02.02.11
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Comments as a premium service?

I’m often asked what are the metrics for success when it comes to blogging or community engagement on a website, and I always respond that it isn’t simply the number of comments. Chasing high comment counts can be a race to the bottom in terms of content as the most provocative content easily gets the most comments creating more of a bare-fisted brawl than a conversation. As time has gone on, more sophisticated community engagement systems and strategies have developed, although these have developed mostly outside of news organisations rather than by them.

One strategy that has started to develop is to view comments as a premium service. Everyone can read comments, but only those who pay can post comments. It’s not a new strategy. Metafilter has been asking people for $5 to comment since late 2004, and it’s actually quite successful. In terms of news sites, Civil Beat in Hawaii requires subscribers to pay to read most content and also to comment.

The BBC College of Journalism has a very interesting post by Tomáš Bella about different strategies in Slovakia and the Czech Republic to reduce the number of comments but improve other metrics such as quality and page views. Tomáš runs a start-up called Piano, a paid content system. Several of the most popular sites in Slovakia have started using Piano to charge €2.90 to comment and access “other premium services on the sites”. It is interesting to view comments as a premium service.

Something else caught my eye in the post though. To comment on the popular Czech site, Novinky.cz, they have instituted a process where you have to apply for a code using your real name and postal address before you can comment. Your real name and home town appear alongside your comment. The result?

This radical approach has worked. Readers’ comments have dropped from 50,000 to 4,000 a day. But the number of page views has risen by a third because the quality of the content has shot up.

Long ago (2005) when I was writing a blogging strategy for BBC News, I realised that the large audiences that major news sites can create for blogs or other participatory efforts might not scale. Open comments are fine on niche blogs such as here at Strange Attractor. People come here looking for specific content and wanting to take part in a specialist, professional conversation. The conversation is manageable because quite honestly, we rarely have that many comments, usually just a few if any and never more than 25. On major news sites, it’s easy to receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of comments. Depending on the content, they can become unmanageable for staff and commenters alike. Making people register or pay is one way to create a speed bump to commenting. That might not be a bad thing.

I know that participatory purists might cry foul saying that this is censorship by credit card, but I think that asking people for a little commitment before they participate might make participation better for everyone. Discuss.

01.31.11
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Lesson from MySpace: “Never Stand Still”

MySpace has gone from fast rising social network to a fast falling has been, waiting to be sold by News Corp. In terms of mindshare, it’s already joined the deadpool. Chris Thorpe flagged up this great blog post this morning:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/jaggeree/status/32066764669980672″]

The blogger, John Willshire, is also a member of a band, and he managed to cobble together a new presence for his band, Gamages Model Train Club, by pasting together a number of other services: Tumblr, Soundcloud, iTunes, Facebook, Google Analytics and Feedburner.

Most articles written about the fall of MySpace focus on the lack of focus after News Corp acquired the social network. Rupert Murdoch turned his attention to other areas of his empire, and MySpace simply failed to keep pace with Facebook.

John’s big lesson from MySpace is that digital businesses must never stand still. As he says, MySpcace was never easy to use, which left open the huge opportunity that Facebook exploited. More than that, while MySpace had been improving incrementally before News Corp acquired it, those improvements stopped after it was bought by the Beast.

Don’t launch things small and often, let’s launch things infrequently, but talk about all the changes we make at once.  So don’t talk about anything in between that spoils this, please.  Oh, and we need a major review of what we’re doing with the site, platform, tech, so don’t do anything till that’s complete….

…and so and and so forth.  By trying to sort everything all at once, as old, established companies want to, and as you’d have to do with a newspaper redesign, Myspace stopped evolving.

Lessons for news organisations

When I started in digital journalism, I worked for small organisations, and we ran on shoestring budgets. It wasn’t until I joined the BBC that I worked for a well-resourced operation, and even then the BBC News website had (and still has) a tiny budget compared to BBC TV (but then my former colleagues in radio will say the same thing, and be right).

However, with integration, bringing together the print and digital or broadcast and digital newsrooms, resourcing is improving, but those digital organisations are now being brought into larger, sometimes less nimble, organisational structures. It’s a challenge that only a few news organisations have successfully met.

01.12.11
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Prioritisation: How do news organisations decide what they must do?

Since leaving The Guardian last April and striking out on my own, I joke that I’ve become an occupational therapist. I’ve had the chance to speak to journalists, editors and media executives around the world and hear the issues and challenges facing them. Most of them are instantly familiar, but one issue that I first heard about in Norway in 2009 and heard with increasing frequency in 2010 was prioritisation. In digital, there are a myriad of things we could do, but in this era of transition and scarce resources, the real question is what we must do.

In the comments on my last post covering the opportunities for news organisation in location services and technologies, Reg Chua, the Editor-in-Chief of the South China Morning Post, had this insight:

Kevin’s point on prioritization is a critical one. We can’t do everything well; in fact, we can’t do everything, period. I’d argue that we should think about the product we want to come out with first – and then figure out what data is needed to make it work. I realize that leaves some value on the table, but I suspect we all need to specialize more if we’re to really create products that have real value.

For the news organisations that I’m working with now in developing their digital strategies, one of the things that I look at is where they have the most opportunity. I agree with Reg that there are a number of opportunities in terms of creating products using data, and I also think that data is important in determining which products to develop. News organisations need to get serious about looking at what their audiences find valuable, digging into their own metrics. Right now, we’ve got a lot of faith-based decision making in media. It’s critical that we begin to look at the data to help determine what new products we should deliver and how we can improve our existing offering.

For a good start on this kind of thinking, Jonathan Stray wrote an excellent post last year, Designing journalism to be used. He wrote:

Digital news product design has so far mostly been about emulation of previous media. Newspaper web sites and apps look like newspapers. “Multimedia” journalism has mostly been about clicking somewhere to get slideshows and videos. This is a little like the dawn of TV news, when anchors read wire copy on air. Digital media gives us an explosion of product design possibilities, but the envisioned interaction modes have so far stayed mostly the same.

This is not to say that the stories themselves don’t need to change. In fact, I think they do. But the question can’t be “how can we make better stories?” It must be “who are our users, what would we like to help them to do, and how can we build a system that helps them with that?”

Josh Benton of the Nieman Lab says that we have an opportunity to rethink the grammar of journalism during this period of transition in the business. Jonathan and Reg are definitely thinking about rethinking the grammar and rethinking the products that we create. Digital journalism is different, and the real opportunity is in thinking about how its different and how that creates new opportunities both to present journalism and support it financially.

01.11.11
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Location: News organisations must seize this opportunity

Since I started geo-tagging content during my trip across the US for the 2008 elections, I’ve been interested in the possibilities of location-based services and news. Location is one way to deliver timely, relevant content to audiences. Smart news organisations such as TBD.com in Washington DC in the US are already leveraging geo-tagging to deliver their content, and now Examiner.com has struck a deal with Foursquare in 288 cities. MocoNews.net, part of the paidContent network, is reporting that:

In essence, Examiner’s 68,000 contributors, known as “Examiners,” will provide reviews and recommendations on nearby venues, restaurants, events, businesses and landmarks that will surface within the Foursquare mobile app when users following Examiner.com check in.

This is one of the opportunities that news organisations must not miss. Location allows for better delivery and discovery of content by readers, but it can also deliver new revenue streams to support journalism.

01.05.11
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Hacking the BBC

I spent several months last year working with a team of people, including Kevin, on a retrospective of BBC Backstage, which has now been released as a free ebook. As I wrote for the introduction:

BBC Backstage was a five year initiative to radically open up the BBC, publishing information and data feeds, connecting people both inside and outside the organisation, and building a developer community. The call was to “use our stuff to make your stuff” and people did, to the tune of over 500 prototypes.

This ebook is a snapshot of some of the projects and events that Backstage was involved in, from its launch at Open Tech 2005, through the triumph of Hack Day 2007 and the shot-for-web R&DTV, to current visualisation project DataArt. We take a diversion to Bangladesh to see how a Backstage hacker helped the World Service keep reporting through the horrendous Cyclone Sidr, and look at the impact of the ‘playground’ servers, used inside the BBC.

Backstage’s mandate, throughout its history, was for change. It changed the way people think, the way the BBC interacted with external designers and developers, and the way that they worked together. So what remains, now Backstage is no more? The legacy isn’t just a few data feeds and some blog posts. Backstage brought about permanent change, for the people who worked there, for its community of external developers and for the BBC. What better legacy could one ask for?

Jemima Kiss has written a great piece on The Guardian about it:

Night has finally fallen on the visionary and quietly influential five-year project that was BBC Backstage, a collaboration of ideas, experiments and talent that informed and defined some of the corporation’s best technology work.

Now set to be replaced by a cross-industry developer network – a repository for data from many media organisations and tech companies – this special corner of the BBC devoted to developers has been wound down.

[…]

Woolard talks of Backstage in three phases: creating a space to make this kind of experimentation and open innovation possible; engaging the developer community; and a third stage that takes these findings and this attitude of openness further across the BBC and its output. He points to last year’s BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution, which explored the impact of the web, and was heavily influenced by the R&D TV project led by Rain Ashford, which also filmed wide-ranging interviews with high-profile technologists and allowed viewers to cut and shape footage for their own use.

Now, says Woolard, it is normal to talk about openness, innovation and working with external developers – and he claims the BBC is “fully technology conversant” in what it needs to do.

Backstage was born on the same day as the Open Rights Group, on 23 July 2005 at the Open Tech conference. I was rather busy bootstrapping ORG whilst Backstage was getting off the ground, but I kept my eye on it nonetheless.

Backstage and ORG had a lot in common beyond their birthday – a desire for more openness, a fervent dislike of DRM, and a strong DIY ethic. We also shared a community: many of our supporters were also Backstagers. In many ways, we were two sides of the same coin, with ORG campaigning publicly for change, especially around DRM, and Backstage working the inside line. I like to think we had a nice pincer movement going on.

Backstage had some amazing moments, most notably HackDay at Ally Pally, which I sadly missed due to being on a plane at the time. Spending time last year reading over old blog posts, it was great to be reminded of what a vibrant community Backstage built and what groundbreaking work they did, especially with events. Most importantly, they redefined expectations around open data and standards.

Congratulations to everyone who was involved in Backstage, and huge thanks to the Hacking the BBC team!

12.29.10
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iPad magazine sales continue dropping

After some initial very positive sales figures for magazines on the iPad, sales continued to drop for US titles as the end of 2010 approaches, according to a post by John Koblin in WWDMedia.

Vanity Fair sold 8,700 digital editions of its November issue, down from its average of about 10,500 for the August, September and October issues. Glamour sold 4,301 digital editions in September, but sales dropped 20 percent in October and then another 20 percent, to 2,775

iPad sales for Wired, which outsold print copies with the iPad edition in its first month, have seriously tailed off. We now have several months of declining sales for the iPad edition. The iPad as ‘print’ saviour now looks less and less likely. Would a better subscription model help? Would less print-centric thinking help? At this point, the sales figures don’t look to justify the premium ad rates some magazines are charging for the iPad.

Dorian Benkoil writing on PBS MediaShift quoted John Loughlin, executive vice president and general manager of Hearst Magazines:

As Loughlin noted, this is an experimental period, when magazines are learning what they can offer and how much they can charge. Some apps will be breakout hits. A combination of web, apps, mobile and print sales may bolster magazines and give them new life and sustained profitability.

But the excitement over apps has some difficult realities to confront until that day is reached.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again. There are no silver bullets, no single solution that will save publishing. It’s going to take strategic thinking that focuses on building compelling print and digital products and building a multi-revenue stream business or businesses to support them.

12.23.10
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Tim Berners-Lee on Wikileaks and competing democratic values

Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and inventor of the World Wide Web, drew a distinction between Wikileaks and efforts to increase government transparency through open data, which he is involved with in the UK. Alexander Howard, government 2.0 correspondent for O’Reilly Media, has a good summary of his comments on the Huffington Post.

Berners-Lee succinctly discussed just a few of the values in a democratic society that have come into conflict in the Wikileaks case.

The whistleblower idea is very important to democracy, for the overturning of repressive regimes. The idea that the press should be able to not reveal their sources, for example, is a very important principle, and the fact that people should be accountable for what they say, and that you can’t just go out there anonymously insulting people, libeling them, creating havoc, which then spreads uncontrolled [?] damage across the blogosphere without any kind of accountability. That’s an important principle too. Obviously these principles are in conflict. And we, as a society, have to work out rules which allow us to have norms on both sides of the line, which allow both principles to survive, and where they are in total conflict, have a way of resolving in each case. That’s my feeling I’ve been asked that question a few times.

I think there are several democratic values at conflict in this case, and as democratic societies, we’re going to have to discuss these issues. The Wikileaks case has brought to public attention issues that specialists in internet security, government transparency and internet governance have been discussing for years. It’s good that Wikileaks has brought these issues forward to the general public. I hope that after some of the dust settles from the particulars of Wikileaks that these thorny debates move forward.

12.20.10
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After Wikileaks, how do we empower those in government who support transparency?

Suw and I have watched with some concern as the battle over Wikileaks has played out. For a time, both supporters and critics seemed to lose perspective about what is a very complicated and nuanced story. Hyperbole and complete lack of context in the coverage were sadly all too common. As someone who has covered technology and security issues for some time, the lack of a sense of history about the story is shocking.

History is important. Many of the debates that Wikileaks has brought to the attention of the broader public have been going on for much of the past 15 years. Debates about internet governance, Internet security, resiliency and censorship didn’t start with the recent release of documents and war logs by Wikileaks. To see these difficult issues trivialised and bled of nuance in the shouting match going on between pro- and anti-Wikileaks commenters is deeply troubling because making grey things black and white tends to lead to bad public policy.

Let me add some history from my own work. I covered the story of the release of secret files by former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson. I worked with my colleague Paul Reynolds and tracked the documents allegedly containing the identities of MI6 agents as they quickly moved across the internet after their initial release.

I’ll quote my former colleague Chris Nuttall from this 1999 piece:

Former MI6 intelligence officer, Richard Tomlinson, who has threatened to publish state secrets on the World Wide Web, says the Internet spells the end for the world’s intelligence services.

His prediction came in an e-mail interview with BBC News Online. “I think the Net will eventually make intelligence agencies defunct as there will be a lot less secrets around the world that they can steal,” he said.

The British government tried to shut down the website where the names were published saying that it was putting the lives of its agents at risk. Even if they had, it was too late. Mirrors of the information were set up almost immediately, much faster in fact than in the Wikileaks case. Indeed, this case raised many of the same issues that Wikileaks has.

The issue of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks being used for political means isn’t all that new. I mean, come on, Twitter was supposedly the target of a politicaly motivated DDoS attack last year. Hacktivism isn’t new. I wrote about waves of site defacements and other attacks stemming from the Israel-Palestine conflict and after the collision of a US spy plane and Chinese fighter in 2001. Is it a danger of the 24-hours news cycle that history is wiped clean in every morning news meeting? Seriously, we will have no chance of tackling the issues our societies face if in the pursuit of the new-ness of news we immediately forget our past. Wikileaks is a pretty logical extension of events over the history of the internet and as a reaction to reflexive secrecy by governments around the world.

The history of US government transparency reformers

Without going over territory that has been well covered, it’s safe to say that Suw and I defend our right to remain conflicted about Wikileaks. (Suw says that she had wanted to write a blog post then, but shied away because of the abuse she saw meted out to anyone who expressed doubts about Wikileaks.) Fortunately, beginning a couple of weeks ago, leveler heads started to prevail and sort through some of the thorny issues and the competing values the case has raised. It is our hope that Wikileaks will lead to a mature discussion about government transparency. Clay Shirky makes a lot of very valid points when he says that competing democratic values are in butting up against each other with this case. As he says, in the short haul, Wikileaks probably operates as a needed corrective to government secrecy. However:

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to.

I followed the Personal Democracy Forum’s event looking at Wikileaks from afar, and this comment from journalist and internet activist Rebecca McKinnon points to the long haul:

We need to think strategically about how to empower those in government who support transparency.

One of things lost in the ahistorical coverage of Wikileaks has been the recognition of those who have dedicated their lives to increasing transparency and decreasing the secrecy of the US government. The standout exception to this has been National Public Radio’s excellent programme, On the Media, produced by WNYC in New York. They have covered the complexities of Wikileaks with great nuance and intelligence, interviewing people with a range of views on the subject.

For instance, they have interviewed Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a source I often called on when I was based in Washington. He has worked for years (joining FAS in 1989) to declassify information from the US government:

“In 1997, Mr. Aftergood was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency which led to the declassification and publication of the total intelligence budget ($26.6 billion in 1997) for the first time in fifty years. In 2006, he won a FOIA lawsuit against the National Reconnaissance Office for release of unclassified budget records.”

He laid out his conflicted views about Wikileaks in a blog post and in an interview with On the Media. He said:

I would also say that in the U.S., the political process is still flexible enough that it is possible to put forward an argument for a change in policy and to see that change put into practice. We’ve seen more than a billion pages of historically valuable records declassified since 1995.

He has come in for a lot of criticism for being conflicted and critical of some aspects of Wikileaks work by those who truck no criticism of the organisation.

I also commend this recent interview with Tom Devine and the Government Accountability Project, who has been working for 31 years for legislation to protect corporate and government whistleblowers in the US. He talks about a number of cases where people have put their careers on the line to uncover waste, fraud and abuse. At the end of the interview, he thanks the interviewer for being interested.

To me, this is what Rebecca means when she says we, journalists and citizens in general, should strategically work to empower those in government working for greater transparency and also those organisations in our societies working for greater transparency. These battles for reform aren’t nearly as sexy as the Wikileaks story, but they are crucial in the long haul to our democratic societies.

12.09.10
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Wikileaks crossfire: Cyber-attacks from supporters and opponents

If the internet weather is bad right now where you’re at, it’s most likely down to the amount of online attacks being carried out by supporters and opponents of Wikileaks. It’s a fascinating aspect to the story, and one that is starting to get some good coverage. I’ve collected some stories that delve into Anonymous, a loose online collective, that has launched attacks against commercial companies that have denied Wikileaks services, and also The Jester, a hacktivist who has launched denial of service attacks against Wikileaks.

11.26.10
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Journalism: Opening up the ‘insider’s game’

I met Jonathan Stray this past summer when I was speaking at Oxford, and I’ve really enjoyed keeping up with him on Twitter and on his blog. He’s smart, and if you’re thinking about journalism in new ways and thinking of how we can, as Josh Benton puts it, change the grammar of journalism, then you definitely want to add his blog to your RSS feeds.

I noticed Jonathan was having an interesting exchange with Amanda Bee, the programme director of document hosting project DocumentCloud, about the need for a service to help her get up to speed on an unfamiliar news story. I captured their conversation using a a social media storytelling service called Storify.*

In writing about information overload, one of the solutions that Matt has advocated and explored is the wiki-fication of news. Reading Matt and also based on my own experience as a journalist, I think there is another solution that involves journalists bringing their audiences along with them as they explore topics in-depth. In 2004, when I started blogging as a journalist, I turned Fox News’ tagline “We report, you decide” on its head. I said: You decide. I report. In describing this to Glyn Mottershead, who teaches journalism at Cardiff University, he called it concierge journalism. Put another way by Matt, having a good journalist around is like having a secret decoder ring to explain the news.

Editorially and socially we need deep engagement strategies like this. It’s not just about promoting our content to the audiences using Facebook an Twitter. It’s actually about engaging with them so that they will spend some of their precious time and attention following news rather than the myriad of other entertainment and information choices they have.

There are some important issues and challenges with this approach. One is an issue of scaling. When I started blogging in 2004, I had support at the BBC News website to manage the interaction and help with the production. You need that level of support to scale to that level of audience and also that level of engagement. I also think there has to be a better way to capture all of the insights and intelligence that this approach captures. A traditional style blog probably is a little too simplistic, although smart use of tags, meta-data and categories can overcome some of it.

Matt put the challenge to status quo this way:

I started to realize that “getting” the news didn’t require a decoder ring or years of work. All it took was access to the key pieces of information that newsrooms possessed in abundance. Yet news organizations never really shared that information in an accessible or engaging form. Instead, they cut it up into snippets that they buried within oodles of inscrutable news reports. Once in a while, they’d publish an explainer story, aiming to lay out the bigger picture of a topic. But such stories always got sidelined, quickly hidden in the archives of our news sites and forgotten.

As Jonathan says, this is serious problem worthy of serious discussion. It’s one that I think a lot of about, and there aren’t any easy answers. It’s complex and it really does require a lot of rethinking of not only how we present journalism but also how we practice journalism. As I’ve found, it’s much easier to change technologies and change the design of websites than it is to convince journalists that they need to change how they do journalism. Technology is easy to change. Culture is devilishly difficult to change because so many people, very powerful within organisations, have an investment in the status quo.

The difference now as opposed to any other time in my career is that there are new news organisations that don’t have a status quo. They have no legacy operation tied to another platform. They are digital.

* A few words about Storify: This is the first time I’ve used it. It’s the embedded element highlighting the conversation on Twitter. It’s a system that makes it easy to build a story out of content from the social web, whether that is tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr pictures or YouTube videos. The drag-and-drop interface is nice, and the built-in search makes it easy to find the content and conversations you want.

In terms of adding text in between the updates I wanted, I found a few tools missing that I’ve grown used to in my normal blogging. One was paste and match (or strip) formatting so that when I copy a quote from another site I’m not cluttering up the page with lots of different fonts and type styles. I’d also like blockquote. It might be available by simply adding the HTML, but with a tool like Storify, this would definitely be a good shortcut.

In terms of Storify, I’ve watched with interest as social media journalists have embraced it quickly. My quibble with it hasn’t been in the tool itself but with how it’s been used. I’ve seen some instances where it seems little more than a collection of tweets and actually seems to be doing exactly what Amanda and Jonathan are worried about, playing an insiders game. They assume knowledge of who the people tweeting are. Collection without context is poor journalism.