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Kevin: Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of US website Salon.com, on the effects of its 2001 paywall experiment
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Kevin: Advertising Age's "continuing farewell to magazines that quit print under pressure from the recession and digital media."
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Kevin: Philip John looks at a number of different models that could support hyperlocal journalism. There are a lot of ideas here. Some might seem strange to journalists and newspaper commercial departments, but it will take editorial and commercial creativity to build the new businesses that will support professional journalism in the 21st Century.
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Kevin: John Temple writes: "My view is that he should go ahead and cut off Google if he wants. At a minimum, it'll be amusing to watch. But I doubt his content will be missed – unless he can create greater value and benefit for the user than he has today. The way to do that is to give people relevant content – information and advertising – that has real value. No easy task. I'm trying to wrestle with these issues – how to monetize content. And I know it's not easy. But I can't believe traditional news organizations will find success just by bashing Google and other search engines."
links for 2009-12-04
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Kevin: "Asterisq just released Mentionmap, an exciting web app for exploring your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they're talking about. It's also a great way to find relevant people to follow." It's a very good tool to see your network, not only in terms of people you're most connected to but also the topics that they are talking about.
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Kevin: Ian Betteridge summarises a discussion that he had on Twitter with a number of digital journalists including Matthew Ingram and John Robinson. Ian puts forward an interesting argument that people too focused on what readers need and forgetting what people want engage in a "puritan reductionism" and "paternalism".
"But if you treat journalism as some kind of “enabler of effective citizenship” you will never produce stories which are compelling, interesting, provoke real emotion – and yes, which entertain too." -
Kevin: Zoe Kleinman writes: "Children who blog, text or use social networking websites have better writing skills than those who do not, according to the National Literacy Trust." A survey of 3,001 children aged nine to 16. "Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same."
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Kevin: Google CEO Eric Schmidt writing in the Wall Street Journal says: "Video didn't kill the radio star, and the Internet won't destroy news organizations. It will foster a new, digital business model." It's especially delicious to see Schmidt use Murdoch's words against him in one of his own publications. "…as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry."
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Kevin: A fascinating visualisation looking at the wide variations in income across New York's various neighbourhoods. This is what visualisation is about: Allowing people to easily see patterns in large amounts of information. This shows you the median income of the people living in various neighbourhoods and income distribution of the household in that neighbourhood or borough. Bravo.
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Kevin: Matt Brittin, Google UK MD, told a Parliamentary committee hearing: "Google delivers 'something like' four billion clicks to news organisations and publishers per month, he said. "Once those clicks go through to sites those are people reading stories and engaging in advertising."
"It's wrong to paint us as stealing content (…) The amount of traffic that comes from us is equivalent to 100,000 clicks a minute to newspaper sites."
Google's 'snippets' of text were in-line with worldwide copyright law, he claimed."
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Kevin: "The Twitter "back channel" can be a powerful tool to quickly knit a gathering of strangers into an online community, a place where attendees at meetings broadcast bits of sessions, share extra information such as links, and arrange social events. But the same technology can also enable a "virtual lynching.""
Why does a blog look like a blog?
Smashing Magazine has an article titled The Death of the Blog Post, wherein UX designer Paddy Donnelly examines a trend amongst web designers to play with their blog’s design and layout in what he calls a “blogazine” – a blog with a magazine-style layout. Donnelly’s main point seems to be that he, and other designers, find traditional blog designs boring, and feel that that each post deserves to have its own design to service its own needs, rather than have to fit in with a single blog-wide design.
I can understand why this is deeply attractive to designers. The creative freedom to tailor a page’s design perfectly to fit the text must be something designers often crave. And the examples he gives, particularly those from Dustin Curtis, look lovely. But the idea of designing each post afresh is only going to work for a very tiny minority of bloggers with the time and skills. For the vast majority of bloggers, this is just not an option.
But more than that, conflating blog and magazine is a really bad idea.
In unpicking why, we have an opportunity for some important lessons for enterprise. The first is that your blog design really, really matters. There is no excuse for you not to have a beautifully, professionally designed blog that is readable, accessible, and flexible enough to be read on different monitors or devices. If your blog is just slapped onto your corporate website with the same navigation, styling and layout as the rest of the site you should get it redesigned right now. No excuses.
The next lesson is relevant not just to enterprise, but also to web designers shifting from site design to blog design: Blog design patterns matter.
When you look at a well-designed blog you will see a number of features that I call “blog furniture”. There are many pieces of blog furniture to choose from, and not all blogs use all pieces, but most use a combination of:
- Calendar
- Search
- Categories
- Archives
- Recent posts
- Recent comments
- Meta information (e.g. the admin sign-in link, RSS feed link)
- RSS feeds from other sources, e.g. Delicious, Twitter, or news headlines
- Badges from third party sites, e.g. Flickr badges
- About the Author text, photo or link
- Blogroll or list of external links
- Tag lists or tag clouds
These are really important not just because they are useful, but because they provide the visual cues that tell visitors they are somewhere different from the rest of the site, somewhere more personal, more conversational, more informal. Take those cues away, and you risk confusing your readers, even if only momentarily.
If I pitch up on a page that looks just like the rest of the site – or, indeed, nothing like any other page on the site – then it’s going to take me a while to understand what it is and what it’s for. When we arrive on a new site, we give it less than a second to impress us. If the visuals conflict with the content, for example, we are expecting to see a blog but we are presented with something that looks like a magazine, we are less likely to hang around. The fact that it looks pretty isn’t going to make up for that moment of disconnection. (In this precise case, designers may be the exception, but that also means they are profoundly unable to judge whether or not a page causes a conflict of expectations.)
Thirdly, RSS matters. A cornerstone of the blogging world, RSS strips out all design and present, very simply, passages of text interspersed with any graphics. Donnelly’s post looks awful in RSS. Compare and contrast:
From the website
From the RSS feed
A blog post that reads in a disjointed way, with too many graphics, in your RSS reader is going to be a post you don’t bother to finish. Beautiful layouts that rely on the juxtaposition of text and image to make their point are likely to fail horribly in RSS.
I would say that if you’re creating a site with lots of bespoke pages, no blog furniture, which loses its coherence in an RSS reader, you’re not actually writing a blog at all: you’re using blogging software as the backend of a website. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that and I’m glad that such talented designers are flexing their online creative muscles. But let’s not confuse our spades and our shovels.
Over the last ten years blogs have evolved conventions because those conventions are useful. There is no reason why those conventions should hamper design, but you throw them out at your peril.
links for 2009-12-03
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Kevin: Facebook announced that the Guardian (my employer) will be integrating Facebook Connect across their site. In other Facebook news in December 2009, they said the average user spends 25 minutes on the site. It has 90,000 apps. SkySports recorded 400,000 fans in four weeks.
The other Two Cultures
What are the implications of reducing bureaucracy? Bill Vlasic of the New York Times asked that question in his piece about how General Motors is trying to get rid of needless form-filling and shed its “hidebound, command-and-control corporate culture”. GM is trying to shift from a company where dissent was marginalised to a culture of openness and honesty.
I agree wholeheartedly with Johnnie Moore, when he says:
My feeling is that what appears to be happening at GM needs to happen in a lot more places. It often seems to me that everytime we experience a crisis, the solution is to write more rules. […]
The intention is good, but the practical effect is to engulf people in explicit, complicated systems and reduce their freedom – based on an unconscious assumption that everyone is not to be trusted. We give ascendancy to people who are really great at theory and effectively degrade practice. I think its rooted in the idea that one person or a group of people can effectively oversee a system and control how it works with written instructions.
In order to get things done people have to find elaborate work arounds for the rules, often with anxiety. The result: it’s actually harder to create real trust the human way, using our judgement and instincts.
This reminds me of theories of management that I stumbled once on Wikipedia, Theory X and Theory Y, which were proposed by Douglas McGregor in the 60s. In Theory X, management assume that employees are “inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can”. In Theory Y, managers assume that employes “may be ambitious and self-motivated” and enjoy their work.
Whilst reality tends not to fall into two neatly opposing mindsets, the framework is still useful, especially when think about how social media fits into a corporate culture. One could extend the theories thus:
Theory X companies are inimical to social tools, because they simply do not trust staff. Concern that people will ‘abuse’ the tools in some way leads to attempts to control employees’ access to them. The company’s public blog winds up with an editorial committee, only approved managers are allowed an internal blog, and access to sites like Wikipedia or services like Twitter are curtailed. Social media projects generally fail in these cultures, if they are ever started in the first place.
Theory Y companies, on the other hand, are ready to trust their staff to do the right thing. Social software is made available to all, small talk and social uses of the tools are allowed (sometimes even encouraged), and people build stronger relationships with colleagues which increases trust and ability to collaborate. Departmental silos are broken down, communication across time zones and locations improves, duplication of effort is reduced. Social media projects generally succeed in these cultures.
Of course, in reality, corporate cultures are not homogeneous. One department may have a much more open, collaborative and sharing culture than another. The question is whether Theory Y cultures are nurtured and growing within a wider Theory X company, or are they seen as aliens to be disposed of?
(The other Two Cultures, in case you’re wondering, are CP Snow’s.)
The dangerous distraction of GWOG – the Global War on Google
Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants’ Global War on Google might make for entertaining copy for journalists who enjoy an old fashioned media war with titans going toe-to-toe, but Adam Tinworth has pointed out the danger of taking this rather noisy display of “posturing and PR” too seriously. It is distracting people in the news and information business from dealing with the real issues besetting our businesses.
But in this war of words, the true issues seem strangely absent. Where’s the discussion of how newspapers can compete for readers in the age of the attention crash? Where’s the careful analysis of the role of the general publication when their audience’s time is being slowly eaten away by a million and one niche websites that speak more directly to them than anything a national paper publishes? Who is talking about how you rebuild publishing companies to account for the new economic reality of internet publishing.
These are huge issues that are being completely ignored in the bluster of Murdoch’s posturing. These issues are critical in the development of any paid content strategy.
I would like to think that behind the public bluster that these issues are being discussed in strategy meetings across the industry, but I doubt it. I would wager that Adam and I have discussed these issues over beers more than they have been discussed in any boardroom. I feel relatively confident that I would win this wager.
While Adam highlights the scarcity of attention and abundance of content, industry leaders still boast about the indispensability and exceptional nature of their content. Too many newspaper editors still believe that their competition comes from other newspapers, not from music streamed on Spotify, TV from the BBC’s iPlayer or Apple’s iTunes or Modern Warfare 2 (which sold 4.7m copies in 24 hours). Newspaper journalism is competing for time and attention against a myriad of other choices in an over-saturated media environment. Until news organisations (and content creators of all stripes) begin to grapple with the economics of abundant content much of it of very high quality, we’re not going to take the many steps necessary to create sustainable businesses that support journalism.
links for 2009-12-02
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Kevin: Danny Sullivan looks at ACAP – the Automated Content Access Protocol – that news organisations have proposed as a replacement for robots.txt. It's an excellent and thorough overview of the differences between ACAP and the current Robots Exclusion Protocol.
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Kevin: Malcolm Coles has an excellent review of how to make a better paywalls or pitches to get audiences to pay for content. My big take away is that sites need to clearly and positively state what premium content or added value audiences will get in paying for content.
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Kevin: The male-female ration on 19 social network sites including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.
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Kevin: Dorian Benkoil runs the numbers based on as much intelligence as is available and comes up with a plausible target figure (or at least a floor) for what Murdoch should demand from Microsoft for delisting WSJ.com from Google and handing Microsoft's Bing an exclusive deal. "Should News Corp. drop out of Google? Based on what I know today, I wouldn't recommend it. Maybe some blocking of Google here or encouraging of Bing there might work to News Corp's advantage. While News Corp. has some of the world's leading news brands, including Fox News and the aforementioned news organizations, collectively they don't have the advantages of The Wall Street Journal, a paid publication considered a must-read for much of the well-to-do business community."
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Kevin: John A Byrne, until recently of BusinessWeek has launched a new company called C-ChangeMedia, and he outlines his thinking about the new company and his vision. "It’s too early to tell everyone what our first products will be, but I do envision more than a single platform. It will be a network of niche products for the business audience with an emphasis on mobile applications."
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Kevin: An interesting post looking at the sameness in blog design. The post isn't just about blogging but also about the sameness in web design. CSS is wonderful for making changes across sites, but it does lead to a lot of cookie cutter design. The other issue in blog design is that people use a few platforms with a number of standard templates. You can tell whether someone is using WordPress or Drupal just by these templates.
I think there is another issue here which is a certain stagnation in web design. This happens from time to time. I think in terms of Paddy Donnelly's call for web magazine style design and a generally higher level of design, it's a worthwhile goal, albeit a difficult one. Suw and I don't have the resources to pay a designer nor do we have a time to do much to tweak the design of individual posts. I think one solution might be templates for different kinds of blog posts in a standard blog design template. -
Kevin: Channel 4 innovation fund 4iP announces its investment in "ScraperWiki, a platform to scrape, store, aggregate, and distribute unstructured public data in more useful, structured formats". I especially am interested in the geo-location libraries.
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Kevin: Jim Barnett calls on ProPublica executive editor Paul Steiger to flesh out his goal for the high-profile non-profit news organisation. Steiger said one of the major goals is "to create 'nothing less than a new class of cultural institution in this country'". It's a good post looking at the challenge the concept of non-profit news organisations face and what Steiger could do to change perceptions about the non-profit concept.
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Kevin: Steve Yelvington looks at traffic patterns at news sites, mostly newspaper sites that serve a specific area. He says that news sites need to look to their loyalists. "Compared with the overall population of visitors, they're far more likely to live in your market. They're keenly interested in your content, highly engaged in local life, and solid gold prospects for your advertisers." Steve has some great advice. You can give your loyaltists options to pay while not shutting out infrequent visitors, some who you need to convert to more frequent users. It's a great post, well worth reading.
ATA: Who are your favourite social media bloggers?
So I reckon it’s time for a bit of audience participation here on The Social Enterprise, so I’ve decided to create a new “Ask The Audience” category. I shall, unsurprisingly enough, periodically and at random ask you a question about your thoughts on social media. Simples!
Today’s question:
Who are your favourite social media bloggers?
Who are the trusted old voices whose opinions you value? Who are the up-and-comers that provide you with insight? Which social media blogs can you simply not live without?
Let me know in the comments!
Print-digital paid content debates require reality
If you have any hope of solving a problem, you better have a clear sense of what the problem is and what causes it. Listening to the paid content debates in the newspaper industry, the debate has become polarised and filled with assumptions and assertions rather than clear-headed thinking informed by research and data.
One assertion that I’d like to challenge right up front is the oft repeated claim that no one makes money with digital content. In the late 90s, I often heard editors say, “The internet is great, but no one has figured out how to make money with it.” The dot.com crash only reinforced this view. However, internet use continued to grow through the crash. Advertising shifted online, especially after Google introduced its search-based advertising model. Within a year or two after the crash, many large news sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post were making money. A 2008 study in the US by Borrell Associates found almost all of 3,100 news websites surveyed were profitable.
The Great Recession has hit both the print and digital businesses of the newspaper industry with a vengeance putting tremendous pressure on newspapers. As I’ve said, the economic crisis has reopened divisive debates between the print and digital sides of the newspaper business. To get through this crisis and rebuild sustainable businesses that support professional journalism, we’ve got to get real about the economic reality we face, not just in the depths of this recession but after it ends.
Steve Yelvington has more experience with digital journalism than many people have in journalism full stop. He fights bluster with data and even a graph. Most news websites exhibit a long tail with a hump, he writes.
Most of those visitors come once or twice, probably following a link
from a search engine or another website. They’re looking for something
very specific. They find it (or not) and leave.Then the number drops like a rock. Hardly anybody comes five times in a month.
But over on the right side you have an interesting little lump.
That lump is your loyalists. You’re going to have a hard time getting people to pay who come via a search engine, look at a page and leave. However, your loyalists see value in what you do and might be willing to pay. Working to convert more users to loyalists and giving your loyalists some way to pay for the content they value might be a revenue model that begins to add a revenue stream in addition to business cycle sensitive advertising.
Steve argues for a sophisticated model that leaves visitors who only look at one or two pages “unmolested” but asks those who view several pages to register with the site. News group McClatchy used this model, and the FT uses this model as well.
Determining how many pages people should see before registering and paying and what to charge are unknowns, but with a flexible system with graduated fees and clear benefits, this is a much more sophisticated model than some of the absolutist, binary solutions being thrown around.
Rewarding and building loyalty
I think that loyal readers should be rewarded, and I believe that they will reward publications they value with not only their traffic but also their monetary support. I think that newspapers could do much more to convert some passing traffic to more loyal readers, but it’s going to take better design and more engagement from journalists, which I know will be difficult with slimmer staffs. Not all journalists want to engage with readers, but I think that those who do and do it well should be encouraged and supported.
To successful deal with the problems that we’re facing during the recession and will be facing once growth returns, we need more data, more research, more experimentation and more sophistication in our discussions about business models. There is no silver bullet, no one solution that will save journalism. We’re going to have to try a number of things and a number of ways to earn money to support professional journalism. However, one of the first steps we need to take is to get past these lazy assertions and out-dated assumptions about the business. Lots of the conventional wisdom is based in the print-digital culture wars in newspaper newsrooms, and it’s in desperate need of updating.
CWSE Roundup – 27 Nov 09
To make sure that you don’t miss out on the blogging that I’m doing over on my new Computer Weekly blog, The Social Enterprise, I’m going to do weekly round-up posts so you can see if anything takes your fancy. Obviously I’m a bit late for last week, but I’m sure I’ll hit a rhythm soon.
Monday: Joining the Social Enterprise
Tuesday: CoTweet: Twitter tools get collaborative
Wednesday: Is tendering right for social software projects?
Thursday: The role of dopamine in social media
Friday: Merlin Mann’s Time & Attention talk
Please do pop over to The Social Enterprise, take a look around, and let me know what you think.