Category Archives: Media 2.0

07.06.11
by

Huffington Post UK: What does it add?

The head of AOL Europe, Kate Burns, says that the newly launched Huffington Post UK has no competitor. Really? Let’s ignore the over-served national newspaper market here in the UK for a minute and focus on the aggregation plus blogger network model of the Huffington Post. While Burns points out Rue89 as one of the European competitor, she conveniently overlooks the Guardian’s Comment is Free here in the UK. Both sites were inspired by Huffington’s success in the US and roughly follow the same model although adapted for their markets. Beyond that, the Telegraph has a blogger network, MyTelegraph, that allows anyone who wants some space to air their views.

It is interesting to see that HuffPo UK is going a bit up-market compared to its US model. For a US transplant in the UK like me, the US HuffPo always has felt like the bastard offspring of the Indy’s opinion page crossed with the Mail’s skin-tastic, pap-driven parade of c’lebs. Plenty of American friends have taken to complaining that it’s the skin that wins when it comes to HuffPo’s page views. It has toned down the celebrity sidebar for the UK homepage, probably in no small measure that the UK is not only over-served in quality national dailies but has a veritable smorgasbord of ethically challenged tabloids. One tab recently criticised Pippa Middleton for allowing its dwarf photographer to take an upskirt shot. (No, I’m not going to link to it even if I could find it. Yes. I’m being completely serious.)

I’m still wondering just what HuffPo adds to the UK market apart from a new outpost in its namesake’s global ambitions. AOL’s display ad sales are starting to rebound, but it’s pouring money into its local project, Patch, with growing evidence that it’s a money pit with no prospect of becoming a money maker. It’s on a high-salary hiring spree in the US as Arianna has opened a second front to Rupert Murdoch’s first against the New York Times. One thing is certain, with the BBC, The Daily Mail and The Guardian launching in the US and the HuffingtonPost launching here in the UK, cross Atlantic competition is definitely heating up. The big question is whether the ad dollars will follow or be spread thinner than ever.

07.05.11
by

Advice to a younger self

The Media Briefing is using LinkedIn very effectively, and on one of their discussions, they have the following question:

Q: If you could go back in time and talk to yourself as a fresh-faced young entrant to the media industry what advice would you give?

I thought about this for a while, and to be honest, some of this advice I’d give to myself just a few years ago, not in the distant past of my career. One criticism that I would have of myself is that I’m absolutely horrible at office politics, well I used to be horrible.  Being independent, I can observe politics without being threatened by it and without threatening those I work with. In the respect, striking out on my own has been wonderfully liberating.

With that bit of self-criticism in mind, I have to be fair to myself. Office politics is challenging enough on one’s own culture. I’ve had to learn not only British office politics but also some of the very subtle cultural cues of British society. That notwithstanding, I’d give myself this one bit of sage advice:

…take time to figure out the invisible org chart when you start a new job. Those invisible walls you run into are just border crossings between one fiefdom and another.

Like most journalists, I know how to work in a newsroom. I know what’s expected of me and how to tick the necessary boxes. When you become an editor, you enter an entirely other world, especially in an industry in crisis.

07.01.11
by

Google Plus as Google’s glue

Suw and I have been using Google Plus for the last day. The company’s latest effort to try to get social definitely learns a lot from it’s previous failed attempts to inject some social into its ever growing collection of services. More than learning from past failures such as Buzz and Wave, Google does something that it had to do, it started to knit together that sprawling collection.

Google was running the risk of pulling a Yahoo. With the rise of web 2.0, Yahoo not only developed its own services but also went on a shopping spree, buying up Flickr, Delicious and other services. One of Yahoo’s issues is that it has never been able to tie those services, as excellent as they are on their own, into any kind of meaningful coherent network or business plan. On one hand, it’s probably down to leftover 1990s portal thinking for Yahoo, and on the other hand, Yahoo spent a lot of time over the last decade pursuing Terry Semel’s dreams of becoming a major content player. (A strategy that AOL’s Tim Armstrong seems intent on giving another go, possibly with similar results.)

For a while, Google seemed to struggle with its quest for another growth driver apart from search advertising and Android. They seemed to launch and acquire service after service without much overarching strategy. The services seemed isolated and often poorly integrated. That has started to change with some very subtle navigation changes, but Google Plus really starts to knit them all together, including Gmail, GTalk or Picassa. It’s a good start, although I’m a little baffled why Google Reader is not integrated into Plus. I’d guess that is because Google Readers is a minority sport, but it seems like a logical addition, even if they had only added a tool that easily allows you to share from inside of Reader as you can already with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and a range of other blogging platforms, bookmarking services and social networks.

They also seem to have learned some lessons about privacy from the Buzz debacle and also Facebook’s issues. Privacy controls are woven throughout Google Plus, and I think that’s a welcome addition to social tools. While folks who live in public like Jeff Jarvis believe that “social is for sharing, not hiding“, most people want to be able to exercise some choices with their online privacy.

As a journalist, I’m going to be keeping an eye on Sparks, which is a social content discovery system built into Plus. It’s not quite there, and it feels much more of a search product than the solid type of social recommendation service that I’ve come to love with services and apps such as Zite on the iPad. Sparks are supposed to be driven by Google’s +1 service, and maybe it’s an indication of a lack of uptake on that. At the moment, the recommendation is weak. Jeff Sonderman at Poynter has some excellent suggestions on how Google could improve Sparks. It’s well worth reading.

Google has dealt itself back into social and managed to start to integrate its offerings into a cohesive whole. Even if the social aspects weren’t all that compelling, bringing some order to what had seemed a bit of a haphazard collection of web services is crucial for Google’s ongoing success.

Some services I explore because I feel I have to. Others I start using because they offer me something. Google Plus definitely piqued my interest enough to take a proper tour and explore more in the past day. I like the ability to group people as I see them in my life and share things with the appropriate group.  I’m sure my Mom won’t use Google Plus, but I’m not sure I agree with Scoble that this is early adopter only service. If you’re a Google or Android user, Google Plus makes a lot of sense. I’ve watched a lot of my friends in media and tech flood into Google Plus. It already feels quite a friendly, busy place. For Facebook diehards, those people for which Facebook is the internet, I doubt that Google Plus will have much pull. Google also is facing increasing anti-trust (anti-competition in the EU) scrutiny, and integrating its services will seem to its detractors as another attempt to seize new territory. Despite that, Google has shown that it can learn from its mistakes. It showed that it can do social, including some innovation in what is a very crowded space. It will be interested if the early adopters who flooded into Plus over the last 36 hours will stay around and what happens when the doors are opened to the wider public.

06.21.11
by

Africa Gathering London: Putting the social in media

On Monday, I spoke at Africa Gathering London which looked at how new media was revolutionising Africa. I usually do a presentation, but I only spoke for 10 minutes and thought the presentation might get in the way of the points I was trying to make. Here’s the talk, obviously not as delivered and a bit expanded. I still haven’t mastered the art of live blogging myself.

Journalism: More networked, more distributed

Journalism is becoming more networked, not only in how it’s distributed but also in how it’s created.

Since I left The Guardian about a year ago, I’ve done quite a bit of work with Al Jazeera, training more than 250 journalists across Al Jazeera English, Arabic and Turk on how to social, digital and mobile journalism. I started with Al Jazeera English last November and early December, and I’m told that they’ve put the training to good use. (That was a bit of a joke.) Riyaad Minty, the head of social media at Al Jazeera, has a great formula that sums up how Al Jazeera approaches the new realities of networked journalism:

(information – noise) + content = accurate reporting

Throughout the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera has used social media both to distribute its journalism but also as a source for their journalism. As we’ve seen in Syria and Libya, the story of the Arab Spring would be almost impossible to tell without the help of social media. Al Jazeera has developed a sophisticated way to engage with and evaluate social media.

  1. They have built a network of contacts through social media. When they realised that Libya might be the next story in the Arab Spring, the social media team worked to build up a network of contacts there. When their reporters were kicked out of the country, they still had eyes and ears on the ground. In Syria, they have used a closed Facebook group to vet and keep in contact with sources.
  2. They also have a UGC platform of their own Sharek. It allows them to build up a history and profile of the people who send in submissions. They also take in submissions via mobile phone that allow them to get contact information so that they can easily follow up with the people submitting the images or video.
  3. They not only take in content from social media, but they also use social tools to report and distribute their journalism: AudioBoo, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. AudioBoo is a tool that allows you to easily record audio on your iPhone or Android smartphone and upload it directly to the internet.
  4. Al Jazeera also licences some of its content via Creative Commons. Creative Commons is an alternative to traditional copyright. Traditional copyright which says that for people to use your music, images or text only by paying to licence it, Creative Commons gives content creators flexibility in how they want their content used. For instance, you can licence your content using an attribution licence that means that people are free to reuse and remix your content as long as they give you credit. Al Jazeera has its own Creative Commons repository to distribute the content that they licence. It’s been a great way for Al Jazeera content to get a wider viewing, for instance their coverage of the Israeli attacks in Gaza in 2009.

The process is about seeking, finding and amplifying the right voices. Just as with traditional sources, not all social media sources are created equal, and as Riyaad says, if we amplify every voice, it just becomes noise.

Journalism is increasingly becoming networked, distributed and participatory. We need your help to help us filter out the noise. This spring during the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, someone came up to an Al Jazeera correspondent in the field and gave them a video that claimed to show atrocities being carried out. Unfortunately, the video was actually of ‘witch burnings’ in Kenya in 2009.

 

Communication by any means necessary

This morning, someone mentioned that we need to use social media to motivate people, but I think we need to consider what is motivating people to use social media.

One thing I want to stress is that social media is not about technology. It’s about something much older. It is about the fundamental human need to communicate. Often when you hear journalists parody what they see as banal chatter on social media, they mistake communication for publication. Most people aren’t posting on social media to become famous writers, but they are writing for the 15 people they are famous for. Sometimes, they are caught up in a news event, but I often refer to this as random acts of journalism. It’s the modern form of amateur video that we started seeing in the 1980s with the rise of the video camera. Now, with mobile phones, there are cameras and video cameras almost everywhere. The possibility of catching a chance event are higher than ever before.

More than this, what I’m constantly amazed by in the my coverage is the great lengths that people will go to and the creativity that they demonstrate in communicating despite enormous risk and persistent barriers from authorities.

Who has heard of the strange create the Grass Mud Horse? Grass Mud Horse refers to coded slang that internet users there write to poke fun at the official system of censorship as The Great Firewall. The Grass Mud Horse is close to the characters that when translated say something very rude about your mother. Internet users also use a strange date, May 35, which refers to 4 June, the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on student protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

When I was working with Al Jazeera in March and late April, they told me how some of the videos were getting out of Syria. They weren’t be posted on the internet. Syrians were burning the videos onto CDs, walking to the border and throwing the CDs into Jordan.

People want to communicate. I was part of the launch team for World Have Your Say, the sister programme of Africa Have Your Say, and we had passionate listeners around the world. One of them was Abdelilah Boukili, who worked in the Ministry of Education in Morocco. He started a blog just to capture all of the comments that he made on World Have Your Say.

 

Old school rules: socialising the media you have

There has been a lot of talk today about social media as if it is only Twitter and Facebook, and often the response has been that this is representative of only a small sections of voices in Africa and old, but valid, concerns about creating a digital divide. I also think that when we talk about social media, we need to think about how we can create social experience using whatever media is available to people.

One of my favourite quotes about media is from Arthur Miller that I believe he said in an interview with The Observer:
‘A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

 

It’s about building a social experience, not about getting jiggy with the technology. The world’s largest circulation English language newspaper isn’t in the US, UK or Australia. It’s in India, Newspapers in Asia, Africa and Latin America are seeing double digit growth. There are huge opportunities in socialising ‘old media’.

As I said, I worked on World Have Your Say. People around the world joined the discussion in the easiest and most affordable ways available to them. We felt a thrill when a ship’s captain in the Mulucca Straits called us via satellite phone to take part in the discussion. What we found over time is that people in the US, where I’m from, often emailed us. It was easy and inexpensive for them. People in the UK would ring us because the call wasn’t expensive, and they were in our time zone. If we ever did a show that touched on a subject in Africa, we would be inundated with text messages.

Often, we would use quite traditional technology to get voices in the conversation. We would send producers out with broadcasting kit into Kenya, for instance, to hear from people there.

Last year I was working in Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, doing digital media training with journalists and NGOs. When I was there, the Government was holding a celebration  to promote ties to the EU with the idea of possibly joining the union. In the square in Chinsinau, a public broadcaster had a huge public message board. It wasn’t a digital messaging board, it was a place where people could write their messages with pens and markers.

Public TV comment board in Chisinau

The message board in Chisinau Moldova.

Let’s look to Poland. Gazeta Wyborcza is a national daily newspaper in Poland. Fifty percent of Polish internet users are younger than 25, so that affects the type of information that they will look for. Older readers are not so fast in adopting he internet, an editor there told us. They worked to engage their readers whether they were online or reading in print. They asked people about healthcare in Poland. You could have your say on the website, but you could also answer questions and give your views via a form printed in the newspaper.

After joining the EU, Poland €70 billion to spend. The question was how should this money be spent. Asked the question in the newspaper across 21 regions, and used the local newspapers and journalists to write a front page commentary “Seven sins of my city”. They asked people to list the worst things about their cities. It was quite a shocking experience, because most local editors believe they have to write nicely about their city.

They organised local debates but promoted them nationally. The result was amazing – 70,000 letters, emails and calls on this topic. They asked readers for feedback, and they got it! Local TV and radio stations organised news shows about it, despite not being related to Gazeta.

People want to communicate. They want their voices heard. It’s often said that FM radio is to Africa what satellite television is to the Middle East. When we think about social media, there is a lot of ways that we can engage people socially regardless of the technology.

06.16.11
by

The Guardian needs an intervention

The Guardian and its Sunday title, The Observer have just announced a “digital-first” strategy. However, this is not a triumphant announcement. This is a burning platform admission.

Guardian News & Media, the parent company for both newspapers, lost £33m on a cash basis for the year ending 31 March, only slightly less than it’s £34.4m loss for the previous year. Guardian Media Group chief executive Andrew Miller warned that the group could run out of money in 3-5 years if things don’t change. I heard sobering burn rate figures when I was at The Guardian. I covered the dot.com boom and heard start-ups talk cash on hand, but I never expected to hear this from a major media company.

Some things leapt out at me: They reported £47m in digital revenues out of a total of £198m revenues. Digital made just shy of 24% of total revenue. That’s good going, and most newspapers would kill for that percentage of digital revenues. (Apart from the FT, which is making a killing from digital: 30% or revenue from digital now and projected to reach 50% of revenue by 2013.)

This came out from the presentation to Guardian staff:

Unaudited results for the year ending 31 March showed that revenues at Guardian News & Media, the immediate parent of the newspapers and guardian.co.uk, fell to £198m last year compared with £221m the year before, a fall in revenues that reflected a sharp fall in classified advertising. Recruitment advertising has fallen by £41m in the past four years.

The Guardian is seen as one of the most innovative newspapers in the world. It was why I enthusiastically joined them in 2006. They announced they were going web-first in June 2006, but that didn’t and doesn’t change the fact that the newspaper is burning through cash. To future of journalism folks, The Guardian is indicative of challenges facing the industry, but so far it’s not showing the way forward in solving those challenges.

Feel free to give The Guardian credit for being innovative, but everyone in the journalism community has to be more honest and realistic about its business challenges. It’s in the same sinking boat as a lot of other newspapers.

Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger is saying that not only will they publish first to the web but that they will do less in print. The Guardian’s article says there will be no job cuts, though they have to find £25m in savings. Yet Mathew Ingram at GigaOm quotes Alan as saying there will be editorial job cuts.

Mathew also quotes Alan as saying that they have identified at least ten different revenue streams. That’s comforting. But it speaks volumes that The Guardian’s own article doesn’t mention new revenue, and Alan only mentioned existing digital revenue streams to Mathew.

The Guardian needs an intervention. Digital first will not be enough to save it. It needs to remember that although they are supported by a trust, that is not a licence to completely ignore business realities. Here is my bit of tough love:

1. Building a sustainable business is not evil

The Guardian needs to realise that making money to support journalism is no sin. There is a lot of moral space between being a sustainable journalism enterprise and being a voracious media mogul like Rupert Murdoch. I’d love to see The Guardian demonstrate how to create a financially sustainable journalism business, but it will have to challenge its own anti-commercial culture.

2. Editorial innovation alone is not enough

The Guardian is innovative, but it also shows that technical and editorial innovation are not enough on their own to guarantee a sustainable journalism business. Digital first without a business focus will still leave it in dire straits. If The Guardian is going to devote 80% of its resources to digital, as is implied by Dan Sabagh’s article, it has got to develop new revenue streams to support its digital first strategy.

3. ‘Open’ without a business model is an empty ideology

I love the open web. I think The Times hard paywall is foolish. However, the ideology of open from The Guardian lacks pragmatism. The Rupert v Rusbridger battle makes a good media ding-bong, but neither positions are proving able to solve the problems that face newspapers. (Yes, I’ve seen Guardian digital strategist Matt McAlister’s presentation on generative media networks. Hopefully, some of that strategy will be part of these 10 revenue streams. At the moment, I remain unconvinced.)

4. You’ve got a golden brand. Capitalise on it.

At the risk of sounding critical, I joke with people that The Guardian has the brand of Apple but the business focus of Twitter. Guardian readers are some of the most loyal in the world. When The Guardian recently cut short its well regarded local project, readers offered money to help it continue. Most newspapers would love to have that affection and loyalty. If The Guardian can’t capitalise on its loyal audience, incompetence will be the only explanation.

A friend of mine, who had taken a buyout from a US newspaper, said to me after visiting The Guardian a few years ago:

The Guardian seems like a great place to work when the times are good, but it doesn’t seem capable of making the tough decisions when the times are tough.

The Guardian has time to make some relatively easy decisions to ensure its future, but it needs to get serious, not just about digital but about its business. The Guardian’s often lauded as the future of journalism, but without a sound business model, it doesn’t have a future.

06.08.11
by

Ken Doctor digs into the economics of HTML5

Ken Doctor who writes the excellent Newsonomics blog says of the FT’s HTML5 web app:

We first heard of HTML5 as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash as Apple excluded Flash from its products. HTML 5, though, has proven to be a strong foundation for next-generation digital product development (“The Newsonomics of Apps and HTML5?). HTML5 is also the basis for web apps, and it is web apps — those browser-based apps the FT is trumpeting today — that are now providing tech and business competition to native apps.

via FT Declares Independence (from Apple) Day | Newsonomics.

Ken continues on to dig into the FT’s digital business and why they might be in a unique position with respect to other publishes due to their decade-long strategic development of their digital business.

When people and clients ask to me about good models for digital news operations, I first point out that having good digital content offerings isn’t enough. You can have amazing, world-beating editorial, but if it isn’t supported by a sustainable digital business, that’s not a model to emulate.

05.23.11
by

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
by

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.)

04.13.11
by

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
by

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’.