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Kevin: Josh Benton at Nieman Lab has said that the current crisis in journalism is actually an opportunity to rethink its grammar, and Megan Garber has an excellent post on a good first step: Rethink the news cycle.
“Because we choose, essentially, topic over time as journalism’s core ordering principle, we don’t generally think about time as an order unto itself. Newness, and nowness, become our default settings, and our default objectives. The ‘tyranny of recency,’ Thompson calls it.”
Or, put another way in this post, the tyranny of the news peg. This is a very thoughtful post pointing at possibilities in how to rethink journalism.
Learning from a failed journalism project
I want to applaud Jen Lee Reeves who wrote about the mistakes that she made for a journalism project that she worked on for the 2008 elections in the US at PBS’ MediaShift blog. It’s a brave thing to do, but her courage flags up a number of mistakes that are common to journalism projects, including a few that I have made myself.
She is an “associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, I am also a new media director at the university-owned NBC-affiliate, KOMU-TV”, and for the elections, she had an ambitious idea to bring together the coverage of several different outlets “to make it easier for news consumers to learn about their candidates leading up to election day”. She would complete the project during a fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
In 2006 for the mid-term elections in the US, she had done something similar, but the site had been hand-coded. (I’m assuming what she means is that there was no content management system.) She realised that this would be too cumbersome, but in 2008, she opted for a “hand-built” site created by students with her oversight. Technically, she was moving in the right direction. The site took in RSS feeds from the participating news organisations, and web managers simply had to tag the content so that it appeared in relation to the right candidate and election. However, while, the site was easier to user for the news organisations, it still wasn’t clear enough to use for the audience. She said:
Unfortunately, our site was not simple. It was not clean and it was hand built by students with my oversight. It did not have a welcoming user experience. It did not encourage participation. I had a vision, but I lacked the technical ability to create a user-friendly site. I figured the content would rule and people would come to it. Not a great assumption.
Back in 2008, I still had old-school thoughts in my head. I thought media could lead the masses by informing voters who were hungry for details about candidates. I thought a project’s content was more important than user experience. I thought I knew what I was talking about.
She goes on and lists assumptions that she had about the audience, assumptions which proved false and which she believes doomed the project for failure. Go to her post and read them. She is grateful that she had the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes during her fellowship, an opportunity that she says she wouldn’t have had while being in charge of a newsroom.
If we’re paralysed by fear of failure, we’ll never do anything new. It’s not failure that we should fear but rather the inability to learn from our mistakes. For big projects like this, it’s really important to have a proper debrief. Free services on the web can bring down the cost of experimentation, and by testing what works and what doesn’t, we can not only learn from our mistakes but also make sure that we take best practices to our next project.
links for 2010-08-02
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Kevin: Hotline is a high-priced ($15,000) subscription only political news aggregator in Washington that made its name in the mid-1990s when it was delivered by fax machine. Now competition online is driving a rethink of its business model.
links for 2010-07-31
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Kevin: Google has opened up its Places API (which differs from its Latitude API). Some of the first developers to get access to these services will be developers creating check-in services ala Foursquare and Gowalla. As TechCrunch points out, this doesn't mean that Foursquare and Gowalla will have new competition (they are beating up on each other quite well). However, the pure check-in space is going to get quite a bit noisier. This also supports my view that location is much more of a platform than a specific service. Foursquare really is built around using game play to get people to check in, and using that information to provide access to businesses wishing to market to those people. However, location has many other applications and business models, and as Forrester recently found, Foursquare is still a relatively minority sport. (4% in the US)
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Kevin: My friend and former colleague Roy Greenslade says in the wake of the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs story: "Confidential sources have therefore come to be seen as the lifeblood of modern journalism, as I have said so often down the years to my journalism students. But I now concede that I have overstated the point and downplayed the important, and often crucial, business of discovering, reading and analyzing raw data." Roy is really beating the drum for journalists analysing raw data. Computer-assisted reporting has been an important boutique skill in the US, and it is now good to see the recognition of its importance in the UK.
links for 2010-07-30
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Kevin: Some really smart analysis and links to more really smart analysis about the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs release by CW Anderson: "To understand the world of Wikileaks, and what it means for journalism, you have to understand the world of geeks, of hackers, and of techno-dissidents. Understanding reporting and reporters isn’t enough." I couldn't agree more, and it shows why understanding this world is important to a broader range of stories. This culture is becoming much more widespread and mainstream, and it has a different ethos to traditional culture. Furthermore, Anderson says: "We’re seeing here the full-throated emergence of what a lot of smart people have been talking about for years now: data-driven journalism, but data in the service of somehow getting to the “big picture” about what’s really going on in the world." Good piece of analysis.
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Kevin: Releases of sensitive material such as the Afghan War Logs could become much easier and more distributed if Wikileaks carries through on its plan to create a widget that would allow people to upload a disclosure to news and other sites. As Dan Nystedt at Computer World says: "The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy."
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Kevin: Major UK local newspaper publisher Northcliffe fails to see a return to growth in 2010 and says that "it lacks visibility" (has no idea) when the division will fully recover. I wonder if this is just due to softness in the British economy outside of London and the southeast or whether this is down to a continuing decline in the sector.
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Kevin: A good question and answer piece with Jonathan Zittrain, (a friend and) a law and computer science professor at Harvard and one of the founders of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, about the Wikieaks Afghan War Logs release. My key take-away: "I see WikiLeaks as just a new intermediary, not something that gets rid of intermediaries. So the function it’s serving if any is not something alone that should strike fear into traditional newspaper editors.
The people at WikiLeaks have learned that if they want to get a message out, they should hand it to the mainstream media under embargo."
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Kevin: Richard McManus considers the decline of startpages such as NetVibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle. "Startpages have undoubtedly faded in recent years, despite my positive outlook for them 4 years ago (although I also correctly predicted that the enterprise market would provide revenue opportunities). The main reason for the decline of startpages in the consumer market is Facebook."
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Kevin: A look at various curation platforms that newspapers are using including OneSpot, Daylife, Publish2 and Loud3r. It's an interesting look at how technology is being used by newspapers to sift through large amounts of content.
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Kevin: Lawrence Meyer at the Nieman Watchdog blog says that the internet has put a premium on speed. Some of it is fair comment, but I'd argue that the 24-hour news cycle brought about by cable television started this trend long before the internet was a force in journalism. It's a thought provoking piece though. I just might quibble with the causality.
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Kevin: The post looks at five tools that allow you to send audio via Twitter. They focus mostly on desktop applications but also include AudioBoo, which has a mobile application (on Apple and Android) as well.
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Kevin: Romenesko highlights a quote from Adrian Holovaty from a recent Time story on hyperlocal news organisations in the US. "As much as I love a compelling story, I think good journalism can also be about organizing information in intelligent ways and giving people tools that let them help each other," Adrian said.
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Kevin: Good ideas from Janet Titterton on how publications can deliver value added services to their readers. Publishers already have a lot of data on their readers, and they need to use this data to provide services not just to their core print readers but also to their larger online readership. She not only talks about it in the abstract but provides good examples.
KPMG: UK readers far less willing to pay for digital content
Normally, I’d just add this link to Delicious, but the data is worth highlighting. KPMG has found that 81% of UK “would go elsewhere for content if a previously free site we use frequently began charging”. Only 19% would be willing to pay in the UK, while globally (the same research looked at consumer behaviour in a range of countries) 43% of consumers are willing to pay for digital content.
However, there are possibilities for publishers to pay for content that “almost three quarters of UK consumers are willing to receive online ads in exchange lower content costs”. They are also more willing to have data collected if it would result in lower content costs. “48 percent of UK consumers would be willing to accept profile tracking, up from 35 percent in the 2008 survey.” Publishers and marketers need to take care though as 90% of consumers also expressed concern about their privacy and security online. That is high, although a slight reduction in the figures from 18 months ago.
A key finding from the report shows how consumers would like to balance privacy and targeted advertising. Tudor Aw, Head of Technology, KPMG Europe LLP, said:
(UK consumers) do see the value in allowing service providers to have access to the information necessary for more tailored services, but they are only prepared to do this if the risks are controlled and, crucially, if there is some value in it for them.
The research is well worth a look, especially for those whose revenue strategies are tied to advertising, but also for any business looking to deliver better targeted services to their customers through better use of data.
links for 2010-07-29
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Kevin: Adam Tinworth pushes back at the idea that you can't buy subscriptions for content on the iPad, contrary to a piece in the Wall Street Journal's All Things D saying that Time Inc was struggling because it could not come to an agreement with Apple on how to handle subs. Adam says that there are routes for selling subs, but he also says that Apple could be clearer on what those routes are.
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Kevin: A good, critical but not overly negative look at Demand Media, Associated Content and Suite101 by Emma Heald. She concludes: "The majority of content farms' content is not news-related, and those searching for news topics are unlikely to come across it. Everybody in the media industry is aware of the differences between hard news stories and the content farms' how-to pieces, making it doubtful that the latter will devalue the former. A critical eye on such developments is justified and indeed necessary, but how much of the concern is actually rational?" It's a good look at these companie and what they do and don't do. It's one of the more balanced pieces on these companies, often called "content farms", that I've seen.
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Kevin: Chris Brogan has a though provoking short post on loading up on RSS feeds. "But for most of us, staying current on several dozen (or several hundred) news feeds isn’t our job. It’s a way to feel current, but it doesn’t always positively impact our decisions and plans." The bottom line: Does consuming all that information help you make better decisions and be more successful in your business?
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Kevin: A good look not only at a leaderboard of social games in China but also the businesses that are creating them and their market goals for the near term. Chinese social games developers are finding monetisiation difficult and are looking to enter the Japanese market where average revenue per user is 12 times higher. They are also looking to Korea and Russia as possible markets. However, they will face competition from other companies such as Zynga and Playfish as they try to expand outside of their home market.
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Kevin: Matthew Buckland looks at Google's Newspass content payment system and compares it to the system that Rupert Murdoch has instituted at The Times. He compares Newspass to a cable television subscription in which a consumer makes a one off, predictable payment to receive a package of content each month. Of course, this makes much more sense than a lot of payments to different providers or micro-payments for individual pieces of content. The big question as Matthew highlights it is whether a significant number of publishers will choose to join Newspass or create their own payment system (could they considering anti-competition laws). Knowing publishers, I would expect them to lobby for a relaxation of anti-competition laws in their own countries to make such a system possible rather than partner with Google, which they have as Matthew rightly points out, a love-hate relationship with.
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Kevin: Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb asks off of the back of a Forrester research report that location based social networks such as Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla are dominated by a small group of young men. Only about 4% of US online adults have ever used these services, and only 1% of people use these services more than once a week. The market is fragmented. However, there are still opportunities there, Sarah argues even if Forrester concluded that "the potential doesn't match the hype yet".
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Kevin: Forrester researcher Melissa Parrish looks at location-based social networks such as FourSquare and Brightkite (an early network that as of July 2010 still has more users than FourSquare). The market is quite nascent but can connect marketers with "right-time, right-place marketing by connecting people and nearby points of sale with geotargeted media", she writes. The early adopters are very skewed to males in the 18-25 demographic, and it is a highly competitive emerging market with no established player.
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Kevin: Adina Levin has an excellent post looking at the narrow appeal of FourSquare and other location-based services based on games. A Forrester research study found that 80% of its users are male and 70% are aged 19-35. (I also wonder if it skews heavily male because of issues of privacy and personal safety. As a male, I'm not fussed about revealing my location. However, I know many female friends who have questioned revealing this, especially if a former partner is involved.) Adina says: "When adding game dynamics to software, it’s important to consider the varying motivations of potential users." She says that location will probably evolve to take into account a wide variety of motivations. For companies looking to explore location, they should take into account these motivations and see if they map well for their customer base, she says.
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Kevin: An excellent article at MIT's Technology Review by Erica Naone looks at new location based services and networks. Hameed Khan, the CEO and lead developer of face2face, says, "Location is more a platform than it is a particular service." As the author of the article says: "In other words, simply sharing location information isn't enough–it also needs to be incorporated into a useful application." This is key. Many of the current generation of location games add competition and appeal to narrow demographic as shown by recent Forrester Research. This article looks at an excellent range of new services that have broader appeal and deliver more value to users.
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Kevin: A deep look at non-profit journalism start-up Texas Tribune. Like other non-profit news groups, they have a number of different sources of revenue, from foundation and large donor support to events. They have also had a lot of success with publishing data. One thing the article talks about in great length is the risk taking culture at the Tribune. Multimedia editor Elise Hu said: “Instead of being in a place where I feel like I don’t have a lot of control over the hierarchies and bureaucracies that are in place,” she says, “here we can say, ‘Let’s try this. Let’s just go ahead and do it, and if it doesn’t work, let’s fix it.’?”
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Kevin: Michele McLellan writing at the Knight Digital Media Center corrects a Time piece she was quoted in and calls out "replaceniks" who try to judge the value of new local media start-ups as replacements for local newspapers. She criticises studies that try to compare the new class of outlets to existing outlets. "I think such studies fail to assess other sources of news and information, and I think these all complement, rather than rival, traditional news media. Also, a traditional newsroom of any size is going to produce consistently better journalism than a lone blogger but I think overlooks the idea that it only takes one determined digger to uncover an important story that a larger outlet might miss." And she says that she never told time that 1 in 10 hyperlocal outlets were producing "good" content.
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Kevin: A look at updates to the BBC's CPS content management system. I used to use it when I was the Washington correspondent for BBC News Online. It has definitely progressed in the three and a half years since I left the BBC. The interface is much cleaner. They have now moved away from table-based layout to CSS in part because it will help them add more meta-data to the layout.
Will publishers rally to Google’s Newspass?
Matthew Buckland has a great guest post on Silicon Valley Watcher looking at Google’s Newspass payment system for publishers. (It’s cross-posted from memeburn.com) Buckland compares the value proposition for users with Google’s system and the system that Rupert Murdoch has instituted at The Times. He likens Newspass to a cable television subscription in which a consumer makes a one off, predictable payment to receive a package of content each month. He says:
Take the analogy of satellite TV. You pay once and you get a bouquet of hundreds of channels. The transaction is simple and easy. You know you’re getting good value for money too because there is an economy-of-scale effect at work. Now imagine another scenario: What if you have to pay individually for each TV channel and go through the effort, time and extra cost to do so. It’s a no brainer really.
Of course from the consumer’s point of view, it makes a lot more sense to pay once for a bundle of content rather than paying subs to several different providers or micro-payments for individual pieces of content. However, if newspaper groups had the rationality to think about creating value propositions for their readers, they might have spared themselves the mess that they are in.
The big question, as Matthew highlights, is whether a significant number of publishers will choose to join Newspass or create their own payment system. I’m not sure that such a payment system would be possible in all jurisdictions based on competition/anti-trust law. That notwithstanding, knowing publishers, I would expect them to lobby for a relaxation of anti-competition laws in their own countries to make such a system possible rather than partner with Google, which they have as Matthew rightly points out, a love-hate relationship with. I’d say that it’s bordering on hate-hate these days, but that’s a matter of interpretation.
Matthew sees Google as a “dispassionate third party”, but with the egos in publishing and the ‘not invented here bias’, I’m not sure that publishers see Google as dispassionate or without skin in the game. Murdoch and his lieutenants, though possible an extreme example, refer to Google as a “parasite”. For them to be pushed into partnering with the likes of Google, they would have to be pressured into seeing past their almost self-destructively hyper-competitive natures and see that some loss of advantage was worth new revenue streams. In fact, I would see them being more open to partnering with another company just in an attempt to screw Google. Despite the existential threat facing some newspapers and newspaper groups, I’m not sure that they have seen the light, by which I mean the light some reportedly see with near-death experiences.
Will Apple’s obstinacy become self-defeating?
Apple’s attitude towards app approval for iTunes has been strange, to say the least. Stories abound of ?seemingly innocent applications being rejected for obscure reasons or, indeed, no real reason at all.
The latest example of their arbitrariness is the rejection of Time’s subscription-based magazine app for Sports Illustrated, “where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s iTunes, but would pay Time Inc. directly”. As All Things Digital says, this could turn out to be a big problem for publishers, who not only want the predictability of subscribers, but also want the data.
Just a few days ago, the US Copyright Office ruled that jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad “?will no longer violate federal copyright law”. It may still void your Apple warranty, but it’s not going to land you in any more trouble than that.
In April, Apple released iPhone OS4 and with it came the news that developers would not be allowed to programme apps in anything other than C, C++, or Objective-C.
Let’s put three and three together, shall we? Apple is rejecting apps without much logic or clarity to their decisions. The publishing industry have been drooling over the iPad as a possible industry saver (which is likely bullshit, but let’s just run with it for a second) and have poured a fair amount of effort and money into their iPad strategy. Developers are getting frustrated that they can’t develop whatever they want for the iPad, using whichever language they want.
How long is it going to be before we see an app store for jailbroken devices which will bypass iTunes altogether? The publishers have an interest in such a move. So do developers. And as an end user, would you like to be able to decide what you install on your phone and what you don’t?
Personally, I’d like to have a better browser than Safari, which hardly plugs in to any other services (Twitter, Instapaper, Delicious, etc.) at all, but I can’t because Apple doesn’t allow apps that reproduce functionality provided by their own software. I’d also like to have any magazine subscriptions I take out be a relationship between me and the publisher, without Apple holding on to my data like an information-obsessed middleman. (As a bonus, I’d also like a more sensible music management application: iTunes is the worst music organiser and player I’ve ever had the misfortune to be forced to use.)
Me, I give it a year before we see a jailbroken app store and a whole new ecosystem growing up.
links for 2010-07-28
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Kevin: A look at updates to the BBC's CPS content management system. I used to use it when I was the Washington correspondent for BBC News Online. It has definitely progressed in the three and a half years since I left the BBC. The interface is much cleaner. They have now moved away from table-based layout to CSS in part because it will help them add more meta-data to the layout.
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Kevin: Wolfram Alpha now has widgets that allow you to embed math-based apps using their computation engine easily on your site.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis argues at Business Insider that content companies like Condé Nast know that they need diversify their revenue streams. They cannot rely on advertising to the extent that they used to. The abundance of content and also advertising online means that the margins will never be what they once were. Jeff suggests that content companies need to move into retail (or possibly even affiliate sales such as through Amazon) to help offset the decline in advertising.
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Kevin: A visualisation toolkit from Stanford. They have a number of examples of how to use the toolkit. The site explains: "Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations; no plugin required (though you will need a modern web browser)! Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example."
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Kevin: A good interview with Clay Shirky. I like how he is moving the discussion about the impact of the internet away from the binary banality of internet good/bad that we seem to have. The internet is complex, just like humanity and life in general. There are good and bad aspects. For instance Clay says: "We'll never get to a world where the high-minded civic stuff is the majority of the medium, anymore than books are like that. But we need things like PickUpPal and PatientsLikeMe, services that are saying we could actually harness this medium not just for self-amusement, but to change the world for the better."
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Kevin: A good look by Christian Arno at Six Revisions at how to design your site for a global audience from using UTF-8 for text encoding to how symbols and colours might mean different things depending on the country and culture. It's a good reminder that globalisation doesn't mean homogeneity.
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Kevin: John Stauffer of Ogilvy looks at the rise of Facebook in Asia. In the past, local social networks have dominated, but that is changing. Apart from Cyworld in South Korea and Mixi in japan (Orkut is the leading social network in India but it is not local and Facebook is expected to surpass it later in 2010), Facebook is the dominate social network in most Asia-Pacific countries. The growth has been stunning in the past year especially in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.