06.07.13
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Journalism and community: Creating your own little corner of the internet

Alan Mutter categorised the shift from traditional advertising to digital advertising as ‘each versus reach’, and I think that speaks to changes in content as well as advertising in the digital era. Some of the problems with current digital strategies is that they rely on mass media thinking, and no where do I think this more evident than in social media or community strategies. Most still are mass media strategies, with the goal of creating undifferentiated large audiences instead of aggregating smaller, more focused audiences. 

Create a focused conversation worth taking part in, and you’ll develop a loyal, focused audience too. It will make not only make a better community, but a focused audience is easier to sell to advertisers too. 

If you want to see a master in the art of host of an online conversation and creating a focused audience, it’s worth checking out Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at the Atlantic. He has a great interview with NPR’s On the Media, How to create an engaging comments section. The first thing to notice is that it takes a lot of work, which I think is why most media just opt for punching the biggest, baddest trolls in the pit. It’s easy, and it is like a shot of meth for page views. 

Coates on the other hand has decided that rather than a troll pit, he wants to play host to a dinner party, and as he says:

I try to keep the conversation interesting, in terms of what is the bane of all comments sections, and that is, you know, rude commentary, people going over the line, trolling, that sort of thing. I generally follow the same rules, so I always tell people, if you were in my house and you insulted one of my guests, I would ask you to leave. I don’t understand why it would be any different in a comments section.

Amen, and I think most journalists would agree with that. He moderates his comments pretty aggressively, possibly a bit more aggressively than I would. However, I long ago stopped buying the argument that moderating comments is tantamount to censorship. Freedom of expression should not be used as an excuse for freedom from civility.

However, Coates isn’t arbitrary in deleting comments. His rules? 

You can’t call people names. I mean, you can’t say, listen, you idiot. You can’t change the topic because you don’t like the discussion. It’s like, y- you’re more curating comments. So what you’re trying to do is present a conversation that’s interesting, not for everyone but for a certain small group of people.

There is a somewhat absolutist argument about freedom of expression on the internet that one should be free to say whatever one wants and act in any way one wants. However, we have norms of behaviour and conversation in real life, and I personally have always applied to them my online behaviour. I have one standard of behaviour online, in print and in real life. Do I want to impose those standards on everyone? No, but as the host of a conversation, I do retain the right to say those are the ground rules for the conversation that I’m trying to have. 

I also like how Coates interprets freedom on the web. He says:

But the beauty of the Web is that whatever my comments section is, it’s not the Internet. So if that’s not what you want, you can go somewhere else. 

This is key, and a key shift in thinking in terms of digital. You don’t have to be all things to all people. Actually, being something very important to a smaller, defined group of people offers more chance of success. The Atlantic is succeeding because it is building a team of people like Coates who have distinctive voices and are able to create their own definition of community online.

James Fallows, one of the smartest writers in Washington, is another example of a personal take on engagement at The Atlantic. He doesn’t have comments on his pieces, and he has explained why, twice in fact. In his biography on The Atlantic site, it says, “If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a “Comments” field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.” That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t engage with people. He does accept comments but via email., and he’s actually held a few AMA discussions on Reddit. 

I think this is one of the secrets of The Atlantic’s success, both editorially and commercially. It has hired smart engaging writers who want to engage. The fact that they engage in their own ways show they value engagement but have found a way that works for them. Engagement is the goal, but as Coates and Fallows show, there are a number of ways to get there. 

05.31.13
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User-generated content: Free isn’t its competitive advantage

For news organisations to survive and thrive, they have to understand their competitive advantage and the relative competitive advantage of different digital strategies. I was reminded how important this is when I read a great article by Anika Gupta, the product manager for Citizen Journalist Online, a new user-generated content portal for Indian news channel CNN-IBN. Writing on MediaNama, Gupta points out that free content is not the competitive advantage for user-generated content:

Either you pay content producers or you pay content editors, but somebody has to get paid. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Even if you don’t have a portal, it still takes time, someone’s time, whether that’s a social-media savvy reporter or editor or a dedicated team and portal. She writes about the challenges of “polishing” UGC, making sure the content is spelled correctly while also retaining the voice of the user. She works for a citizen journalism or UGC portal, and there are also issues of filtering and verification. If your UGC portal is even mildly successful, you also run into scaling issues. You receive more content than you can use much less evaluate. The ability to filter relevant content can become huge even before you have to assess whether it’s accurate. This is all to say that user-generated content, especially done right, might be less expensive than original content but it is far from free.

If free content isn’t the competitive advantage for user-generated content, what are its true competitive advantages:-

Become the go-to news organisation for UGC

Of course, as Gupta points out, tapping into UGC allows news organisations to get photos and videos from a much wider range of sources. It is impossible to anticipate breaking news events, but now, many of the first bits of footage we see come from mobile phones. However, to gain an advantage over your competitors, you need to have already established your news organisation as the outlet where people will send their photos, videos and first person accounts.

Long before the BBC created its UGC hub, the BBC News website (where I worked from 1998 until 2005), had long been engaging its audience to help it report the news. The BBC had a couple of journalists who monitored and verified photos and emails that came mostly via an email address put on the bottom of stories. However, this allowed the BBC to develop a relationship with its audience so that when big news stories broke, members of the public would send their photos, videos and first person accounts to the BBC. That became a huge competitive advantage for the BBC even in early 2000s, long before many outlets had even realised the opportunity.

“Nothing beats local content”

This is a huge competitive advantage for local news operations, and one which a lot of local news groups have yet to fully embrace. As Gupta says:

A blog post by your neighbor will always feel more authentic than a TV news story by an unknown anchor who has visited your town once.  People are drawn to what they know.

Build up a group of core contributors over time

Al Jazeera is relaunching its UGC portal, Sharek, and one of their goals with the new site is to allow them to more easily identify consistent, credible contributors over time. Developing an effective UGC strategy means building up a relationship and sourcing information about those contributors. This will make it easier to evaluate material in a breaking news situation because you will develop confidence with frequent contributors.

Make sure there are ways to reward those contributors. A couple of years ago, the local version of freesheet Metro in Finland actually listed the price they paid for high quality user photos on the photo itself. However, the reward doesn’t need to be monetary. The BBC’s interactive radio programme World Have Your Say (I was on the launch team) developed ways that active members of their community could take on informal roles in helping the show, whether that was with community management or suggesting show topics.

Increased audience loyalty

Most newspapers in developed digital markets boast a larger digital audience than a print audience. However, many of these visitors read a single story per month and can’t really be considered a core audience. Again, this type of engagement is not free. It takes a lot of time from smart social media staff who blend traditional journalism skills such as evaluating sources and verification with community management skills.

The deeper your engagement and UGC strategy, the more savvy news organisations will have to become with their business strategy to support it. This goes back to Gupta’s original point: UGC isn’t free. UGC and engagement strategies have often been poorly thought as editorial products, with the primary emphasis being on tapping low or no-cost content. The Guardian recently launched its new citizen journalism project, GuardianWitness, with a partnership deal with mobile phone operator, EE.

For local news sites, I still believe, even in the age of Facebook, that there are opportunities to develop deeper relationships with their communities through user-generated content. One of the big issues with these local strategies is that they need to represent a much broader range of the lived experience of local communities and not just focus on hard and breaking news.  The national newspapers (and national journalists) love to poke fun at what they see as boring parochial news stories, but local food, fêtes and sports are part of that lived experience. News sites that become truly woven into the fabric of the fabric of their communities will have a better chance of attracting the loyal audiences that advertisers want. Building up a loyal audience of community contributors will also help news organisations gather the kind of user data that is critical to modern, targeted advertising.

That again, will take investment. I think that local and regional newspaper groups in the US and UK are facing what could be their last opportunity to adapt their editorial and, just as crucially, their business model to the market they find themselves in. It’s not clear that many of the hollowed out groups have the money, the stomach and the smarts to make targeted strategic investments. They might think that UGC is the way to pad out the skeletal products left by years of savage cuts. They should think again.

05.30.13
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HSBC: The suckage never stops

Oh, HSBC, I can’t untangle my personal finances from you fast enough. After my last post about firing The World’s Most Incompetent Bank, I unfortunately still have a couple of credit cards with them because changing my credit cards might impact my credit rating, and Suw and I are hoping to buy a house in the next six months. Once that happens, I’m closing these cards. I have lost all confidence in HSBC’s security, and they need a root-and-branch review of their customer service and communication processes.

Coming up on two weeks ago, my HSBC UK credit card was declined on a routine purchase on Amazon, and then a couple of days later, it was again declined again when I tried to pay for my British citizenship ceremony. (Yay!) This was the first indication that there was a problem. I logged into my account, and there was no indication that anything was awry. No big warning that my card had been compromised or messages asking me to call the fraud department on the internal messaging system. Business as usual for HSBC, which means some level of inconvenience and incompetence.

I sent a message asking for clarification about the status of the card on the internal messaging system. They informed me that there was a block on the card and that I was to call the fraud department but otherwise, they couldn’t actually do anything for me.

The call was enlightening and infuriating in equal measure. On the 23 April, HSBC detected that the details of my card were “copied by a known fraudster”. This is at least the second time that this has happened with HSBC. Wah? I hadn’t used the card since the 15 April. Was it part of a massive credit card theft online? Dunno. They have special software that lets them know about such things but provides them with no other details.

After finding out that my card had been compromised and that yet another new card would be sent to me, I asked to speak to a manager. (I think I’m up to four of five compromised debit or credit cards with them in the seven years I’ve done business with them.) He said that they tried to call me on the 23 April when the software flagged up the issue. I was in the US at the time, and my phone registered no call or voice mail.

I suggested to the HSBC manager that they had an internal security problem, and the manager assured me that they abide by the Data Protection Act. Fine, but what are their internal security procedures?  I’m sceptical about the tightness of those procedures due to the high level of fraud that I’ve experienced as their customer. I told the manager that if I have serial fraud on cards with them that they might want to review their internal security protocols as well as investing in shiny anti-fraud software.

However, I also said that they needed to improve their customer communications. Put bluntly, I found out that they broke their own procedures. The manager said they should have tried to call me 10 days later, and if they couldn’t reach me, they were supposed to send me a letter. The call wasn’t made. The letter was never sent. There was no communication on the internal messaging system, which HSBC has but seems loathe to use. Instead, I found out my card had been compromised because it started to be declined. They assured me that a call was on their to do list today. Uh-huh, that’s nice to know. I have a lot on my to-do list today too.

As with so many of the issues that I’ve had with HSBC over the years, they didn’t solve my problem. I did. That’s what you can expect from HSBC, the world’s most incompetent bank. Customer service? Yes, absolutely, you the customer will have to provide your own service.

PS: This will hopefully be the last time I rant about HSBC. After heavy travel in May, we will return to our regularly scheduled media blogging immediately.

05.22.13
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Want to get paid for journalism? Don’t be afraid to ask your audience

Last autumn, I was talking to a colleague and we were discussing the economic challenges the news industry, and really just about every other content industry, faces. I finally just boiled it down to this:

Anyone can write these days, but getting paid for it is a bitch.

We live in a world where 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (as of May 2013) and between 600,000 to 1 m books were published this year in the US alone. The amount of content available creates a challenge that not only journalists but also musicians, film makers and writers face. There is just so much stuff competing for people’s attention. National Public Radio’s On the Media asked recently: Who’s gonna pay for this stuff? 

Here is how the hosts framed the discussion:

BOB GARFIELD:  As far back as we can remember, media was among the most lucrative industries on earth. The symbiosis of mass media and mass marketing was a path paved with profit for the  entertainment and information industries.

But today’s cheap and relatively simple technology have lowered the barriers of entry into that world, yielding a nearly infinite glut of stuff, brilliant and otherwise, to compete for audience and funding from every other thing out there, whether made by Warner Bros., or a Korean pop singer whose video was the first to hit a billion views on YouTube.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The “Big Bang” in content has exploded the mass of mass media into a zillion fragments, most of which lack the critical mass to survive solely on ad revenue. So, who’s gonna pay for this stuff?

It’s a great show, well worth listening to if you’re passionate about finding the new business models to support journalism and other media in this age of abundance.

It’s a great programme that unpicks some of the issues, and if journalism is your passion, it’s well worth listening to the section on crowdfunding, including a Kickstarter campaign by Roman Mars, the host of 99% Invisible, to fund his third season. I loved this bit:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Has your success using Kickstarter changed your view of your future?

ROMAN MARS: Definitely. I did Kickstarter because I needed a problem solved. I needed to, to pay myself a little bit of something and pay my contributors to do this show, because I was going broke paying them and not paying myself. It was just about that.

What I got from Kickstarter changed the way I viewed like my audience and how I can operate in this world. It gave me time. There’s a perversity of money that money follows money [LAUGHS], and so like when I raised money on Kickstarter, I got more underwriting support.

…

Exactly, that’s exactly it. You know, I realized in this process, and part of this is, you know, me enjoying the success of the Kickstarter campaign, is that I kind of like solving the problem of funding the show. I didn’t think I would ever enjoy this part.

But I kind of like it. I kind of like this idea of entrepreneurial journalism. It’s just a puzzle, like anything else. And I’m a producer, and my job is to solve problems. And this is just the most immediate problem that we have.

Listen to the entire segment. It’s worth it just to hear Mars’ enthusiasm.

I really loved this for so many reasons. He became passionate about solving the problem of funding his journalism, but in the end, he found an authentic, honest way to involve his audience not just in creating the podcast but also in supporting it. US public radio has long history of listener pledge drives so crowdfunding projects is just a natural extension of that. The crowdfunding campaign showed that there was demand for what he was doing. That’s important, and crowdfunding isn’t just about raising money but also seeing if there is demand for what you’re doing.

What really grabbed me about this was Mars’ passion about solving the problem of sustainability. It’s great to hear, and I hope that Mars’ passion is infectious. It certainly rubbed off on me.

04.17.13
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HSBC: Firing the world’s most incompetent bank

Dear reader, I’m going to beg your indulgence as I take a brief editorial detour from my normal writing about new media, journalism and innovation. I promise I won’t make a habit of it.

But, hey, blogging is about personal expression, and I need to vent about my former bank, HSBC. I promise to return to return to our regularly scheduled blogging after this.

Sorry it’s so long, but HSBC is just that crap. Skip to the bullet points, and if you’ve experienced horrible service with HSBC (or another bank), feel free to share. Retail banking customers deserve better than we’re getting, and it’s time for our governments to not just bail out banks but also to work with consumers to ensure we’re well served. Many banks are not just too big to fail but also simply too incompetent to survive.

To relevant regulators, I ask that you start doing your job and look out for retail customers too. Retail banking may not be a high margin business, but like or not, people need banking services. It’s long past time to clean up this industry.

Again, if this story or even parts of it are familiar, share this and share your stories. A little social media action might help. We need retail banking reform now.

Dear HSBC CEO Mr Stuart Gulliver:

I thought about sending this letter to relevant banking regulators, but I don’t have faith that they’d actually do anything so I thought that this public letter might be more effective.

HSBC, you’re fired. I wish I had the power to fire you, the CEO, personally and not just the divisions of your bank that I had the infuriating misfortune to bank with since 2005. I would have fired you long ago, but you know that switching costs are high. I actually thought about buying some HSBC stock and leading a shareholder revolt, but after my experience as your customer, I see you as a very bad investment. Besides, I’ve got better things to do with my time and my money.

Why am I firing you? Where to begin. If it were one branch of your global empire that was totally incompetent, I might write it off, but no, my experiences with HSBC UK, HSBC Expat and HSBC US (or what is left of it) were so uniformly bad that I came to believe that you have serious systemic service and security issues at your retail banking and credit card divisions. On that point, I’m not joking at all. I am completely serious.

I’ll try to make this brief, but it’s hard to summarise all of the crap I put up as one of your customers.

• Moving to the UK in 2005 for what I thought would be a brief work assignment, I opened up an HSBC US account. Things started off well enough, although as I would come to find out, the whole “world’s local bank” looks good on the ads at the airports but is actually nonsense.
• In 2006, I opened up an HSBC Offshore (now Expat) account because I needed an account quickly and needed multi-currency services. I had the money to open the account, and the minimum balance to avoid paying fees was better than your competitors. Then it started to go all wrong.
• You sent me my first credit card and cancelled it a few weeks later. You said that I must have used it online on an insecure site. Nope, and then when I asked how a card could have been compromised so quickly, your staff said it was “a known Milanese fraudster”.
• Several months after opening the account, you sent your customers a letter saying that “in order to serve you better” we’re jacking up the minimum balance required to avoid fees. You didn’t increase it a few thousand pounds, which would have been high. You didn’t double it. No, you increased the minimum fee-free balance 5 times to £25,000. The better service never materialised. As a matter of fact, over the next several years, your service got worse and your fees just got higher. I don’t mind paying fees, but I do expect good service in return. You didn’t hold up your end of the customer contract.
• In 2008, I was in the US on business, and my PayPal account was compromised. PayPal immediately snapped into action calling me on a Saturday. The thieves rang up purchases of $1800 in less than 24 hours. I called HSBC alerting you of the fraud and asking what I could do. The answer? Nothing unless I came into a branch. The nearest branch was a seven hour drive away. On Monday, I watched helplessly as my bank account was drained. You then you slapped an overdraft fee on me. World’s local bank my backside. Weeks later when I was near a branch, I demanded a refund of the overdraft fee. You gave me one, but I should have fired you then and there.
PayPal was excellent, and having been a customer of theirs for several years, they waived the fee for a security token to help me prevent this from happening in the future because I had been with them for years. That’s customer service and a business repaying customer loyalty. You didn’t help me solve my problems at all.
• In 2011, I was woken up in the middle of the night in Australia on business. I had an automatic payment scheme setup on my HSBC UK credit card to pay for my storage space in the US. For some reason, that stopped. Fortunately, Public Storage rang me, and I was able to process a one off payment. I still don’t know what happened.
• In 2012, HSBC’s incompetence was on full display. In January, my employer was unable to pay my wages. To be fair to HSBC, my employer’s bank, Lloyds, was pretty useless too, but HSBC really took the biscuit. You screwed up changing your sort code to the new faster payments system, and my employer couldn’t pay me. You didn’t inform your customers. Why not? You were so kind to allow my employer to pay me via free SWIFT transfers. Normally, you charged £20 a crack for that service. For emphasis, your screw up meant I didn’t get paid for a month. Most people don’t have that luxury.
• Despite the fact that I’ve travelled 310 days out of the last three years, for some reason, HSBC UK started blocking my credit card when I travelled outside the UK, even when I called or left instructions on the website. HSBC blocked my card after a flight to Dubai because the WiFi company on the flight had a US billing address, and I had only said I was travelling to Dubai and Indonesia. You’ve got those cute ads with the kids taking multiple currencies at their lemonade stand, but yet, you’re thrown by a US company providing WiFi on an Emirates flight? The reality doesn’t quite live up to your ads, does it now?
• Last summer, HSBC UK blocked my credit card while I was on a business trip to New York. I’m a US citizen. I travel there at least once a year, and I had an HSBC US account at the time. What would be suspicious about that?
• As my credit card was blocked, I then had to use my debit card, which was compromised. WalMart alerted you to the fraud, and you blocked the payment or so I was told. You might want to change the script that your foreign call centres use. They didn’t tell me that £400 would go out of my account for up to eight weeks until I called them up and asked them about it. I had totally lost my patience with you and your bank.

Saving the worst for last

By this time, I had already decided to fire you. I was tired of paying your exorbitant fees, which by this time seemed a perverse way of rewarding you for being utterly useless. Moreover, your serial incompetence and poor security were too much of a risk to my personal finances.

I did some research, and Citibank had a managed transfer service. They brought the switching costs down, and I couldn’t risk banking with you anymore. However, you still had a few opportunities to shine as the masters of suck, and you didn’t miss a single one.

It took me months to fire you. Citibank worked with me, and you did not. I had more communication from Citibank in the first month of being their customer than I did in years of being a customer of HSBC. HSBC Expat didn’t even mention that Citibank had requested information on my direct deposits and transfers. As a security issue, I would have expected that much.

When I was in the US on business, I fortunately was in one of the last remaining cities where HSBC US has a physical branch so I could close my account. I went to the branch, and you were going to charge me $12 for a cashier’s cheque. It shouldn’t be standard procedure to charge for a cashier’s cheque when closing an account. Lovely, I have to pay you to get my money so I did the very insecure thing and withdrew the cash. Fortunately, the Citibank branch was just across the street.

But wait for it, your worst is yet to come. Several years ago, my HSBC US credit card was compromised. Sigh, who runs your security operations? A known Milanese fraudster? The card was cancelled, but for some reason, it had a one cent balance. I had tried to pay it off several times, but you only allow payments of one dollar or more online. Knowing HSBC’s level of stupidity, I had the foresight to bring a penny to the branch with me when I closed my bank account. The teller struggled a bit with what to do because the credit card account was closed. Bless her. She tried to sort it out and meekly asked if I had a penny.

I tried to cancel the credit card too, but I was told that I couldn’t do that at a branch. Face palm. Was the mystery one penny balance sorted? Hardly. I now have a one cent outstanding balance on the old card and a one cent credit on my existing card. I’ll give you points for consistency, the consistency of never missing an opportunity to screw up. Seriously, this is a global financial institution?

Sir, I wouldn’t trust you or your managers to run that little girl’s lemonade stand in your ads. Let’s make a deal. You got an $11.1 m bonus last year. Flip me that penny, and we’ll call it even.

Your utterly incompetent service and your farcical security has cost me time and money. I’ve got a choice in banking, and you have come up wanting over and over and over again. You left me with no choice. You. Are. Fired.

Sincerely, your former customer,

Kevin Anderson

04.05.13
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News, advertising, subsidies and revenue streams: Disentangling products and profits

Yet again, I started to write a comment and then decided that it was a blog post rather than a comment. I was responding to a post that Jeff Israely, a former Europe correspondent for Time magazine and founder of Worldcrunch, has written for Nieman Lab. I love Worldcrunch, and when I was thinking of doing my own news startup, we had a chat or two. I completely understand the point that Jeff is making in his post, and this isn’t a criticism of what he wrote, but a conversation that we need to have amongst journalists trying to get our heads around the business of what we do. 

Journalism! We don’t need no stinking subsidies!

Ok, so that’s a tongue-in-cheek summary of Jeff Israely’s post for Nieman Lab, Don’t you call me subsidised — people are paying for news. Jeff, please take that in the good-natured way in which it is intended. 

I agree people are paying for news, and I understand how the idea of subsidy grates as a journalist. It’s offensive to think we’re taking handouts. However, in business terms, a cross-subsidy isn’t a handout but a revenue stream, often but not always, closely aligned with the core business, that generates net profits to support the entire enterprise. It happens in a lot of businesses. I can see the problem that Jeff has with the term subsidy, but I think it’s helpful to think of this in a different way. Does Gilette subsidise its shaving business  by selling the blades? No, but it’s become the way that it keeps the entire business profitable.

The journalism business debate is littered with unhelpful terms, and we’re not using the business term subsidy accurately. It bleeds out the business nuance of what’s really going on. Journalism is the business of news, but that business is supported not by a number of subsidies but rather by a number of revenue streams, some more lucrative than others. So, let’s stop using the term subsidy, or at least stop using in inaccurately. Let’s think about revenue streams, with the idea that a revenue stream may not necessarily be a profit centre. (I know that’s stating the bleeding obvious, but I often think that Econ 101 should be compulsory for journalists.) Reframing the discussion in terms of revenue streams rather than subsidies is a lot more productive. That’s why I like Jim Brady’s formulation that the business model problem for journalism isn’t going to be solved by a silver bullet but rather shrapnel, a bundle of revenue streams that support the mission. 

Jeff mentioned Google. Is it in the search engine business? Sure, that’s one of its products, but its business, it’s main source of revenue, is advertising, with 96 percent of its revenues coming from ads. Just like the news business, Google wouldn’t be able to dominate online advertising the way it does if it didn’t provide the search product. Google saw off other search engines – Hotbot, Altavista, etc – because it did a better job of delivering results, but it has excelled as a business because it has developed (well acquired really) an incredibly lucrative revenue stream tightly integrated to its core business of search. It has attracted a huge user base, one that dwarfs that of most news sites, so while CPMs have plummeted, it still is able to be profitable.

That’s why the MailOnline is pitching itself as competing not as other news sites but against internet giants. It’s in the volume business, and it wants what Google has. Smart, I say begrudgingly. We need a world where the Mail’s brand of journalism and its fellow travellers aren’t the only ones with good business models. Yes, I’m looking at you, when I say that. 

Back to news and in particular print media, we used to have a Google-sized fat revenue stream that more than paid for news and information that we journalists provided, and it happened to be advertising. The US newspaper business was especially dependent on advertising to pay the bills. Newspapers in other countries had a much larger percentage of  a lot more on news stand sales or subscriptions. In the US, the big problem for print media is the collapse of advertising for print newspapers, especially newspapers. Alan Mutter makes a lot of really terrifying graphs that put this collapse in the stark terms. From 2005 to 2012, first half newspaper ad sales dropped between 23 percent to 86 percent, depending on the type of advertising. Advertising used to be 80 percent of revenue for most US newspapers, what Ken Doctor called the 80/20 rule of newspaper revenue. Newspapers, like a lot of other post-industrial businesses, are just struggling through a transition where their primary source of revenue has been disrupted. 

To tie this up, I would say that hopefully with a wider range of revenue streams, we’ll end up with a more resilient journalism eco-system, one that isn’t so reliant on a single point  revenue failure, advertising. The over-reliance on advertising was especially problematic because it so cyclical. Newspapers have always taken a big hit during recessions because ad budgets are often the first to get slashed. 

Ok, this is a relatively dispassionate, rational look at the news business. Why does this entire discussion pose a problem for journalists?  The economic decline of the print business, with thousands of jobs lost, already has us feeling very vulnerable. The collapse of the business that supported journalism in many developed countries feels like a critique of the value of journalism. Why won’t people pay us for the valuable service we provide? It feels painful even writing that, and I don’t mean to dismiss or diminish the cultural upheaval we’re going through. It feels like an attack on the value of journalism, and we have to recognise the emotional side of this to work through it. But again, we’re letting the imprecision of our language get in the way.

I keep going back to some advice that was given to my college classmate, Theo Francis, when he was working for a news startup. A business-minded uncle said:

You know you’re creating value. But can you capture it?

For those of us who believe in the social value, and the economic value of journalism, what we need to rethink is how we capture economic value to support the work we do. We need to think of revenue streams to support the mission. I believe in journalism, and to quote Kunda Dixit at MDIF’s Media Forum last (MDIF being my day job):

To be truly independent, media needs to be financially viable. 

We’re already creating value, and now, we’ve got some heavy lifting to do in terms of figuring out how to capture value in the digital age. 

03.27.13
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Data journalism: A simple tip to get started

As a young reporter, I went to a National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in 1998. I’ll admit that I found the pivot tables in Excel of 1998 a bit daunting. A lot has changed since then, and when I do data journalism training now, one of the things that I stress is how the tools have gotten so much easier, especially in the last few years. Even pivot tables, which can be hard to wrap your head around, are really simple in Google spreadsheets and the current versions of Excel. With Google Drive (Docs), almost any journalist can be trained to produce simple graphs and charts in a day.

Aron Pilhofer, the Interactive News editor at the New York Times, has put it this way:

I teach and have taught for years basic computer-assisted reporting and I do it in this one-day class. Nobody believes me, but it’s totally true: In one day – ONE DAY – we can teach you the skills that if mastered would allow you to do 80 percent of all the computer-assisted reporting that has ever been done. This is importing a spreadsheet, doing some basic math, knowing what a sum is, what a mode, a median, what an average is. I mean, being able to take a dataset, to do some basic count. I mean, this is not rocket science, for the most part.

I did data journalism back in the 1990s when it was called computer-assisted reporting (CAR) in the US, and it was only when Simon Rogers launched The Guardian data blog after one of our internal hack days, that I got a chance to return to it. Thanks Simon.

And I was reminded of how easy it is to get your start again today with an interview by WAN-IFRA with Steve Doig, truly one of the CAR pioneers. What does he use for data journalism?

His toolbox has five items: a web browser, ability to access public records, Excel, in rare cases a heavier programme such as Microsoft Access to bring different tables together and a geo mapping tool.

Those are tools that most journalists use every day, apart from Access, and it really is that easy for you to dip your toe into data journalism. To be honest, I haven’t used Microsoft Access in years, and you can do most things just by using Excel, Google spreadsheets or Google’s Fusion Tables.

As a matter of fact, here’s one tip to get you going. If you want to find the sum, average or count of a column of numbers in Google spreadsheets, simply highlight the column of numbers and look in the lower right hand corner. You’ll see a small box. Click on it, and you’ll see a summary of the biggest number (max), smallest number (min), the average and  the number of numbers (count numbers) or of words (count). It’s that easy. You can start right now.

Gdocssummarise

It’s just a simple little feature, but over time, it can be a huge time saver. Of course, sometimes this quick little summary won’t be the end of the process but just the beginning. However, it’s the first step in interrogating data. Sometimes it will give you the answer you’re looking for, and other times, it will uncover a key question for your story, and that’s when data journalism really gets exciting.

03.23.13
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To John Paton: I’m still dedicated to journalism and I damn well didn’t quit

I woke up this morning to what could diplomatically be called a bit of digital journalism friendly fire on Twitter. In response to my post about coming to terms with my decision to take a buyout from The Guardian in 2010, John Paton, the CEO of Digital First Media and a vocal advocate for the need for digital transformation at newspapers, said this on Twitter:

Not everyone is out of energy, ideas or dedication “@kevglobal: Coming to peace with journalism http://bit.ly/XxblUQ … thanks @allysonjbird”

Needless to say, I take umbrage at the implication that I’m not dedicated to journalism and out of ideas or energy. Suw leapt to my defence, but I was angry, well shaking with rage to be honest. He went on to say:

@Suw @kevglobal’s post – I think is too self-serving. Large news organizations are struggling to make the changes he discusses.

Suw brought up the post by Mimi Johnson about the problems Steve Buttry, her husband who now works at Digital First Media and is a good friend, had experienced in journalism, to which Paton replied:

@Suw Which is why I admire @stevebuttry – he didn’t quit. He fights forward everyday, teaching our staff, trying to find solutions.

And then:

@Suw @kevglobal I disagree. I tire of the one-man-against-the-machine posts like this not just his. They are strawman arguments.

To which, I said:

@jxpaton @suw You’re projecting your own experience onto my post. Your comments are about you not me.

That hopefully provides some context for what I’m about to say. I know Paton by reputation, but I’ve never met the man. However, as he is a powerful voice for  digital change, I found this exchange depressing as well as infuriating. I didn’t appreciate having 140-character pot shots taken at me by the CEO of a major media company. I didn’t say anything about Digital First Media, nor did I say that it was impossible to achieve change at a big company. I just said that I was feeling more successful and satisfied outside of one at the moment. Paton chose to make this personal and question my commitment to journalism, which is why I feel the need to rebut some of his implications:

• To imply that I quit journalism is both factually inaccurate and insulting. I didn’t quit journalism in 2010, I voluntarily took a buyout from the financially troubled Guardian. Paton is straying dangerously close to implying that the thousands of journalists voluntarily or forcibly (or often a mix of both) taking buyouts are quitters.
• In the two years after I took the buyout I did plenty of freelance journalism, although in this market I joked that I did other things – training and consulting – to support my journalism habit. I would have loved for freelance journalism to have paid the bills, but we’re in a terrible media market and many freelance journalists must supplement their income with other work.
• To imply that I lack dedication to journalism because I’m not still working on staff at a news organisation is insulting. Whilst I was consulting, I worked with many major news organisations around the world, helping them make the digital transition and even launching new and innovative news sites. I’m proud of what I’ve done both on the staff of major news organisations and as a consultant.
• To imply that I lack ideas and energy… well, just ask the major news organisations I worked with when I was a consultant and trainer.
• I now work for an organisation that invests in independent news organisations in countries with a history of media oppression. I help these news organisations navigate the digital transition.  In my spare time (literally during spare vacation days), I do the odd bit of training and consulting with major news organisations and with journalism training organisations.

Lack dedication to journalism, my arse!

I may have just risked sounding “self-serving,” but this is just the latest time in my almost two decade career when I’ve had to list what I do just so that journalists, mostly in print, will accept me as a one their own. I am tired of justifying my journalistic credentials and commitment to journalism to traditionalists, but I didn’t really expect to have to do it with the CEO of a digital first journalism company. We’re both working towards bringing much needed digital transformation to journalism, which is why I found this attack so baffling and counter-productive.

The decision to take the buyout from the Guardian was incredibly painful and difficult. The post that Paton commented on was an attempt by me to work through some of the emotions surrounding that decision. It wasn’t a statement about the state of the industry as it was me working through those emotions as I, as with thousands of other journalists, try to navigate these difficult times. It was a tough decision for me to make at the time, but looking back it was absolutely the right decision. I wrote that post to share my experience, to connect with other journalists who have been either made redundant (laid off) or who chose voluntary redundancy (a buyout) because they saw no real future where they were or needed to make a career change. It’s a tough thing to go through and we shouldn’t shy away from talking about it, and what it means for us as individuals.

I know, only too well, how hard cultural change is in big news organisations. I know the tough fight that Paton is fighting, but I don’t see how taking pot shots at another digital journalist still fighting the fight helps anyone.

03.22.13
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Kickstarter-funded Read Matter finding subs do better than singles

Bobbie Johnson by Jeremy Keith from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Bobbie Johnson by Jeremy Keith from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Building sustainable journalism is a topic near and dear to me as it is core to the work that I do now, and Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday provided one of those rare times when you get to hear someone a real journalism entrepreneur talk about what has worked and what hasn’t with their start-up. Of course, it’s also great to see a former colleague at The Guardian, Bobbie Johnson, find success.

He and co-founder Jim Giles launched Read Matter with a campaign to raise seed capital on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. They set a goal of raising $50,000, but in less than 48 hours, their goal was firmly in the rear view mirror. In the end, they raised almost three times their goal, brining in $140,201. As Bobbie told The Next Web, crowdfunding can be a great bit of market research. It allows you to find out whether there is real demand for your project.

One of the things that I think really helped their Kickstarter campaign was a great video that clearly explained what Read Matter was in a highly engaging way. It was a great bit of marketing, and if you believe in your journalism, I believe that you have to be ready to sell it. It’s not enough to have the conviction that journalism should win in the marketplace of ideas, you do need to work to make sure that it cuts through the overwhelming torrent of things competing for people’s time and attention.

However, taking a step back before the campaign, Bobbie and Jim did business plans. Bobbie quickly flashed the Excel spreadsheets they used to try to figure out if there was an actual business with how they planned to produce one long-form science and technology piece a month. For a lot of journalists trying to do start-ups, I’d strongly suggest speaking with someone with business experience. It’s not something that we were taught in J-school, but in this new world for the brave, this is something you’ll either need to develop or get via a partner in your project.

Bobbie and Jim are learning as they go along, and one of the things that really stood out for me was lessons that surprised them. They had expected most of their sales to be single sales, but they are actually getting more of their revenue from subscriptions. I read Bobbie’s experience that single sales were too high friction. It’s much easier to set up a subscription through iTunes, Amazon or your own payment system than it is to remember to buy something every month when it comes out. I think that has a profound implication for how news groups are packaging up their long-form, high-gloss, high-cost pieces. Does this mean that instead of trying to sell Kindle Singles, that it might be better for news groups to sell subs for long-form journalism? Should they have several packages that target niches? Read Matter covers only science and technology. Would they be as successful if they tried to sell “investigative journalism” rather than a single topic? My gut says that investigative journalism as a class of content might have more value to journalists than it does intrinsically to audiences. What I mean is that audiences are usually interested in topics, not classes of content. That is why I’m sceptical about the sustainability of trying to strip out deep investigative journalism from a broader package of content.

I’m doing a lot of thinking about how to support long-form, often investigative journalism. As  another speaker at Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday – David Leigh of The Guardian – pointed out, the cross-subsidy in journalism businesses, mostly fat advertising returns, are going or gone. To me, the real question is not how to support investigative journalism on its own but how to find new sources of cross-subsidy to support it.

That aside, kudos to Bobbie and Jim. I know that their future success will take a lot of work and more learning, but it is encouraging to see people succeeding with new models to support the real heavy lifting of long-form original content.

03.20.13
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Coming to peace with journalism Part 1

This is a blog post that has been a long time coming. I simply hadn’t known where to start, and I’m the kind of blogger who doesn’t like to leave threads dangling. I need to get over that, and a journalist in the US inspired me with her courage in discussing why she left news. Allyson Bird, a woman in her late 20s in the US, said when asked why she wasn’t married and why she left news, she answered with one word: Money.

I can relate to that. I remember as an early 20-something reporter in western Kansas in 1994 that I made $2,000 less than a first year teacher, which is commonly used as the benchmark for low pay in the US. I remember going to a local TV station in a much larger city in Michigan after that job, and I was shocked to find that a junior producer made $3,000 less than I had in western Kansas.

Allyson then said that journalism didn’t seem like a “sustainable career path”, and she meant not only financially but also personally. She went on to explain:

This is the real reason why I left news: I finally came to accept that the vanity of a byline was keeping me in a job that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, yet supremely unsatisfied.

I did and continue to find journalism quite satisfying, but I know what she means about emotional exhaustion. For me, it wasn’t the hassling by editors late at night or during personal events. I’m probably a little too much of a workaholic for that to have bothered me. I still need to find a better balance between work and play.

To me, the emotionally draining thing was knowing exactly what I should be doing as a digital journalist and being almost completely powerless to do what needed to be done while I was working in a traditional newsroom. I have had a lot more success being an external agitator rather than a Barbarian Inside the Gates, which is what I called myself and was the title of a short lived internal blog when I was The Guardian.

Why did I take a buyout from The Guardian? I often get asked that question. A little over a year after Suw and I were married, I threw myself back into my job, giving myself one more chance to make a difference. I worked from the moment I got up until the moment I went to sleep. Then one day, Suw said to me, “I don’t get to see my husband anymore.” I refused to be a statistic of yet another journalist with a failed marriage.

The real reason I took the buyout though was that powerlessness and its corrosive effects. I was giving into the dark side; I was growing bitter. I knew that the lost marriages were only a side effect, not only because of too much work, but bitterness that I had seen in too many journalists. I was getting into middle life, and not only was I not going to lose my Suw, I wasn’t going to lose my soul. I didn’t want to become that bitter old man I had seen a fair number of times sitting in the newsroom alone not because there was a story to cover but because he had nothing better to do.

Fortunately, I’ve never feared course corrections. I miss being in a newsroom, but Suw reminds me that in the two years in between when I left The Guardian and when I joined the Media Development Investment Fund, I trained and worked with more than 800 journalists around the world.

But I still miss being in a newsroom. Suw has asked me what I miss. That is another blog post. I need to answer that question, but I needed to be honest and open about why I left the newsroom first.

Thanks Allyson for inspiring me with your courage. This is a good conversation to have.