iPad app than the rather showy and useless interface candy of The Daily.

Publishers have rarely thought about how the web and now mobile change how information is consumed. They have a product that they want to sell, and they only see the web and mobile as different containers to sell it in. They don’t think much about how those platforms change the way we relate to information. It’s as if we were still in the early 1950s, producing radio programmes with pictures for TV. What is frustrating for those of us who have been doing this for a while – since the mid-1990s for me – is that we know how to tell stories on the web. We know how digital and mobile change ways that stories can be told.

That said, I’m actually quite optimistic. The iPad has renewed interest in novel digital story telling and design, and I’m even more enthusiastic about HTML5 which opens up all kinds of possibilities for not only the iPad but the desktop, smart TVs and other new devices. However, it’s going to take some digital thinking rather than thinking that sees digital as just another vehicle for print.

05.18.11
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Linking and journalism: The Workflow issue

There was an interesting discussion about linking and journalism amongst a number of journalists in North America. Mathew Ingram of GigaOm and  Alex Byers, a web producer for Politico in Washington, both collected the conversation using Storify. It covers a lot of well worn territory in this debate, and I’m not going to rehash it.

However, one issue in this debate focused on the workflow and content management systems. New York Times editor Patrick LaForge said:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/palafo/status/70668697051725824″]

Workflow and how that is coded into the CMS is a huge issue for newspapers. For two years when I was at The Guardian, most of my work was on our blogging platform, Movable Type. Movable Type had scaling issues, as did almost every blogging platform back in 2006 when I started at The Guardian. However, Movable Type and other blogging platforms also make it ridiculously easy easy to create content – rich, heavily linked multimedia content. It was so much easier than anything I had ever used, especially when coupled with easy to use production tools such as Ecto and MarsEdit.

However, due to the scaling problems with Movable Type, The Guardian moved its blogging onto its main content management system. We didn’t have a choice. We had outgrown Movable Type. However, I’m being diplomatic in the extreme when I say that the new CMS lacked the ease of content creation and publishing that I had grown accustomed to with Movable Type and WordPress. Furthermore, there was an internal conflict over whether to use the web tools or the print tools to create content, and in the end, the print tools won out. The politics of print versus the web played out even in the tools we used to create content. That was an even more jarring move. It was like trying to create a web story with movable type, and I’m not talking about the blogging platform.

Most newspaper CMSes are more WordPerfect from the 1980s than WordPress. That’s why you have journalism outfits setting up blogs on Tumblr. Creating content on tools like Tumblr is like falling off a bike instead of trying to write caligraphy with a telephone pole. You can build a robust, advanced content management system without making the tools to create content so piggishly ugly, bewilderingly confusing and user surly. However, newspapers code their workflows into their CMSes. The problem is that their workflows aren’t fit for modern purpose.

Newspaper newsroom workflow is still print-centric, apart from a very few exceptions. The rhythm of the day, the focus of the tools and much of the thinking is still for that one deadline every day, when the newspaper goes to the presses. From this post by Doc Searls on news organisations linking to sources (or not linking as the case may be), see this comment from Brian Boyer about his shop, The Chicago Tribune:

At the Chicago Tribune, workflows and CMSs are print-centric. In our newsroom, a reporter writes in Microsoft Word that’s got some fancy hooks to a publishing workflow. It goes to an editor, then copy, etc., and finally to the pagination system for flowing into the paper.

Only after that process is complete does a web producer see the content. They’ve got so many things to wrangle that it would be unfair to expect the producer to read and grok each and every story published to the web to add links.

When I got here a couple years ago, a fresh-faced web native, I assumed many of the similar ideas proposed above. “Why don’t they link?? It’s so *easy* to link!”

I’m not saying this isn’t broken. It is terribly broken, but it’s the way things are. Until newspapers adopt web-first systems, we’re stuck.

Wow, that’s a really effed up workflow by 2011 standards, but a lot of newspaper newsrooms operate on some variation of that theme. It’s an industrial workflow operating in a digital age. It’s really only down to ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ thinking that allows such a patently inefficient process to persist. Seriously, has no one really thought that it’s easier to export plain text from HTML than to bolt on a bunch of links, images and the odd YouTube video to a text story destined for a dead tree? Want to cut some costs and increase the quality of your product? Sort out your outdated industrial workflow, save a lot of money, hire more journalists and improve your web and print products. Simples. (Well, after sorting out your workflow, hire a digital sales team, and then you can hire even more journalists. That’s a post for another time.)

04.27.11
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Collaborative reporting

I read Highs and Lows of “Post Mortem” Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR, by Carrie Lozano over on Mediashift with interest, not least because collaboration has been a specialty of mine for many years now. Ever since I first started working with social media over seven years ago I have focused on collaboration, so a project that marries collaboration and journalism is of course going to pique my interest.

This piece, first in a series by Lozano, sets the scene, but doesn’t go into any detail about how journalists from Frontline, ProPublica and NPR actually got down to the day-to-day nitty gritty. That’s what I’m really interested in, because the collaboration tools available today make working together really easy, if – and only if – people are willing to learn and adjust the way that they communicate.

There are basically two types of collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration:

  • The actions of the collaborators are spread out over time 
  • Materials are gathered or created and made available to the other team members who access them whenever they wish to
  • Collaborators can be spread out over different time zones
  • Conversations can occur slowly as there can be a delay before each participant is able to reply
  • Tools include: wikis, blogs, microconversation tools (i.e. Twitter-like tools), Google Documents, file sharing services like Dropbox

Synchronous (or nearly synchronous) collaboration:

  • The actions of the collaborators are taken in concert
  • Materials are created together, in real time, either by simultaneous editing or by taking turns in a timely fashion
  • Collaborators are usually in overlapping timezones, even if they are not physically in the same location 
  • Conversations happen smoothly as collaborators can response almost instantly
  • Tools include: instant messenger, chat, Google Documents, microconversation tools

 

The trick is in knowing what kind of collaboration you need and how to swap seamlessly between modes as required. A lot of people who don’t understand collaboration wind up using email as their primary tool, despite email being very badly suited for the work. If you’re going to collaborate with other reporters, you must set up your collaboration systems and ensure that everyone is familiar about what to use, when and how, before your project truly kicks off.

Lozano says:

there’s a learning curve to working this way as basic issues pose challenges, from how to communicate to how to share information to how to simultaneously report for different platforms. Trying to understand how it all works can be confusing, even with a front-row view, so imagine what it’s like when you’re truly in it.

Indeed. You can’t change your workflow in the middle of a big project: trying to do so will cause problems because people are focused on their work, not on their methodology. So you have to sort out ahead of time how people are going to share their research, their notes, their files, their ideas, their rough drafters and their final copy. And you need to make sure people actually use those tools, rather than clinging to familiar ways of working.

“Chaos is the ultimate form of investigative reporting,” Stephen Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica, told me in the midst of “Post Mortem.” “You have to acknowledge that inefficiency is part of the process.” He was explaining the vicissitudes of an investigative piece, where a story can take unexpected turns all the way down to the wire. Joint reporting is not so different.

Collaboration can cause issues if people are unclear on the tools and how to use them, but social collaboration tools can and do create new efficiencies, despite projects going in unexpected directions. If everyone, for example, shares their research and keeps an eye on what others are finding, then that can save a lot of duplicated effort. Understanding what everyone else in your team is doing and how to reduce duplication is a key part of collaboration. It’s not just about doing your own thing and letting others follow on behind, but about considering how your work fits in with other people’s, and how you can all save each other a bit of time.

You also have to teach people how to work inside the collaboration tools, so that the act of writing/researching/planning becomes a de facto act of collaboration, rather than making collaboration an add-on that people do after they’ve finished their final draft. I have worked on a number of ‘open’ projects, where clients can see my notes, research and drafts in all their states of disrepair, and it’s a very different way of working. Emotionally, it’s quite hard because if you’re used to handing over only your final draft, you can feel quite vulnerable when someone can see your messy first draft, but it’s well worth it as early feedback is easier to incorporate.

At the most basic level, think about the logistics. With “Post Mortem” it was often a struggle to get everyone in the same room. At times, there would be 15 busy, bicoastal people on a conference call. It was always a juggle keeping everyone in the loop, but with that many people, I’m certain there were some who wouldn’t have minded being excluded.

Meetings and conference calls are essential to any collaborative project, but they should be reserved for discussion and decision making, and should not be used for updates. Keeping people in the loop should be done online, via wikis, blogs, and other such tools, all of which can be kept confidential. (Remember: your work blog does not have to be public!)

I have had many clients who have found that using a wiki to give people updates, set the agenda, and disseminate notes from calls and meetings cut the length of those calls and meetings by at least half. And let’s face it, there’s nothing more tedious than sitting on a call waiting for your turn to bore everyone to death with what you’ve achieved that week! But you do have to think about these processes ahead of time and ensure everyone is in the habit of adding their update and reading everyone else’s before the call. Once people realise that doing so cuts down the tedium, however, most are happy with the new process.

I shall be interested to learn more about this journalist collaboration, the tools they used and how they managed the processes of sharing information. But there’s one thing that all journalistic organisations can and must learn right now:

People outside of your organisation and industry already know a lot about collaboration: asking their advice will save you some pain.

I often worry that the industry is so convinced it is special that it needlessly eschews external expertise, instead preferring to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. You can see this in the continual re-examination of the use of blogs in journalism, despite the fact that we’ve been having that discussion for the best part of the last decade and have pretty much got it figured out. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is here, it’s just being ignored by half the industry.

Indeed, if there’s one key lesson for journalists to learn about collaboration, it’s to ask the experts who’ve been working in this field for years. Having worked on collaboration projects in many diverse sectors, from investment banking to pharmaceuticals to PR to built environment to science to media, I can promise you that journalists are no different to anyone else. Humans are reassuringly similar no matter what they do, so the lessons learnt about collaboration in pharma are just as applicable to journalism as anything else.

I hope that the exploration of collaborative journalism between Frontline, ProPublica and NPR will throw up some interesting and previously unknown lessons. But I fear that many of their problems will have been be ones they could have avoided with the right preparation. However, we shall have to wait and see!

04.22.11
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Journal-Register’s Brady talks mobile and advertising for local news business

In Journal-Register’s Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap | Street Fight., Jim Brady recently has moved to the Journal Register Company, a local newspaper group in the US which is moving aggressively to remake its business. Brady gives a lot of great ideas on the future of local journalism. He talks about mobile and how location can be used to deliver information. He also weighs in on local paid content, and I think he makes a valuable point that the customer base is so small that it might not be economically worthwhile, especially when you factor in marketing (acquisition) costs.


04.20.11
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Standards in journalism (and comments)

Via Kevin, I came across this piece by James Fallows of The Atlantic: Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media. As soon as I saw that headline, my feathers ruffled. So you think new media is worse than traditional media eh? Well, how come debates that pit blogs against journalism never talk of the scum-sucking pond-dwelling tabs, eh? How comes it’s always the worst of blogging vs the best of journalism, eh? Eh?

Oh, Mr Fallows, I apologise. I did you wrong. Fallows hasn’t, as I had assumed, written some lazy tripe based on a false dichotomy. Far from it. He’s taken an intelligent and insightful look at the claim made by “everyone from President Obama to Ted Koppel” that there has been a “decline in journalistic substance, seriousness, and sense of proportion.”

It’s a really tempting position to take, that standards in journalism have slipped. It’s a position I have some sympathy with, because it jibes with the frustrations I feel on a daily basis when I see inaccurate reporting, sensational headlines and so much PR that I’m surprised that someone at CERN isn’t studying the destabilising effects of political spin on sub-atomic particles.

But Fallows argues eloquently that have we heard this argument before, at pretty much every major inflection point in journalism.

As technological, commercial, and cultural changes have repeatedly transformed journalism, they have always caused problems that didn’t exist before, as well as creating opportunities that often took years to be fully recognized. When I was coming into journalism, straight from graduate school, in the 1970s, one of the central complaints from media veterans was precisely that the “college boys” were taking over the business. In the generation before mine, reporters had thought of themselves as kindred to policemen and factory workers; the college grads in the business stood out, from Walter Lippmann (Harvard 1910) on down. A large-scale class shift was under way by the time of Watergate, nicely illustrated by the team of Bob Woodward (Yale ’65) and Carl Bernstein (no college degree). The change was bad, in shifting journalists’ social sights upward, so they identified more with the doctors and executives who were their college classmates, and less with the non-college, blue-collar Americans whose prospects were diminishing through those years. And it was good, in equipping newspapers and TV channels with writers and analysts who had studied science or economics, knew the history of Russia or the Middle East, had learned a language they could use in the field.

And we can’t just round on digital and blame it for the shift in the way that people consume news and the way that the internet allows them to indulge their interests without ever eating their greens. But we can, he demonstrates, learn something from some of the digital journalism outfits, like Gawker, that so many traditionalists look down upon.

Now, I confess, I can’t even begin to paraphrase the rest of Fallows’ article. Like many Atlantic pieces, it’s long and to try to summarise everything could only do it a disservice. I can only say that this is a great piece, well worth reading and rereading.

Derail
One bit, about Gawker’s Nick Denton, stood out as requiring further consideration, but not just in this context of standards:

In the first New York profile, in 2007, Denton had said that an active “commenter” community was an important way to build an audience for a site. Now, he told me, he has concluded that courting commenters is a dead end. A site has to keep attracting new users—the omnipresent screens were recording the “new uniques” each story brought to the Gawker world—and an in-group of commenters might scare new visitors off. “People say it’s all about ‘engagement’ and ‘interaction,’ but that’s wrong,” he said. “New visitors are a better indicator and predictor of future growth.” A little more than one-third of Gawker’s traffic is new visitors; writers get bonuses based on how many new viewers they attract.

This is fascinating. The received wisdom, and certainly my position for many years, has been that comments can be valuable in terms of encouraging audience loyalty and return users. Over the last several years I’ve been refining my ideas of when comments should and shouldn’t be used on a news site. We have so many examples of how comments can turn toxic, putting off both readers and advertisers, that one would be a fool to think that commenting is some sort of loyalty silver bullet. It is clear that commenting requires serious thought: when is it enabled, how it is used, how/when journalists should engage (hint: most of the time), and how can users be encouraged to behave in a positive and civil manner.

Denton is right. Comments for comments sake is a dead end. And most news outlets have no comment strategy, have given no thought to when and why they might enable comments, and so rarely use comments in a productive way that readers simply aren’t used to the idea that such a collaboration might even be possible. The news industry is also so tribal that they are almost incapable of taking advice or help from anyone that they see as an outsider. That’s a pity, because outside of the news industry is where most of the expertise sits, even now.

We need to be much more sophisticated about how we use comments, much more thoughtful and much more experimental, because we already know that free-for-all comments too easily go awry. Like a pristine blanket of newly fallen snow, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes along to write their name in wee and ruin the view for everyone else.

04.13.11
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Rethinking the jobs newspapers do

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response on Twitter and elsewhere. Welcome visitors from Nieman Lab and Media Gazer. Please feel free to add your ideas below in the comments. I do think that print has a purpose. We just need to rethink what that is. Ideally, a refocused print product(s) and digital products with some clear revenue streams would help start rebuilding the business model for newspapers.

It’s time, actually past time, for a radical rethink of newspapers as a product. Mobile apps and mobile content are finally going mainstream with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, and consumers are finding that these do the job better than print. The 2011 State of the News Media study in the US found:

nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs – weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic. And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.

Which is why it’s really time to rethink and refocus the print product. In a world where immediate access to news and information is in the pocket of an increasing number of people, what role does a newspaper play? Fortunately, there is a process to think about this.

 

The Innovator’s Dilemma

I’m a big fan of Steve Yelvington, and I’ve had the honour to meet him and even do some training and speaking with him.  Steve often talks about Clayton Christensen of the Innovator’s Dilemma fame because of the role Christensen’s thinking had in the NewspaperNext project to rethink newspapers. The project found:

  • Great incumbent companies consistently collapse in the face of disruptive technology.
  • Cramming old products into new forms is the wrong approach so new companies with new approaches win.
  • Products succeed by helping customers get done the jobs they already have been trying to do.
  • We can learn to spot opportunities for growth, not just wring our hands over losses.

I was thinking about this when I read a couple of comments about newspapers this past week. First, SEO consultant Malcolm Coles showed the money he used to give The Guardian (my employer up until a year ago) and what he gives The Guardian now. Putting aside the financial analysis for a minute, this struck me (emphasis mine):

I’ve gone from paying £230 a year for weekday news to £4. The collapse in what I pay is because I read most of the news for the next day’s newspaper on the Guardian website on my iPad the evening before. And I read anything new on my iPhone on the way to and from work. The newspaper has nothing in that I need.

Second, David Carr was writing in the New York Times  about executive bonuses at US newspaper giant Gannett while the company asked employees to take a furlough. That aside, he said this (again, emphasis mine):

Gannett’s flagship, USA Today, is a once-robust national newspaper but has lost 20 percent of its circulation in the last three years. About a week ago, I was at the Marriott in Detroit, and as I stepped over the newspaper at my door as I usually do, I then wondered why. It occurred to me that everything in that artifact that would be useful for me — scores from the teams I follow, a brief on big news and a splash of entertainment coverage — I had already learned on my smartphone and tablet before leaving the room. Gannett is aware of the challenge and has moved aggressively into mobile, with six million downloads of its apps, but those marginal revenues will not fill the hole created by challenges to its core business.

For edge cases like me, this has been the case for years, but when media reporters for a major newspaper like the New York Times say that the jobs that newspapers used to do for them they do with something else, the industry has to take notice.

 

Steve Yelvington has been thinking about this question for years, but the newspaper industry really needs to ask: What jobs does a newspaper do that no other medium does for its readers? I’m not asking about how you value newspapers, but what do you actually use a newspaper for that no other bit of media can do for you? I’m not even asking about your emotional relationship to print. Actually, I think for a lot of people in the newspaper business, their emotional and professional connection to print, is actually getting in the way of answering these questions.

It’s time to radically rethink the newspaper as a product. Where would you start?

To start things off, I’d say cut the breaking (or rather broken because it’s yesterday news) news. Yes, there will be a major story of the day, but we really need to rethink how it’s presented on the front page. How does the front page feel fresh instead of repeating last night’s news? It’s almost becoming laughable how out of date most front pages feel. If you’ve got a big scoop by all means splash it, but don’t just follow yesterday’s news agenda. Next?

03.29.11
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Journalists must set the tone for their communities

Robert Niles has a must-read post on the Online Journalism Review about the role that journalists should play in terms of interactivity and community on their sites. Online communities need leadership: Will journalists provide it, or will someone else? he writes:

…writing in any interactive environment is an act of leadership. Your words, your tone and your style not only inform your audience, they provide a model – an example – for those in the community who will write for that community, as well. And your silence creates a vacuum of leadership that others may fill.

Since my career shifted six years ago to become more interactive, I am often asked how to get ‘them’ to be nicer. The ‘them’ is always those nasty commenters, members of the public who aren’t as pleasant or as deferential as journalists would like them to be. I respond that the blogger or journalist sets the tone of interaction. If as a columnist, you write a link-baiting attack piece, expect a counter-attack. If a journalist actively invites constructive participation from readers, over time, that journalist can build a positive community (rather than a passive audience) around his or her journalism. The key part of that comment is ‘over time’. It takes time and effort to build a community. It doesn’t take much time or creativity to whip up an angry mob.

The initial response I always get is that sharp writing sells and that I’m somehow advocating overly polite pablum instead of incisive commentary. First off, poisonous communities don’t sell. They don’t sell to most readers, and they damn well don’t sell to advertisers. It’s really interesting the different responses I hear when talking about some high profile engagement-based comment sites. People in the media laud them as visionary, ground-breaking and industry leading. When I speak to members of the public, they call the same sites toxic, offensive and aggressive. I often joke that a lot of publishers engagement strategy is really an enragement strategy. Find the hot button issues of the day and push those buttons until they bleed.

I’m also drawing a distinction between journalism and comment, which is getting awfully blurry these days whether online, on air or in print.

Robert talks about a ‘ladder of engagement‘, and I’ve written about taking the concepts of ‘leveling up’ from gaming and applying it to news communities. I’m not necessarily talking about gamification of news but rather increasing rewards for increasing levels of participation. Robert has some good ideas in his post, and the entire idea is that we’re building loyalty and engagement.

Loyalty is the new currency of the online realm. If you look at the difficulty that major, major news websites are having in creating a sustainable business around high volume traffic, you can see that millions of unique users aren’t necessarily the key to success. It’s about pages per session, dwell time or time on site. A smaller number of highly engaged users can often be more valuable, especially when those users are focused on some high return verticals.

‘You’ journalists must be part of your community

However, putting the business side of things aside for a moment, the resounding message from Robert’s post is that journalists need to be active in our own news communities. We set the tone. If you’ve ever been to a good party or dinner, the host brings people into the discussion. The host introduces new topics, and he or she makes sure that a number of voices and points of view are heard. Whenever I’m out at such a dinner, I come away feeling invigorated and better informed. Without journalists playing this role in our news communities, we’re not only abdicating responsibilities for the conversation on our sites, we’re missing a huge opportunity. I love the quote from Arthur Miller:

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

In the past when a newspaper was defined by the paper, that conversation was a construct, and the conversation was very limited in who could participate. Now in the digital age, that conversation is a reality. It’s a lot more raucous of a conversation, but it’s also more inclusive. My passion is public service journalism, and journalists who can host such a great debate (not just kick off one) are rare. It’s a new skill, and I’m glad Robert has provided such great advice in how to hone that skill.

As our communities and our countries face such pressing problems and challenges, it’s imperative that journalists join these discussions and help foster them. We do that implicitly by providing people with the best information that we can find, but we can also engage our audience to be more active in making these key decisions.

Three years ago, I was back in the US covering the presidential election. One of the people I interviewed, Ralph Torres began following me on Twitter. The day after the election, he wrote this to me on Twitter:

[blackbirdpie id=”991306753″]

We have the opportunity to pull our audiences further into critical civic conversations but we have to seize it, not believe that interaction is only for ‘them’.

03.18.11
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Digital journalists: You’ve got a choice

As I said in my previous post, my good friend Adam Tinworth has highlighted a comment on the Fleet Street Blues blog. I’ll highlight a slightly different part of the comment:

It turns out, however, that the new skills are a piece of piss (particularly with current web technology), and promoting a yarn via Google, Facebook, Twitter etc is, in reality, an administrative task rather than a journalistic one. If you want to employ a proper journalist rather than a cheap web monkey, the SEO stuff really is secondary.

To which all I can say, bitter much? The commenter goes on to say that bosses hire web monkeys because they’re cheaper than real journalists. I know that this commenter is in the UK, but I’d point out that AOL is paying journalists for its local news sites, Patch.com, a very good starting salary, much more than they would probably be making at a local newspaper.

As I’ve said quite a few times before, too many journalists waste their time dividing the world into us and them, into people they consider are journalists and people they don’t. I can understand the anger and upset about journalists tired of cuts and anxious about their future. Most of my career, I’ve worked for organisations engaged in sometimes dramatic cuts. I was at the BBC for eight years, half the time there were cuts. I was at The Guardian for three and a half years, and half the time there were cuts, quite deep cuts. However, comments like this are counterproductive and self-defeating on so many levels.

It’s just another misguided attempt to trivialise the work of digital journalists. Sigh. It’s sad that in 2011, we’re still having to justify our journalism to those who would call us cheap web monkeys.

Digital Journalists: Go where you’re appreciated

To fellow digital journalists, I’d say this. If you hear this repeatedly in your organisation, you have a choice. Frankly, a year ago, I could feel some bitterness overtaking me: Cuts, integration battles, the pressure of having to make up for a greatly reduced staff, and the odd pot shot thrown in my general direction for being a “cheap web monkey”. I realised that I was never going to win over folks like the commenter on Fleet Street, and I finally stopped trying. I finally stopped quoting my CV to justify my journalistic credentials. I stopped correcting people who assumed that my degree was in computer science instead of print journalism.

Now, the news organisations that Suw and I are working with, international and national news organisations around the world, don’t question whether I’m a journalist. I don’t have to quote my journalistic achievements, and you shouldn’t either just because you work in digital.

If you’re in a poisonous work environment like this, constantly having to defend your work, just leave. It’s a judgement call, and every place has its politics, but if you’re sidelined, marginalised and disrespected, you owe it yourself and to journalism to take your skills where they’ll be put to good use. I spend quite a bit of my time now training people to do what you already can. You’re in demand and fortunately, now, there are places where you can just get on with being a journalist. There are organisations getting past these cultural issues or aware of them and working hard to overcome them.

Worried about the economy? So was I last year. I held off taking a buyout at The Guardian until the last minute. I was scared, and I’d be lying if I said there haven’t been a few ‘oh shit’ moments in the last year. However, I can honestly say, I haven’t been this happy professionally since I worked for the BBC as the Washington correspondent for BBCNews.com. The work is fascinating and rewarding. The news organisations I’m working with, like Al Jazeera, are pushing the boundaries, like we did when I joined the BBC News website in 1998 less than a year after its launch. Financially, Suw and I are more secure. Oh, and I did I mention already that we’re happier? If you’re beat down and don’t want to take it anymore, just remember, you don’t have to.