Category Archives: Journalism

05.25.09
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Media140: Twitter and covering the US elections

Suw and I both spoke at the Media140 last Wednesday. Suw spoke about how Twitter helped build support for Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to raise awareness about women in science and technology. I talked about how I used Twitter as a reporting and community-building tool during my trip across the US covering the historic 2008 elections.

As I’ve written before, this was my third trip across the US covering the election and every trip included some experimental element. : In 2000, we focused on webcasting; in 2004, I wrote a blog; and in 2008, I built on blogging with an experiment in highly distributed networked journalism and geo-tagging. I experimented with several different services even after I landed in the US: Video services like Viddler and YouTube, geo-location services such as Fire Eagle and location-based social network BrightKite. In the end, I settled on four which became the cornerstones of my coverage: Flickr, Facebook, Delicious and Twitter.

Building contacts

Twitter often helped me develop better contacts who I initially met using other services. For instance, I posted my images to Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial use licence, which I felt was important because I was using Creative Common licenced photos from Flickr to help illustrate my posts. I contacted fellow Flickr users to let them know I had used their pictures, something I try to do as a matter of courtesy and also as a light-weight way to promote our journalism. Sometimes those contacts developed into stories and contacts beyond the original posts. For example, I used this excellent photo of a foreclosed home in California by Jeff Turner, who organises property shows there. He followed me on Twitter and helped me find local contacts for my reporting on the housing crisis.

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Sign Of The Times – Foreclosure, by Jeff Turner, Some Rights Reserved

After writing a post about the crisis, I received an e-mail from Ralph Torres whose father had been in the property business for 30 years. Ralph wanted to give me a tour of his neighbourhood, Riverside, one of the hardest hit not only in California, but in the nation. He told me about the history of his neighbourhood and showed me the foreclosed homes on his street. He told me:

Our family went through a few recessions over the years, but it was always real estate sales slowing down. You didn’t have block after block with three or four houses vacant due to foreclosures.

That story made both an excellent article, and I recorded the tour for one of our election podcasts.

Virtual contacts and face-to-face connection

Twitter helped me organise my first of four blogger meet-ups on the trip. A Twitter contact helped not only arrange the guests but also a venue in LA. Having someone local who knew which venue to use was invaluable – it’s on-the-ground knowledge that is hard for a visitor to find.

Connecting and collaborating with fellow journalists

Twitter also connected me to other journalists. One of the stories I read was how the recession was increasing homelessness and creating tent cities, reminiscent of Hoovervilles during the Great Depression. Blogging and Twittering journalist Monica Guzman of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer told me about a tent city in Seattle. I doubt I would have learnt of that without her help, and she pointed me to details on the Seattle P-I site, saving me valuable time.

Real-time reporting and aggregation

Twitter proved invaluable throughout the trip, allowing me to stay in touch with friends, other journalists and those following the elections. It acted as a real-time reporting tool and, by using Twitpic, it allowed me to tell the story not just in words but also in pictures. It also was a real-time news feed with news organisations and people flagging up must-read stories and must-watch vidoes in the lead up to the election. One of my friends and followers, Adam Tinworth, said during the trip that he hoped I would get up soon because he needed his election news fix. He told me at media140 that my Twitter feed was the most efficient way to follow the elections.

The night of the election, I had planned to go back to my hotel and finish some writing, but I was caught up in the street celebrations in the city I had called home for seven years. On Twitter, I read reports of how 16th Street, the historic black district of the city, was clogged with revelers. I was downtown near McPherson Square and, early in the morning, people of all races were celebrating Barack Obama’s historic victory. Washington can be a very racially divided city, and I had never seen anything like this.
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Celebrations in Washington DC after Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency, by Kevin Anderson, Some Rights Reserved.

But everyone told me that the real party was at the White House. I didn’t have to wait until I got back to my hotel to report. I could report live from the streets, providing pictures (albeit grainy) and quoting the crowds as they chanted outside of the White House: “Whose house? Whose house? Obama’s house! Obama’s house!”

At the end the trip on election night, I heard from Ralph in California. He said on Twitter:

Big thanks to @GuardianUS08 for last month’s visit and chat and for pulling me further into the conversation.

That was the goal and a measure of the success of what I had hoped to achieve with my experiment in highly distributed, networked journalism. Despite the pressures of almost constant reporting over two months and the difficulties of driving across the US, more than 4000 miles in three weeks, Twitter proved incredibly useful as a reporting tool, an aggregation tool and as a tool to take part in a real-time conversation about the election.

The trip also proved the effectiveness of networked journalism. I really don’t think I could have achieved a fraction of what I did without Twitter. It is actually part of a larger trend of how mobile phone technology will open up new opportunities for professional journalists just as it has spawned the citizen journalism movement. Camera phones were just he beginning.

As I said at media140, there are still some work to be done to fully realise the promise of these technologies. In working on Twitter and other platforms, tying together all of the content and providing context was only possible through manual, editorial methods: writing posts on the Guardian and weaving a narrative through the tweets, Facebook questions and Flickr messages. That was an imperfect solution. I had to try to reconstruct Twitter conversations and Facebook threads and tie them together. It was easier with Twitter, seeing as most of the updates were public, but Facebook proved more complicated and less satisfying. But we have done a lot of work at the Guardian this spring to help integrate Twitter into the site, such as we did during the G20 protests when we used ScribbleLive to pull together the updates of several of our journalists.

As I have said in the past, I have been frustrated as a field journalist with having to leave the story to report, but Twitter allowed me to stay in the middle of the story while I was reporting. It also provided me with a real-time conversation with people while I was covering the story, something that seemed a dream four years earlier when I covered the elections in 2004. We’re still only scratching the surface of what is possible, and while it’s a challenging time to be a journalist, I still can’t help think we’re living through a revolutionary time for journalism.

05.22.09
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Raising journalists’ expectations only to crush them

My colleague and compadre Jemima Kiss flagged up story making the rounds on journalism blogs that the University of Missouri School of Journalism is requiring new students to have an iPhone or an iPod touch.

Like Jemima, I speak to quite a few journalism classes as well. While everyone assumes that young people almost without exception embrace technology, it couldn’t be further from the truth. As Jemima writes:

Chatting to journalism students is always an eye-opener, because, despite the enthusiasm and the clear commitment to their career, there’s very often a rather romantic view of an industry that doesn’t really exist any more. It’s a world of smokey bars and clattering Fleet Street typewriters battling against a daily deadline, or, very often, a rather glamorous late night gig review by a wannabe music journo.

Sadly journalism students’ romantic notion of journalism is often 30 years out of step, and they are often even more resistant of new technology and new methods than those working in the industry.

I stopped off at the University of Missouri to visit my friend Clyde Bentley when I was traveling across the US last year for the elections, and it was great to see them thinking not just about the internet but also actively exploring mobile technology. The University of Missouri is a great institution, and it’s great to see them keeping ahead of the times. But the move to require an iPod Touch or an iPhone has not been welcomed by all.

Levi Sumagaysay at the San Jose Mercury News asked if the requirement was a conflict of interest. He questioned “what appears to be the school’s bias or endorsement of the aforementioned Apple products”.

However, I noticed something else that Levi wrote about, building up journalism students expectations. He writes:

An ironic side note: In most newsrooms I’ve worked, we’ve had to claw our way to “preferred equipment,” and we considered ourselves lucky if, in 1999, our work computers got upgraded to, say, Windows 95. If newspapers survive, future journalists being trained to work on the latest and greatest equipment are in for a huge letdown when they realize that that stuff is largely non-existent in the newsroom — we just write about them.

It’s actually more than moving journalism students from a world of shiny Apple engineering to a world of outdated, coffee-encrusted computers. It’s moving them from a world where they can install and run what they want to a world of locked-down, corporate machines.

I was talking to a friend this week who told me that she had to get a permission slip signed to get a piece of software installed on her work computer and another permission slip signed to actually use the piece of software. You would think she was a seven-year-old going on a field trip to an active volcano. When I was with the BBC, I traveled with two computers. My work computer, which I had to have to access certain work systems, and the computer that I actually got work done on.

I know that there are security issues. I know that IT administrators can tell stories of the senior manager’s kid downloading a virus via some Flash game and taking down the network. But a one-size fits all corporate IT policy is not only a soul-destroying experience for a technically proficient journalist, it’s also a productivity killer. There has to be a better way than this. Train staff in the basics of computer security. Allow them to try new things on a virtual machine that can be wiped if it gets infected with a virus. But we can’t expect journalists to explore and learn about digital tools if we lock all the doors ahead of them.

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05.19.09
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Overcoming journalists’ sense of entitlement to an audience

Like many blogging journalists, I now find myself spending more time with Twitter and seeing the conversation take place there instead of on blogs. I suspect it is down to time constraints. As Stowe Boyd said last week at the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle, blog rhymes with slog because blogging is a lot of work and has produced a natural barrier to entry. Yes, anyone can blog but few people have the time to devote to maintaining a vibrant blog. I find myself now often wanting to capture some of those Twitter conversations.

Today, Adam Tinworth said on Twitter:

I think that journalists’ sense of entitlement to an audience may be the most difficult challenge to overcome in jobs like mine.

Andy Dickinson, who teaches Digital and Online Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, asked:

do you think it’s entitlement or just institutional blinkers?

To which Adam replied:

Entitlement. “I’ve made it as a journalist. Hence, I have an audience.”

I think the problem is actually deeper than that. I think the institutional belief is that if we work for a major publication or broadcaster that not only do we have a de facto audience but that we deserve an audience. It’s the height of institutional arrogance and self-importance, and it’s obvious to anyone who even has one foot outside of the bubble of institutional journalism that this is the case. But therein lies the rub. For many journalists, we never get outside of this bubble. I think it’s one of the reasons that journalists are bewildered by the fact that viewership and readership numbers are declining. Journalism matters, we say, and it does. But we are too often the authors of our own increasing irrelevance. We trivialise the important and amplify the trivial. In this noisy age, we don’t help our audiences find the signal but instead make a vain attempt to drown out the noise, often with self-serving arguments about our own importance.

Our audiences understand this more than we’d like to admit. I still remember as a cub reporter having a member of the public tell me I was full of shit because I was a journalist and that he wasn’t going to talk to me. I said fair enough and talked to him about the weather until he opened up and answered my questions. Put another way, if journalists’ relationship with our audiences was a marriage, the audience is filing for divorce.

This isn’t a bout of professional self-loathing. I am still very proud to be a journalist and, if anything, I am someone clinging to my journalistic ideals as I too often see my industry making a joke of them. I believe strongly in the public service that journalism can provide, but too often recognise that instead of a public service, our audience sees us a public nuisance, nothing more than professional gossips and self-appointed scolds. We don’t hold power to account. We don’t seek out facts and cut through opinion. Too often, we are playing a bit part in a what can only be called a high-stakes but low budget soap opera. We are nothing more than supporting and enabling characters to the drama queens of political and entertainment celebrity. Yes, in the UK, we have uncovered MPs abuse of the expenses system, but the journalism is all the more exceptional because it has become the exception.

This is also not about being liked but about being relevant and earning respect rather than assuming it. We don’t deserve an audience. We aren’t owed a living. We might think that we provide a valuable public service, one essential to democracy, but the public doesn’t buy it. We have squandered the public’s trust.

The issues as I see them:

  • There is no clear division in the industry between fact-based analysis and commentary. I find well researched analysis valuable. I rarely take the time to read commentary, no matter how inflamatory.
  • There is over-reliance on a few sources throughout the industry with very little original reporting.
  • We live in an age of information abundance. We need to seek information that is rare and valuable for our audiences, or we have no reason for being.
  • Finely crafted prose is no substitute for reporting. Our audience sees through our attempt to write around what we haven’t found out.

We live in an era of information abundance. As Andy says in a follow up to Adam, “the expectation is more that the audience comes as a given not earned or nutured.” We’ve taken our audiences for granted, and now we have to do a lot of hard work to earn them back.

05.12.09
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Peering into the future of newspapers at the NYTimes R&D lab

New York Times R&D Group: Newspaper 2.0 from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Suw and I visited the New York Times R&D lab last August when we were in New York. It was an impromptu visit. A friend, Jason Brush, at Schematic put us in touch with Nick Bilton after seeing that we were in New York from our Twitter status updates. (Yet another example of how useful Twitter is.) Nick was kind enough to work around our hectic schedule, and Suw and I were both happy to be able to fit the visit in before we had to dash for the airport. Nick showed us his table of devices including the One Laptop per Child, various e-book readers and the odd netbook.

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photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University is running an excellent series of interviews with Nick. It’s definitely worth watching the videos or reading the transcripts.

Nick not only showed us their collection of devices to show people at the Times how their audience might view their site, listen to their podcasts and view their video, he also showed us some of their projects. One that really impressed us was a print-on-demand customised version of the newspaper. However, this isn’t your father’s PDF to print. No, this was much more advanced and showed elements of effortless personalisation married to a future-looking mobile strategy. The system works by users having a card, similar to the Oyster cards used on the London Underground, that is linked to their account at the NYTimes. Based on the stories that you read on the site, it knows what your interests are, adding personalisation without the cumbersome box-ticking that has led most first generation customisation services to fail. Research shows that people say that want customised services, but they will rarely go through the hoops of ticking boxes to tell news sites what they want to read. This is not only customisation, but it also changes with users’ habits instead of being a static set of preferences. After the user swipes the card, they are presented with the top three sections of the site based on their reading habits. They can choose a version with the top story in full from each of those sections or a digest of those sections, similar to an RSS feed view. However, after each story, there is also a QR code or semacode. Using your mobile phone camera, these QR codes are translated to URLs and take you to the full story using the web browser on your phone.
Nick also showed us something that the R&D Team first came up with at a Hack Day in London, which is the idea of content following a reader throughout the day. They created a system with some of the ideas called shifd.com, which is actually a working site if you want to have a play.

The thinking behind shifd.com is actually realising that as we go through our days we actually shift from device to device, from form factor to form factor. Content that might be relevant or accessible on one platform might not be appropriate on another platform. The reader might begin reading a story on their computer before going to work and then want to continue reading that story on their mobile phone on their train ride to work. They might not want to watch a video associated with that story until they can come home. They can mark the video for viewing at home on their flat screen TV at home. This is the kind of user-centered thinking necessary to adapt to news consumption as it is instead of asking readers to modify their behaviour to our platforms and business models.

Nick and the rest of the team at the New York Times R&D lab are doing some great work that I hope drives thinking in the rest of the industry. I think it’s also an opportunity for cross-disciplinary academic research. How do we surround our audience with our content, delivering relevant information to the relevant devices as they move through their day? That’s a service I’d pay for.

05.06.09
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Government support for journalism is no panacea

Today, I had a Twitter discussion with Kevin Garber, an “African entrepreneur in Australia and founder and CEO of spellr.us” an online spellcheck service. As with Twitter conversations, this is actually from two threads that take some joining. It began based on one my response to journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen who said:

My testimony would have been: No government funding for news; culture war yahoos in Congress will just Mapplethorpe it http://tr.im/kDIb

Jay was linking to a US Senate committee meeting about The Future of Journalism. Jay is referring to the battle over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the US over support of exhibitions of homoerotic photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. The NEA became a key front in the US Culture Wars.

Journalists in the US who look to the BBC model for funding journalism or want their own government bailout would be wise to remember the Culture Wars. They’ve loved covering it, but if they took state funding, they wouldn’t be just be covering it, they would become embroiled in it, even more than they already are. As I said to Jay on Twitter, “People in US arguing for gov’t support for newspapers forget what a political football arts or public broadcast funding is.”

Kevin said:

the key question is are newspapers a public good that can’t be addressed via normal supply/demand mechanisms …

To which I replied: “No, the question is about about journalism not about newspapers. Public funding for journalism is not a panacea. (says as ex-BBC)”.

I’ll agree with Kevin who said in a follow up comment that “smart capitalism doesn’t rely on mkt for everything”, but I’m not sure that the market is failing in terms of support for professional journalism. Rather, I think we’re in the midst of changing business models and that the dominant print model has given way to a multi-platform model with much greater diversity of revenue streams than the recession sensitive over-reliance on advertising. Newspaper and broadcast journalism are capital-intensive, industrial businesses that rely on advertising rates that were under threat before the recession and are unsustainable during the recession. The market has been sending clear signals to newspapers for 30 years that their business model was under threat, and those trends have only accelerated in the last five years. However, the Great Recession is a rupture in business as usual. Assumptions, business projections and companies are now being swept away as this credit bubble bursts.

Now, like the banking and auto industry, the newspaper industry is looking for a solution, and many journalists share Kevin Garber’s view that newspaper journalism is such an important public good that it merits public funds. You hear it when journalists argue that they play a role essential to democracy.

Even non-journalists make this argument. Suw was at Social Web Foo Camp recently at O’Reilly HQ in California, and she said that many people during a “design the future newspaper” pointed to the BBC as the model that could save journalism. Public service broadcasting is a funding model for journalism, but even in the UK, it hasn’t been extended to newspapers. And I doubt it will be. I think journalists also need to realise that such a model probably couldn’t roll back the job cuts that are hitting US newspapers. This shouldn’t be seen as some full employment act for journalists. Also, let’s get real. As an American, I think it’s safe to say that we would have to be living in some Star Trek-variety parallel universe to even contemplate significant public support in the US for a $200-plus annual licence fee payment to watch live broadcast television (either other-the-air or down a cable of some description). It ain’t gonna happen. Seriously. Also, while many other state broadcasters benefit from a licence fee, the UK is unique in the level of funding, and I think a poll of senior executives at the BBC would find most of them preparing for a dramatically reduced level of public funding in the future.

But apart from the political feasibility of a publicly funded journalism institution at the level of the BBC, let’s take a look at some of the cons stemming from public funding. And I say this coming from the point of view of having worked for Auntie for eight years. I love the BBC, and I was very proud to work there. However, public funding doesn’t come without its downsides (and strings attached, just ask the banks or Chrysler for that matter).

  1. What one administration giveth, another can taketh away. And the cuts might even come from an administration that you think will like you. Bill Clinton didn’t really like the press when he left, and Labour, while it might seem would have much more kinship with the BBC and public broadcasting, has not exactly been a supporter of the BBC. Just ask Director General Mark Thompson who thought he was going to get a much more generous licence fee settlement than he got.
  2. Your commercial competitors will spill tankers of ink, pay lobbyists and rant endlessly on air (cough, Fox News) to make sure that your funding will be as low as possible. Just ask the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the US. (Maybe you should take a page out of NPR’s books and start subscription drives.)
  3. You’ll have to subject new ideas to a ‘public value test‘ and make sure that it doesn’t distort the commercial market. In other words, you can be successful, but not too successful.
  4. Public funding won’t insulate you from job cuts. As I said, I worked for the BBC for eight years. There were cuts four out of the eight years I worked there. One year, the cuts were 18%, which was a blessing because the Head of New Media at the time, Ashley Highfield, had asked for 25%. And the cuts continue. This year, they are looking to find £400m of savings.

There are pros, of course, and the BBC is a great journalistic institution. But it’s not in the ruddy health that most American journalists assume it is. Like much of the media, it reached a high water mark in the early part of this decade, and it’s now swimming against the tide. This is not to say that public funding shouldn’t play a role in journalism, but it already does in the US in the form of NPR and public television. Also, based on the experience of Sweden, state support might help for while, but it’s not a long-term solution.

I’ll be interested to see what if anything comes out of the US Senate hearings today, but if it’s government support you want, be careful what you wish for.

UPDATE: A timely example of what I’m getting at. If journalists are anxious over a sense of powerlessness from market forces, it’s no different when the government can change your budget by fiat. See: (Conservative Party leader) Cameron to force vote to halt increase in BBC licence fee. He might not get his way now, but he might when he’s prime minister.

04.26.09
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The long view in building news businesses

Google News Timeline

When Google Labs released their News Timeline feature, it prompted Mathew Ingram at Harvard University Nieman Journalism Lab to call for more creativity from news organisations. Mathew wrote:

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? … Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing?

In the comments, people pointed out projects that news organisations had done such as the a graphic visualisation of recent news at NineMSN in Australia. I pointed out time-based navigation at El Comercio in Peru. Mark S. Luckie who writes the excellent blog about journalism and technology, 10,000 Words wrote:

It’s kind of sad showing off innovative technologies over at 10,000 Words, knowing it will be years before most newsrooms adopt them, if at all.

Another commenter, Dan Conover, said, “I wish it wasn’t this simple, but the truth is that the newsroom culture is, and has been for years, overtly hostile to the geek culture.”

Getting past the frustration, how do we bring more innovation to news organisations? It’s something that Suw and I write about frequently here at Strange Attractor.

  1. Journalists, editors and senior managers need to learn about the software development process.  
    I often say that journalists think that technology is like Harry Potter. Many believe that developers need only to wave a magic wand and voila, faster than an editor can drain a cup of coffee, we have a new interactive feature. Web and software development is more like the Matrix. It’s a rules-bound world. Some rules can be bent, but others cannot be broken. Also, just like in life, some choices preclude others. Web technology is not a blank canvas. A good, dedicated developer can do amazing things, but no developer can do magic. They can’t rewrite the rules, rewrite a programming language or rebuild your CMS in a day.   
    Most editors don’t need to learn how to code, but editors do need to learn the art of the possible. Some things can be done quickly, in a few hours. Other projects take more work. A basic understanding of what is possible on a daily deadline is essential.
  2. Develop a palatte of reusable digital elements
    When I first started doing online journalism, we often built one-off projects that took a lot of time and had a mixed response from our readers. We were still learning, not only how to execute digital journalism projects, but also we were learning what type of projects people found engaging. We soon learned that ‘evergreen’ projects often were best, things that had a life-span much longer than most news events. Besides, there are very few editorial projects that merit huge one-off investments, and most news orgs can’t afford this in 2009.
    At the BBC, when I started, we had a limited palette of things that we could add quickly to primarily text-based news stories. The News website was still very young. But over time, we built on that limited palette. Our Specials team built things, and they tried to determine what worked and what didn’t. The things that worked were added to the ongoing list of elements that journalists could add to their stories.
    Modular interactive elements are easier in the Web 2.0 era. For instance, we often build maps, not just locator graphics but actual maps that draw on data (for instance one could create a map using data of the H1N1, swine flu outbreak). More news organisations are using Twitter and other third party services that call external APIs and cache the results.
    If you’ve got limited resources (and who doesn’t), you must think in a joined up way. Think of elements that will add value to your entire site not just to a certain section. Think of elements that will work in many areas of coverage.
  3. Interactivity is a state a mind and doesn’t always require technical development
    Much of this isn’t even about software development. It’s about a state of mind. Interactivity isn’t just about the web. It’s still about letters and phone calls. It can be about text messages. When I worked for World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service, Americans called or sent emails. Listeners in the UK mostly called, and Africans sent text messages by the hundreds. The first and most important step isn’t about developing a technology strategy but about developing a philosophy of collaboration with your audience.
    Everything will flow from that philosophy because there are many non-technical ways to get your audience involved. One of the most powerful things on World Have Your Say was getting people around a microphone in Africa to talk to Americans who had called in. The marriage of mass media and social media can be an extremely powerful combination.
    Add to all of this no-cost of low-cost web services, and you can do many things on a daily deadline.
  4. Strategic projects require long-term vision
    When I was writing the post for the Guardian about Google News Timeline, I found out that Google had begun creating a historical archive of news content in 2006. News is ephemeral, but as news is the first draft of history, news stories put in context can be a fascinating look at history. Google decided that archiving this content might have some value.
    There are a lot of things that take a strategic decision and not only long-term development but also a long-term commitment from a news organisation. I think that geo-tagging is one example. It’s a choice that takes a bit of development but actually more commitment from editorial teams, but the addition of a small bit of structured data generated by journalists creates a lot of opportunities, some which might have revenue.

Taking a long view is difficult as news organisations face very serious short-term challenges, but the lack of long-term thinking is one of the things that got a lot of news orgs into this mess. Developing a long-term, multi-platform strategy might have goals five years out, but that doesn’t mean developing the perfect five-year plan. It means setting some strategic goals and getting there one day at a time.

04.19.09
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What’s missing from the Google/newspapers discussion

It seems to have become fashionable recently for members of the media to rail against Google, claiming that the search giant is significantly to blame for the demise of newspapers. The arguments appear to include:

  • Google is a parasite that makes money off newspapers content through aggregating it
  • Google, by acting as a middleman, deprives newspapers of control and therefore income
  • Visitors from Google are of low value because they do not stay to explore a site and therefore are not exposed to enough ads to make their visit worthwhile to the news outlet

In my opinion, these arguments are all wrong, but rather than debate them here (other people are already doing it), I’m curious to ask why two key parts of the problem are being utterly ignored.

Google enables existing behaviours
Before newspapers started publishing on the web, newspaper readers had a limited number of choices if they wanted to read what the paper had printed: read someone else’s copy, or buy and read their own. Once someone has bought a paper, the tendency is to read substantial portions of it, or even read it cover-to-cover including the bits one doesn’t really care about.

I am sure that there are psychological forces at work here, perhaps cognitive biases such as ownership bias. After all, who hasn’t felt the desire to get the most value for money out of a newspaper or magazine purchase by reading as much as one can manage, even when one has run out of any real interest?

That behaviour, and the forces that encourage it, is absent online. Instead of feeling obliged to oneself to make the most of a newspaper purchase, people are now searching for only the information that they need or want. They become promiscuous browsers, instead of dedicated readers.

Google facilitates that behaviour, a behaviour which was present before Google existed, and which will continue after Google is gone. The news outlets, however, are fixated on the idea of a dedicated reader and I’ve heard some journalists get positively indignant at the suggestion that promiscuous browsing is not just a normal behaviour, but rapidly becoming the default. They think that dedicated reading is the one true way to absorb news, and look down upon anything else.

This prejudice is damaging the news industry badly, because if your whole revenue generating mechanism, not to mention your metrics for success, is built upon the idea of people spending lots of time on your site, reading lots of articles, then your business is built on sand. Instead of working from a set of assumptions that are no longer valid, how about the news industry learns how their readers’ lives, attitudes and behaviours have changed, and uses that as a basis for developing a more robust business model. After all, people aren’t going to go back to their old habits. Ever.

Advertising innovation can be done by companies other than Google
Whilst Google News runs no adverts, news content does make its way into the general search results where advertising does very well for Google. This, for reasons unclear to me, is seen by some in the news industry as a grave assault, to be fought and destroyed.

Yet Google, alongside Craigslist, Gumtree and their brethren, are ripe for advertising disruption. The sites that were the disrupters can themselves be sideswiped, by the very sort of clever innovation that appears to be almost entirely lacking in the news industry. Why have news outlets not put together their own versions of TextAds and AdSense, allowing advertisers to buy text ads on certain topics, categories, or keywords? Can I go to a major news website and buy a keyword directly from them? Why are news organisations, who have been in the advertising game forever, relying on third party tools to spread excess ad inventory across their extended blog network? Why give away that slice of the pie to someone else?

Where is the advertising innovation? And no, annoying pop-ups, rich-media ads and irritatingly loud audio ads do not count. They are about as innovative as a slap round the face with a wet haddock – they are old school, scattershot, relying on interruption instead of relevance, and worst of all, they infuriate the visitor so much that even if the ads had been of interest, their childishness is terminally off-putting.

It feels like the news outlets have abdicated responsibility for finding new and better ways for their advertisers to buy space, time and keywords, to manage their own accounts, make their own decisions on where they want their ads to appear and manage their own budget.

It’s time for the news outlets to reclaim advertising, to learn from Google, Craigslist and Gumtree and beat them at their own game. Railing away at Google or any other site that’s eating their lunch is, however, a waste of time and a distraction that the industry can ill afford at the moment.

04.09.09
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What content will people pay for?

Four years ago, I went to the Web+10 conference at the Poynter Institute in Florida. It was an honour to meet some of the pioneers in digital journalism, many of whom I had corresponded with online for years but never had the opportunity to meet. It was 2005, long before the depth of the crisis in newspapers was obvious to all, but everyone was asking the same question: How do we pay for professional journalism? Contrary to popular belief in the industry, newspaper websites were profitable, some quite profitable, but those profits could not sustain the size of newsroom that big-city metros in the US had at the time, newsrooms that dwarfed the size of the British national newspapers.

The crisis has been coming for years as newspapers have seen circulation declines for decades, but the Great Recession is amplifying pressures on newspapers. You read blog posts and articles from journalists and editors who say that the public should pay, must pay for ‘quality journalism’. We hear arguments that they will pay as content becomes scarce with the decline in the number of journalists and the number of newspapers. Leonard Witt, the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University in the US, says in this post:

So will people pay for high quality journalism and information? I do think so because I know one person intimately who already has. And trust me that person is very tight with his money.

Keep in mind, I am saying high quality news and information. Run of the mill junk is a worthless commodity. High quality journalism is scarce and will be more so in the future, and that’s when everyone who loves great journalism will begin to pay.

But I tend to agree with David Kohn, of spot.us, who says this in the comments:

I think this is right on Lenn – as you know, I tend to agree with you. But more and more I’m realizing that certain types of news and information that journalists think is priceless have less value than others.

David elaborates on his point back on his blog citing lessons he’s learned from various citizen journalism and crowd-sourced projects.

Increasingly I’m of the belief that the newspaper industry is relying far too much on its values in its estimates of what readers value enough to pay for. We need some solid facts and figures on what people will pay for. I might be hoping for concrete data that just doesn’t exist right now, but I think we as journalists have to move from asserting what people should pay for and do a little reporting and research to find out what people will pay for and the types of services that might be able to subsidise professional journalism.

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04.06.09
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Complexity and news: The Financial Crisis

One of my biggest criticisms of my profession, journalism, is that we don’t do complexity or nuance very well. My friend and colleague Bobbie Johnson once referred to this as ‘binary journalism’. I always found it odd that many media commentators criticised George Bush’s Manichean world view (a view that is in itself simplistic) when the media delights in over-simplified stories of good versus evil that seem have more of a place in comic strips than journalism. However, whether it’s climate change or the global financial crisis, journalism needs to deal with complexity. We need to explain it to our audience in ways that engages and adds to their understanding.

Unfortunately, I fear that journalists are leaving this job to GAB – the Global Association of Bloviators, well-paid commentators who make a helluva lot of money not explaining a complex world but rather engaging in polarised shouting matches on talk radio, cable television and comment sites. It can be greatly entertaining and distracting, but it’s the information equivalent of professional wrestling while Rome burns. We can’t have binary journalism in an analogue world where often things exist not only on a continuum but in complex, multi-dimensional inter-relationships.

But therein lies the challenge. How do you Jedi mind trick people who might prefer the theatre of cable news or the simple morality tales of tabloid newspapers into caring about something that in the end is really complex but have a real impact on their lives as the global financial crisis has? I think that engaging readers using social media and creatively telling stories is the way forward, and we’re starting to see some great examples of this.

During the financial crisis, the collaboration between US National Public Radio’s Planet Money and This American Life have produced some of the most enlightening and entertaining programs on the subject. One of the programs, The Giant Pool of Money, has rightly won a Peabody Award. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab has interviewed one of the creators, Adam Davidson, about a model for complex news.

NPR’s Adam Davidson on “The Giant Pool of Money” from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Adam says that journalists need to acknowledge their own ignorance in covering complex stories, and he talks about other lessons he learned in creating what has become a series of some of the best journalism on the financial crisis in any medium. The full transcript is on Nieman’s site if you’d prefer to scan it.

More than this, I think that Adam hits on why I prefer to blogging, in particular, and digital news in general to traditional print or broadcast media, which is that news can be a process of learning that the journalist shares with the audience. Also, as Rob Paterson points out, digital media can be much better than traditional linear media in dealing with complexity, although Adam has done a wonderful job dealing with complexity during a long-form radio program. I appreciate this in Rob’s explanation:

The POV was always going to be – EXPLAIN! The presenters of the show would be representing us. They would start from a position of NOT KNOWING and not understanding the jargon. The irony is that even the so called experts have told Adam that they too have learned from the show.

They got rid of the voice of authority and took their listeners on their own journey of discovery.

I understand all too well the illusion of the ‘VOICE’ that Rob is talking about. The deep bass voices of presenters are meant to represent authority, but the presentation cannot overcome the fundamental superficiality of sound bites, the same interview aired in heavy rotation and minute-thirty packages. Why not just dispense with the theatrics and focus on finding out what we all wanted to know? How the hell did this mess happen? What led us to here?

The global financial crisis is now being packaged into media theatre complete with two-dimensional villains and victims that do a disservice to the real story: The West has maxed out our personal and collective credit cards. Politicians and commentators on the right point to irresponsible borrowers while those on the left point to irrresponsible greedy lenders and financiers. The crisis is here, and while the media retreats into a comfortable narrative that places responsibility on some other segment of society, it will only put off a little longer the hard choices that all segments of society will have to make. This is a moment when journalism can shine, even during this time of industry and individual anxiety. The global financial crisis cries out for great intelligent story-telling. Let’s do the story justice, and hopefully in doing so, we’ll find solutions to the crisis sooner rather than simply putting off the hard choices.

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04.02.09
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Saving Newspapers: The Musical

A tip of the hat to Harvard University’s Neiman Journalism Lab (a must follow for journalists on Twitter) for this gem.

Let’s all sing along: “In the name of name of digital ubiquity, where you can get the news anytime for free, is there any room for dinosaurs like us, journalists who are already extinct.” New business models: Offer businesses good reviews on Yelp? Sell Marijuana when it’s legalised?

Well, it looks like their solution is a little behind the British tabloids in their plan to save newspapers. But I’ll leave you to watch it. I may have already ahem…revealed too much.

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