The Future of News

Data Point of One: What Happens When Readers Only Want Raw News?

2010-08-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

At dinner last night, a friend told me he has no interest in picking up a newspaper because the information in it is "outdated" and "fabricated." Interesting. So what does that mean for the journalism industry?

The “outdated” part is obvious. Sitting next to me, my friend picked up his iPhone. “By the time I walk by a newspaper box in the morning," he said, "I've already read the latest news on this," referring to apps from news organizations like the BBC which have the most recent breaking news. "The stuff in the newspaper is 12, 16 hours old.” Sounds reasonable.

As for the “fabricated,” what he didn’t like was that the stories in the newspaper had been kneaded and churned and framed this way and that until they were a package of sorts, presenting an interpretation and assessment and analysis of the particular news item. In the past 10 years, he, like many others, have gotten used to the snackable nature of the blogosphere, and now the Twitterverse. Readers like him are becoming increasingly used to consuming news in short hits more police-blotter style than 700-word inverted pyramid. The longer stories no longer hold as much appeal.

Which makes sense, if you think about it. It used to be the newspaper business had only one opportunity a day to deliver the news to its readers: In the paper that was dropped on everyone's doorstep. So it made sense that we crammed everything into that single story. But in a day and age when readers can stay tuned into latest developments as they happen, that longer story not only is no longer optimal, for many readers it's actually a drag. Why should I have to read through all that stuff that I already know to find out the latest?

So what does this mean for the future of the news business?

Long-time readers know that one of my main mantras is: Don’t worry about business models for now. Instead, re-think the product. So this one friend’s feedback should prompt the news strategists to consider the following kinds of questions:

In what situations/for what kinds of news does it make sense to provide readers with a short-and-sweet “just the facts”, snackable summary of a news event? Or, from a different angle: In what situations/for what kinds of news do readers generally just want the short-and-sweet “just the facts” snackable summary?

If readers want that, what does the end product that we create to deliver it look like? What would it look like on our news organization’s Web sites? What would an iPhone / iPad app just for that look like? How would we leverage Twitter to deliver that?

In other words, we might want to re-think what the atomic unit of news is. In the last few years, we’ve heard that the atomic unit of news is the article (rather than the newspaper or Web site). But maybe there's another atomic unit: the snackable summary? If that's the case, how should that change how we report—and design/deliver the news—to offer readers the product—and value—they’re looking for?

What 'The Big Short' Has to Say About the Journalism Industry

2010-08-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

The epigraph to Michael Lewis' new book, The Big Short, could be applied as easily to the journalism industry today as Lewis applied it to the recently crashed financial industry.

It reads:

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

-- Leo Tolstoy

The primary challenge to journalism finding its way forward today, to finding new sustainable financial models, is the fact that many in journalism, especially at the highest levels, believe they know certain parameters to be immuatable. Until the industry goes back to the beginning, and revists every truth it believes to be self-evident, and assesses which really are immuatable, and which were simply artifacts of the ecosystem and technological environment in which they emerged, the industry will not be able to see, much less embrace, those new truths which will be the key to its future viability, and success.

Photo courtesy of: ercwttmn, Flickr. Creative Commons license.

The Chron's Massive Fail on Sunday Business Feature Should be a Wakeup Call to Newspapers

2010-07-12T12:29:00.001-07:00

Wow. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a feature in their Sunday business section yesterday about two of their major hometown companies -- Google and Yahoo -- and somehow managed to get it totally wrong. Not just a-few-facts wrong. But 180 degrees wrong.

I did a double-take at the headline: "Yahoo and Google in high-tech news war." A war? Really? I follow Yahoo and Google's news ventures pretty closely, and I had never heard anyone talk about them being in any kind of a war. Yahoo and AOL? Absolutley. But Yahoo and Google? No.

OK, fine. Maybe I'd missed something. I quickly ran through the article to see which high-powered observers the Chron was crediting with this bold observation. Turns out: None. Yes, the article quotes the highly respected Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. But Sullivan only describes what the two companies are doing in the news space: Yahoo is creating its own content; Google is continuing to index other publishers' content. He says nothing about them competing with each other, much less being in any kind of a war.

The Chron also quotes a Gartner analyst. But even that guy simply comments on one of Yahoo's tactics. He says nothing about any kind of Yahoo-Google competition.

So how did the Chron come to its conclusion? The trigger seems to have been the fact that both Google and Yahoo made news-related announcements in the past couple of weeks. Google News launched a redesign. Yahoo launched their new Upshot news blog. Fine. But, it's huge leap to go from coincident announcements (regarding minor tactics, at that) to drawing an overarching conclusion about the two companies' being at war.

Another pass at the story took me back to the lede. And herein may lie the source of the headline. The lede reads: "Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are redefining the online news experience, but in diverging ways that underscore the evolving identities of the search giants."

Woah. Hold on a second. Did I read that right? "The evolving identities of the... search giants"?!

OK. Now everything is becoming clear. If you think Yahoo and Google are competing "search giants," I can see how you might write a lede talking about how their different approaches to news is "underscoring their evolving identies." (Which, btw, says nothing about them being at war, a fact we'll get to later.) But, um, hello, Chron. Did you miss that whole Yahoo-selling-their-search-business-to-Microsoft thing? That took place, oh, a year ago? Which means Yahoo, by their own admission, has not been a search company for a year.

I'm a bit flabbergasted. How could the Chron possibly not be aware of this? Anyone who's been following Yahoo to any degree knows that Yahoo ceded its search service to Microsoft and instead is focusing on content, with the goal of becoming the leader in online display advertising. This is not a secret. CEO Carol Bartz talks about this every time she steps up to a podium. Which, again, if you're following this, puts them at war not with Google, but with AOL, which also wants to be the leader in online display advertising. (This article on CNET, from way back in December, nicely sums up the real Yahoo news war, the one with AOL.)

So that was mistake #1: positioning Yahoo & Google as in competition with each other by identifying Yahoo as a search company. Mistake #2 was the headline. If you read the article closely, nowhere does it say the two companies are "at war." It just says their different approaches to news "underscores" their "evolving identies." Who knows where the headline writer came up with the idea for the headline, but there it is, smack-dab on the front of the Sunday Business section.

So what does all this have to do with the future of news? Simply that it's alarming harbinger of the state of things when San Francisco's major newspaper not only doesn't get a major local business story right, but that it gets it 180 degrees wrong. I'm picturing all those people who read the story yesterday and are now walking around with a totally wrong understanding in their heads. The paper's readers now have a categorically wrong understanding of a not-insignificant business story.

I can't tell you how this happened. I don't know the reporter who wrote the article, much less the editor(s) who reviewed it, nor the copyeditor who penned the headline. So I don't know how an error of this magnitude could have taken place.

But a massive fail like this should be a wakeup call. News organizations have a noble purpose: to help their readers understand their worlds. An error of this magnitude, where a news organization doesn't simply get a few facts wrong, but gets a story 180 degrees wrong, a story that was not that difficult to get right, underscores that the way newspapers are operating is simply not sustainable. They need to go back to the drawing board and completely rethink how they're doing what they're doing. It's one thing not to be able to do as extensive coverage you used to be able to do. It's another thing to be operating in such a way that a major Sunday business story is 100% wrong. Nobody wants that--not us, not the Chron. We need to stop pretending that we can continue as we always have. We do, finally, have to sit down and figure out a new way forward.

There is No Silver Bullet. And Trying to Find One Just Puts Us Further in the Hole

2010-06-28T18:54:00.001-07:00

Here's a question I got recently: What would I do if someone handed me the reigns of a newspaper and told me: "Go at it"? The answer was simple. But also complicated.

I was on a plane, chatting with my seatmate (who, à propos of nothing, turned out to be a commander in the US Navy). The subject of the sorry state of journalism came up. I assured my seatmate, as I do whenever anyone asks me what I think is going to happen, that, despite however dark things look today, ten years from now, there's going to be great journalism takingplace, better than we've ever seen before, and it's going to be financially sustainable to boot. "Really?" he said. "So, if you were the boss of a news organization today, what would you do?"

The question's always difficult to answer. I could tell that he, like most people, are expecting a silver bullet. Like: "Print the paper on pink newsprint, put the comics on page 2, and boom, you're set."

What's harder to explain is the thing we'll actually have to do between now and the shiny future I'm confident lies ahead of us. Which is to experiment and to innovate. It's hard to explain that, if I were handed the reigns to a news organization today, I'd basically rip it apart. I'd throw the entire canon out the window. I'd say: Where do we have an opportunity to make a real impact, to do something better than anyone else can do it? Let's take that and start experimenting with different ways to actually do that. Let's set up a system of metrics that measures how much readers like it, whether it's serving our purpose of being of service to the community, and whether it shows any indication of being monetizable. I'd tell the staff that v1 of this thing is going to be a disaster. Not because of any failings on our part. Just by definition of being a v1. But we're going to push it out the door and learn from its real world implementation. And use those learnings to do a v2. Which will go out the door one month after v1. And I'd tell the staff: I'd going to do my best to guarantee your financial security. But it's going to be rough going. So if you decide to stick around, it better be here because there's nothing else in the world you'd rather be doing. (And it'd be helpful if you were married to someone with a stable job. Like a prison guard.)

Because there is no silver bullet. Not yet. Just a bunch of hard work. A bunch of giving things a shot and seeing what happens. And learning from it. And refining the thing and giving that a shot.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Until we finally find what works.

Photo courtesy of eschipul, Flickr. Creative Commons license.

Why Schultz is Wrong About Anonymous Comments

2009-09-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Anonymous comments are dangerous, Connie Schultz wrote yesterday on Cleveland.com. They lead to poison and vitriol.

Plus, she said: "Anonymity on the Web offends most journalists I know, and not just because their own names go on everything they write. It breaks every rule newspapers have enforced for decades in letters to the editor, which require not only a name and a city of residence, but contact information to confirm authorship."

Schultz's preferred prescription: Get rid of anonymity and require commenters to identify themselves.

But she's wrong. This is just another example of the kind of faulty thinking that gets in the way of newspapers' ability to move successfully into the new digital era. Two reasons:

It fails to recognize that the online world is a world of its own--one that is much bigger than just news organizations. News organizations that try to force that wider online world to behave according to its preferred standards are going to fail. Successful organizations are the ones that try to learn the local ways and adapt themselves accordingly.

Those who take the time to do this--to understand the local ways--quickly realize that it's not anonymity that leads to uncivil discourse in forums. It's poor moderation. The way you encourage civil behavior in online communities is to have clear rules of the road and then to enforce them. Online community experts have known this for well over a decade.

So today's takeaway: The key to helping news organizations survive and thrive in the digital world is not to try to make that world conform to newspapers' ways of doing things. Instead, the key is to understand the digital world and its ways of doing things--and then to use those insights to help you accomplish your goals.

Photo courtesy of: gregmote. Creative Commons License

Of Course No One Was Suprised That A TV Story Was Shot with an IPhone

2009-07-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

At the end of June, a producer for a Miami TV station shot an entire story with the new iPhone... and the journalism world went crazy. The TV station wrote a story about it. Tweeters tweeted. And Poynter interviewed the producer in question.

Most telling in the coverage, however, was one assertion, in the TV stations' story about the story. The story itself was about the launch of the new iPhone, and the iPhone-shot story happened by accident. The producer had lined up in the wee hours with hundreds of other Apple fans to get the new phone. A good reporter, it occured to him there was a story there, so he started taking still pics while in line and then started shooting interviews once he got his phone. One thing led to another, and the station said why don't you just do a whole story for us with iPhone footage?

So here's where the telling part comes in. The TV station's story about the story includes the following line: "Oddly enough, not one of these Apple fans found it strange that a television station was shooting video with an iPhone!"

Let's ponder this for a moment. The news world is all abuzz, but the folks on the street think this is perfectly normal. Moreover, the TV station thinks it's odd that the folks on the street don't think it's strange.

You can only draw one conclusion from all this, and it's an important one of the news business: The news industry is behind its audience. And, in being so, most likely holding itself back from finding its way forward.

The reason you don't see more TV news stations shooting with iPhones comes down to quality. A traditional camera obviously delivers much better quality than video-enabled smartphones. But maybe news organizations should ask themselves whether that really matters. Maybe the smartphone video is good enough.

Not that anyone is suggesting TV stations jettision all their professional-grade cameras in all circumstances. Rather, it might be useful if they were to regularly consider for what types of stories and events it might be just fine to use a smartphone or a Flip. And to regularly experiment with how far they can push the boundaries on this question.

What's the point, you might ask. Why bother trying to see how much coverage you can get away with with a smartphone when you have perfectly good professional-grade cameras on hand?

There are a couple reasons:

Video-enabled phones are obviously more mobile--and take less expertise to use--than professional cameras. TV stations might discover a range of situations they can access that the couldn't access before, and they might discover they're able to do stories they never could do before. Or simply that they might be able to do more coverage than they were able to do before. In other words, they might discover that, although they sacrifice some degree of quality, they gain more in content. And if viewers don't care about the lower quality or, alternatively, are psyched about the new coverage, that creates growth oppotunities for TV news.

Budget. Smartphones are obviously a lot less expensive than professional cameras. Again, no one is suggesting that TV stations completely ditch their professional cameras (and professional shooters), but it might be possible to substituted smartphones for the big equipment in some situations, thereby saving money for cash-strapped news operations or, alternatively, freeing up budget for use elsewhere.

Don't Bother with the Investigative Journalism "Strike Force" Idea

2009-07-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

Reports say that the summit of nonprofit news organizations that met at the Rockefeller estate at the beginning of July discussed the idea of setting up an investigative journalism "mobile strike force" that could be deployed anywhere in the country, to pick up the slack on investigative reporting that, by all accounts, is falling by the wayside in these tight-budget days.

It's a lovely idea. But news organizations will actually get a lot farther a lot faster if they invest their energy and ingenuity elsewhere.

It's clear why the idea is compelling: In these days when newspapers are cutting back, when local journalism is suffering, when the scaling back on reporting is "putting democracy in jeopardy," wouldn't it be lovely to have an expert strike team to be able to swoop in and rescue the locals? Yes, it would. But it's neither practical nor, actually, is it ideal.

First, ask yourself: Who's going to fund this?

OK, you might get the Knight Foundation or some other organization to pony up the funds for a novel idea like this for a year or two. But after that? You need a sustainable business model, and right now, I don't see one. Unless you get a coalition of newspapers to fund it. But I imagine that after they did an ROI analysis of the returns they get out of supporting a strike force that, most of the time, will not be doing any journalism in their neck of the woods, those newspapers will decide their money could be better spent elsewhere.
Next: ask yourself: Is a group of outsiders really the best team to look into local issues?

Or, turn this around, ask yourself: How much further ahead could you get if, instead of bringing in outsiders, you figured out how to leverage insiders? Think of the pro-am approach Amanda Michel is spearheading at ProPublica and that Robert Rosenthal has talked about doing on the Center for Investigative Reporting's California project. Instead of looking back to the old days, when communities relied on hotshot investigative reporters to break open corruption and wrongdoing, news organizations should be looking to the more recent model of crowdsourced reporting--of the kind Talking Points Memo did in uncovering the U.S. Attorneys scandal--and figure out how to leverage the informed and motivated people within their own communities to bring issues to light that need to be brought to light.

The value that experienced investigative reporters bring is their understanding of how to do investigative reporting. But most of the hour-by-hour work they--placing requests for documents and sifting through them--is work any reasonably intelligent person could do. So, just as accountants can now outsource low level accounting tasks to India so that U.S. accountants can focus on higher-level tasks, we don't need investigative reporters to do the whole soup-to-nuts part of investigations anymore. Yes, we need their expertise in the form of guidance or mentoring. But much of the work can be done by motivated readers.

Instead of spending a lot of time dreaming about some fantasy team of super-reporters to rescue them, news organizations should start rescusing themselves: By investing in developing pro-am methods of gathering and interpreting the news.

What journalism can learn from KodakGallery.com

2009-05-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

The big topic in journalism circles today is how to get readers to pay for content online when they're used to getting it for free. For an answer, it might be worth looking at Kodak Gallery.

I've used Kodak Gallery forever. Back since when they were still Ofoto. I love them--for no other reason than it's a really easy way to share photos with friends and family, and a really easy way to store and organize pix. Take pix at the family Easter party? Upload and share. Take pix at Dad's birthday? Upload and share. Take pix at Burning Man? Upload and share. And the same happens when someone else takes pix. I now have easy access to other people's Burning Man pictures. My nieces' ski trips. A company party.

I've done this forever. For free. Never bought a thing. Not a single hardcopy photograph. And KodakGallery has let me get away with it. Until now.

The good folks at KG have recently sent me a notice. Two actually. Letting me know that, regrettably, they can no longer completely support my mooching. They will happily continue to store my photos online. But I, they say, must do something for them: For the amount of storage I'm using (less than 2 GB), I must make at least $4.99 in purchases every 12 months. Otherwise, bye bye pix.

Now here's the thing. I don't want $5 worth of hardcopy pictures. I have no use for them. I've gone completely digital. But you know what? I'll do it. I'll go ahead and buy $5 worth of pix I don't want.

Why? Because I find their service incredibly valuable.

Sure, I could download all those albums. But that would take forever. And it would take them away from my family and friends, who also still have access to them on Kodak Gallery. All in all, it's easier for me to just pay them the money and keep my pix there.

So what's the takeaway for journalism? If you create something your users really value, they'll pay for it.

There's a lot of talk about business models these days. But I don't see an equally focused and concerted exploration about what readers actually value--not just what kind of news they want to receive, but the forms in which they want to receive it, and the devices on which they want to receive it. Yes, there are a slew of projects working on various aspects of this question. But the dominant drumbeat you hear coming out of the news world these days is: How can we get people to pay? Not: How can we create something so great, people will happily pay?

Without that second discussion, however, there's little point in the first. If we do have that second discussion, however, if we do find forms of journalism that people truly value, I assure you, readers will pay. Happily.

What INDenverTimes did wrong

2009-04-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

Back in March, following the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, three Colorado businessmen announced they were teaming up with former RMN journos to launch a new venture INDenver Times, a new online news site covering the local community. The launch date was set for April 23--assuming, they said, that 50,000 readers had subscribed by then. They needed the $3 million that would come from the $60 per annum subscriptions to fund the business.

Last week, the Denver Post reported that the three businessmen were abandoning the project. Among the disappointments: Only 3,000 people had signed up so far.

Perhaps this was a surprise to the INDenver Times team. But it wouldn't have surprised anyone in Silicon Valley. You see, the group's business plan violated one of the fundamental tenets of online innovation: You don't charge people first, and then deliver the product. Just the opposite: As anyone who's watched the evolution of Facebook, Twitter, and innumberable software products (online and desktop) knows: You give the goods away first. Then you charge.

The reason is twofold:

-- By putting your product out there for free, you get people to use it. And it's in watching real people use it that you learn what works and what doesn't. You then use this information to refine the product and ultimately produce something really excellent that you never could have figured out had you done all your development behind closed doors.

-- In the course of doing this, your users develop an attachment to your product, one they eventually are willing to pay for.

Together, this approach allows you develop two things you need in order to charge: A really excellent product and consumer demand for it.

The lesson is instructive for anyone considering a journalism experiment: You're going to have to find a subscription-less way to fund the project, at least for the first few years.

Photo courtesy of laszlo-photo. Creative Commons license.

Pulitzers measure nothing about a newspaper's viability

2009-04-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

An investor at last week's New York Times annual meeting complained that the Times seemed to have plenty of money to send reporters all over the world but couldn't manage adequate coverage of the city's five boroughs. "Send these people to Brooklyn! Send these people to the Bronx!” he reportedly said. “You will increase circulation."

Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. response? That the Times had just won a Pulitzer for local reporting. Yes, well, here's the problem: Pulitzers are handed out by other journalists, based on how much those other journalists like specific stories. They have nothing to do with whether a newspaper is delivering a product that is valued by its customers.

This is important to remember. As news organizations look forward, they need to forget about using prizes as a metric of their future viability. The only metrics that matter are circulation--and whether those numbers are going up or down.

Photo courtesy of terren in Virginia. Creative Commons license.

Why are these editors so downright giddy?

2009-03-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

There was something interesting about the editors giving advice to Michelle Nicolosi, the new editor of the Seattle Post Intelligencer's online-only edition in CJR's recent piece "To the P-I, on Its First Day."

Talk to any journalist today, and you get a lot of gloom and doom. A lot of talk about how the demise of newspapers is catastrophic for democracy. About how online news sources can't possibly deliver the quality we saw in print. About much will be lost when newspapers are gone.

But not these editors. Oddly, these folks speaking directly to the editor of the first online-only city daily in the country, the editor starting out with a measely staff of 20, yes that's right, 20! These editors were anything but doom and gloom. In fact, they seemed down right giddy.

Their insights were peppered with words like "liberating" and "exciting". They talked about the excitement of being able to experiment and try new things--and discover cool stuff when their experiments worked out. They talked about being freed from the tyranny of having to cover everything, from the canon that said you had to "run after every ambulance, or chase after every press conference.” They talked about how having "everyone do everything" was actually great.

So who were these iconoclasts speaking so far from the conventional wisdom within journalism circles? They were the editors of several of the online-only newspapers that have emerged in the last couple of years: the Chi-Town Daily News, Voice of San Diego, and MinnPost.

This is good news for journalism. These are the people who've already been to the future. And they're telling us: It really isn't all that bad. In fact, it's quite liberating. And exciting.

Photo courtesy of localsurfer. Creative Commons license.

Why the Wall Street Journal doesn't count

2009-03-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Whenever people start saying newspapers should make readers pay for content, they point to the Wall Street Journal. "See," they say, "those of you who argue that readers will never pay for content are wrong. The Wall Street Journal charges, and people pay. Ergo, if newspapers charged readers, readers would pay."

Problem is, they're wrong.

It's not an apples to apples comparison. The WSJ and your average hometown newspaper are not the same thing. The customer base is not the same. The perceived value in the product is not the same. The motivations for purchasing are different.

People buy the WSJ because they view it as an indispensible tool for making money. It's a core part of their business. Indeed, many WSJ subscriptions are paid for not by their readers but by companies who buy them for their employees. Readers are willing to shell out $104/year* because they expect it will help them make far more than that, via business dealings or career advancement. In their minds, the WSJ is comparable to their Blackberrys, or aircards, or business class seats. It's a critical tool for the effective operation of their businesses or career. In that sense, not only is $104 a completely reasonable price. It's so cheap most subscribers probably don't even think twice about it.

That's totally different from how the average newspaper reader (online or offline) views a newspaper. People read newspapers for a whole range of reasons, but just about none of them do it because they view their hometown newspaper as an indispensible business tool.

The WSJ and your hometown newspaper are two different products. You can't use the success of one's business model as proof that business model will work for the other. That's like saying "Airplanes and cars are both modes of transportation, so let's consider using an airplane manufacturer's business model and pricing strategies for cars."

I don't have a final opinion on whether readers will pay for newspaper content. But I do know that the argument "Readers pay for the WSJ so they'll pay for the hometown newspaper" holds no water.

* for online-only. Or $156 for print only. Or $182 for both.

Why doesn't the SF Chron have a real "Prop 8 Central"?

2009-03-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

California Supreme Court justices are in the process of deciding one of the most contentious issues to hit the state in a while: whether to uphold Prop 8.* But not only is it one of the most contentious issues. But it's one of the issues that has most gripped the attention of the average citizen. From a news organization's perspective, that spells opportunity--opportunity to draw readers to your website and rack up those ever important page views.

So how is the San Francisco Chronicle covering it? As if they were... a newspaper.

Which begs the question: Why don't they cover it as if they were... a new media organization?

Specifically, the Chron is basically filing daily dispatches on the story. News and analysis, for sure. But for all intents and purposes, the same kind of daily stories you'd be getting if this were 20 years ago and the Internet didn't yet exist.

But here's what I think they should be doing: Create the premier go-to hub for all things Prop 8. Brand it as its own destination site, the same way the LA Times created "The Envelope," a destination site for all things Oscar. When you go to The Envelope, you don't feel like you're wading through a newspaper. You feel like you're at a website that is completely and totally devoted to the Oscars. It has everything that kind of site would have: Forums, blogs, photo galleries, timelines, trivia, gossip. Yes, the Times' news reporting is there too. But it's not front and center. It's only one component in a larger experience.

Why is this important?

-- Traffic to latimes.com was up 25% (!) for the month of February

-- The LA Times had 8.7 million page views** the day after the Oscars.

What's the lesson? To draw visits, you can't simply dole out daily dispatches. You have to create a compelling destination. You need to move beyond the mindset of "Give me a story to put in tomorrow's paper." Instead, you need to think along the lines of: "There's an important story going on in our community. What kind of information would the community like to get about that story? Let's find a way to give it to them."

So what would a Chron Prop 8 look like?

First, it would be a branded destination site, like The Envelope. When you arrived, you'd feel like you were at an independent website, not as if you were buried deep within the pages of the newspaper.

Include all of the following components:
* Running blog posts, so visitors feel like they're right in the middle of the action. Posts would come from numerous bloggers. Some inside the courthouse. Some outside. Some covering the machinations at the various interest groups. Some covering other aspects of the fight.
* Legal analysis of the various aspects of the suit, from attorneys (not reporters)
* Bios (with photos) of all the key players
* Video from the various demonstrations that have been taking place -- with the option for visitors to upload their own video
* Ditto photographs
* Trivia about the history of this battle
* Forums and/or social networking integration so that visitors can link up with other people interested in the debate and carry on conversations among themselves.
* Opportunities for visitors to share their own stories, whether they are a gay couple talking about what Prop 8 means to them, or an evangelical Christian talking about their community and why Prop 8 is important to them
* And, of course, traditional news stories and analysis pieces
* Other?

To be fair, the Chron is doing slightly more than daily dispatches. It has bundled all of those dispatches onto a Prop 8 landing page. (And its donor database, where you can see who gave how much to the campaigns for and against Prop 8, is a truly inspired piece of new-world journalism.)

But on the whole, the way the landing page is organized, and the content on it, still says, "We think of ourselves as people who create daily stories. We're bundling them here to make it easier for you to find them." What it needs to say is, "We've created a great space for you to learn everything you want to know about this battle, as it's happening, and for you to participate in helping to tell this story."

* Prop 8, as you may recall, was the November ballot measure that created a constitutional amendment declaring marriage is only between a man and a woman only. It passed 52% for to 58% against, outraging many across the state. Advocates of marriage equality have brought suit to have it overturned.

** Via Romanesko

Photo courtesy of mugley. Creative Commons license.

Views of Political & News Videos Up 600% -- Now What?

2009-03-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

YouTube's news manager told BeetTV yesterday that views for news and political videos were up 600% this year. That's good news for journalism. It means that people are interested in news and politics. Or at least can be engaged under certain circumstances. And if news organizations can leverage that insight, they can increase their views-- and, hopefully, their revenue.

This is rich information we can use to help shape the future forms of journalism.

But first, here's how not to use this information:

Editor: "Political and news videos are up 600% on YouTube! Reporter people: Make me more videos about what's going on at City Hall!"

That's a really good way to waste your valuable staff time on stuff that'll never get seen.

It's like a food manufacturer learning that sales of Duncan Hines' cake mixes are up 600% and immediately ordering its staff to start producing more cake mixes. All kinds (chocolate, vanilla, red velvet...). Year-round. And then ending up perplexed about why their mixes didn't sell. The problem is, if the manufacturer had done a little digging, they'd have found that the majority of that 600% was for sales of chocolate cake. At Valentine's Day. See what I'm getting at? You have to look under the hood of the data to understand exactly what's driving the increase and where the opportunities lie. Only then can you create an effective video strategy for your news organization.

So here are some of the questions I'd ask about the 600% increase:

What types of videos were people watching, and what does the pie chart of types look like? Ie: What proportion of views was for:
-- Campaign-created candidate-speaking-to-the-camera videos?
-- Campaign-created ads?
-- User-created artistic creations (songs, parodies, etc...)?
-- Professionally-created artistic creations (SNL, etc...)?
-- Raw footage from professional journalists?
-- Official reports from professional journalists?
-- Debates shown end-to-end?
-- Snippets of debates?
-- Etc...

This tells you what kind of videos are worth producing (or enable to be produced and posted, if user-generated ones are among the most valuable).

What proportion of the navigation paths started outside YouTube vs. started inside?

Ie: What proportion of video views:
-- Started with someone arriving from an outside link?
-- Started with someone doing a search on YouTube?
-- Started with someone clicking on a video in the "Related Videos" list?
-- Started in YouTube channels? (And what particular channel drove large numbers of viewers?)
-- Happened when someone decided to re-view a video?

If a significant proportion of video views started with someone using the "Related Videos" list, then you know that, to maximize the number of video views on your site, you're going to have to make sure your interface does a good job of drawing visitors in. Ie: The editor might get more bang for his buck by asking to the web team to beef up the site's interface, rather than simply asking the reporters to create more videos.

What kinds of videos did people watch all the way through, vs. what kinds did people leave in the middle?

If you assume that the videos that people watched all the way through were the ones they liked (and the ones they didn't were the ones they didn't)*, then you'd want to analyze the videos to figure out what it was about the first set that people found interesting and the second that they didn't. And then use that information to shape your own videos. In order to create happy "customers" who are likely both to return and to recommend your videos to other potential viewers.

It is exciting that views of news and political items went soaring last year. Now let's use that information intelligently to help news organizations craft effective strategies.

* And you'd have to test even that assumption...

(Via MediaIsThriving)

Sometimes, it makes more sense to start from scratch

2009-03-04T14:56:00.000-08:00

"It may be better for a newspaper company to think about killing the paper and rebuilding itself online."

That's from Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Rosenstiel was speaking last week on a radio show about the future of the San Francisco Chronicle following reports that Hearst might shutter or sell the paper, given its heavy losses over the last few years.

He's right. Sometimes it does make more sense to kill a thing and start over, than to rejigger it from within. This sometimes happens in Silicon Valley. You build a product on a code base. And you add to that code base repeatedly over time. Eventually, the code base gets so byzantine and so out of date, that you can't efficiently morph it into a product that works for contemporary needs. So you slowly phase out the old code base while you build a new one. And then you launch a new product that can actually do what customers need it to do.

Or take a more simple example. I had some friends who bought a house, primarily for the location. The house itself, however, wasn't great. They thought about trying to remodel. But finally they realized it made more sense to tear down the old house and build a new one. Sure it was painful (took forever). And sure it cost more. But there was no way to get the old house to the place they needed it. And now, years after moving in to the new one, every day of living there is a pleasure for them.

And that's how I feel about newspapers. I rips me up to watch newspapers try to shove new ideas into their old structure. For the most part, it's just not working. They'd get much further ahead if they just stopped, redesigned, and started over.

And yes, that would involve a huge amount of pain. But in the long run, we'd all be much further ahead.

Photo courtesy of Rick McCharles. Creative Commons license.

Walter Isaacson does journalism a grave disservice

2009-02-22T12:46:00.001-08:00

Earlier this month, former Time CEO and current head of the Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson wrote a long piece in Time, called “How to Save Your Newspaper.” His argument was simple: Newspapers must start charging for their online content. The piece set off a tizzy in the journalism blogosphere, with bloggers and readers chiming in left and right about whether news organizations should, in fact, make readers pay. Charlie Rose even hosted an entire show on the future of journalism, with Isaacson as one of the guests.

The problem is: They've been talking about the wrong thing.

All the energy put into debating whether news organizations should charge for online content was wasted effort. You can’t talk about whether you should charge users of your product until you’ve created a product that a consumer would even consider paying for. The major problem in journalism today is not that news organizations haven’t figured out how to run their businesses off online ad revenue. The major problem in journalism today is that news organizations have not stopped to revamp the product they offer.

Sure, many news organizations have “added on.” They’ve added blogs. They’ve added slideshows. They’ve added video. But they haven’t revamped the core product. For the most part, they’ve simply put online the type of “product” they used to place in their print editions. Is City Hall doing something of note? Fine, write a 10-inch inverted pyramid story. But that’s not a product people want in the online world. In order to have anything to charge for, newspapers need to go back to the drawing board and rethink their “offering.”*

This idea hasn’t occurred to news organizations because they’ve simply assumed that all they need to do to “go digital” was to put online what they used to place in print. Problem is: readers (“users”) have different expectations of what online should provide them than what they expected from print. The same way that users expect far more functionality from a cell phone today than they ever expected from a landline. Landlines at most could store a few numbers and display the number of an incoming caller. But there’s no way a cell phone customer today would ever buy a cell phone that did nothing more than store a handful of numbers and display the number of an incoming caller. Cell phone users expect far more than that, and cell phones must deliver, or get out of the business.

Here’s an example of that means for print. A little while back, the city of San Francisco announced that, from March to November, it was going to do an inspection of all sidewalks in the city and issue repair notices where broken sidewalks need to be replaced. This was significant. Every property owner is responsible for the sidewalk in front of their buildings. Thousands of property owners—homeowners and businesses alike—would likely be affected by the notices. And given the cost of replacing sidewalks, that was going to mean at least several thousands of dollars out of pocket per property owner.

I learned about this online, from a San Francisco newspaper. As you might expect, all they did was post a 10-inch (probably more like seven) inverted pyramid story about it. Which is what you would produce if you were putting the story in print. But that’s the wrong way to go about it online. The news organization could have created a much more valuable offering. But they didn’t, probably because it never occurred to them they should rethink how to deliver this story online vs. how they would have done it in print.

So let’s do that now. Pretend, for starters, that you had never grown up in the print world, that you had grown up in the digital world. Now ask yourself, as a “digital native”: How would you do a story online about the city’s plans to perform sidewalk inspections?

Would you, perhaps, include an interactive map, showing which streets the city was going to be inspecting when?

Presumably the city had a schedule of where their inspectors were going to be when. Why wouldn’t you, as a service to your readers, post a map where homeowners could click their streets and find out when the inspectors would be there? That way they would know whether they needed to start gathering their money now or whether they had a few months before their notice would come.

Would you include a calculator, to help homeowners calculate how much replacing their sidewalk was going to cost?

Sidewalks in San Francisco are made up of squares. Contractors generally tabulate the cost of a job by multiplying the number of squares to be replaced by a standard price-per-square. An online calculator would allow readers to plug in the number of broken squares outside their homes and have it spit out a ballpark figure for how much the job would cost.

These are just a few, tiny, tiny examples of how news organizations might offer a product online that readers would find truly valuable—one that, if all the news were built this way—readers might indeed think was worth laying down a few pennies for.

So this is the point: The news business does not have a future online unless it rethinks how it does news online. You can talk about making people pay, but until you’ve created something people might be willing to pay for, such discussions are a waste of time.

Which is why Walter Isaacson—and others who think and advocate like him—are doing journalism a grave disservice. The more time we collectively spend talking about whether readers should pay for journalism before we’ve created something that they’d want to pay for, the more energy we’re wasting and the longer it’s going to take to find the future of journalism.

* “Offering” is a term used in the business world to describe the thing you’re putting out in the world that you want people to pay for. A Happy Meal is an offering. An oil change is an offering. A 5-day cruise with buffets included but drinks extra is an offering. Businesses spend a lot of time figuring out what should be in their offering in order to create something that people want (in order to maximize number of customers) and will pay for (in order to, at a minimum, break even or, better, make a healthy profit).

Timesmen in the Twilight Zone

2009-02-17T12:45:00.000-08:00

New York had a short squib a while back on how Gay Talese is working with Leslie Gelb on a documentary about the New York Times' "struggles in the digital age." Talese's quotes are a case study in the faulty thinking that's hobbling journalism's ability to find its way forward.

Let's go through them, one by one. And, to help make the point, let's imagine that, instead of a journalist at the turn of this century, he's a horse-and-buggyman at the turn of the last one, when the automobile came on the scene, and see what his quotes would have looked like.

New York: Why are you doing this documentary?

Talese today:

“[The documentary is] about why the Times is having difficulty attracting readers when in my opinion it’s still a very good paper, and about the difficulty of convincing young people to read it."

Horse-and-buggyman:

"We're trying to understand why we're having a hard time getting young people to drive buggies, when we still have so many fine horses and solid buggies."

New York: Is it because young people are reading the paper online? / Is it because young people are driving automobiles?

Talese today:

“We’re not interested in their Website. We’re interested in our insights as veterans of old-fashioned journalism.”

Horse-and-buggyman:

"We're not interested in their automobiles. We're interested in our insights as veteran horse and buggymen."

New York: Do you read the Times site occasionally? / Do you ever take trips in automobiles?

Talese today:

"Never, and I never will. I don’t even have a cell phone. I don’t deal with the technology. I don’t even know how to go into the Web. Maybe Gelb will do it. I insist on being with the people I’m writing about.”

Horse-and-buggyman:

"Never, and I never will. I've also never ridden in a train. And I have no interest in those flying machines either. I insist on having an initimate relationship with my mode of conveyance."

Am I getting my point across? Talese and others who think like him need to, put simply, get over it. Yes, the New York Times is a fine newspaper. But it's a newspaper. It doesn't matter how good it is. Its days are over. Those who care about journalism, and journalism done well, must let go of the thing that performed such a valuable service in the past, and of which they were masters, and use all their insights and intellectual power to figure out how to do all of this using the tools of the future.

Photo courtesy of: Welfl. Creative Commons license.

How to get 6MM views without really trying

2009-02-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

Sports Illustrated's website had an amazing 5.7 million video views in just two days after launching the 2009 swimsuit issue.* That's got to amount to a significant chunk of advertising change.

There's a lesson in here for news sites. Granted, it's not a particularly high-minded one. But it's an important one nonetheless: Post information (would it be better if I put that in quotes: "information"?) on your site that people want, and get traffic that pays for the other stuff--the stuff that, yes, is important, but that, let's face it, is a little like oat bran: necessary for the smooth functioning of a system, but not always the stuff you're chomping at the bit to get at.

If you aspire to higher things, like uncovering secret CIA prisons or even simply holding your local officials accountable, the idea that your news organization might have to devote resources to such, um, lowbrow activities as stories about (or better yet, photos and video of) sexy women rolling around in the sand might make you recoil. "But surely," you might argue, "if we're a news organization, why should we have to lower ourselves to stunts like this?"

Because that's where the money comes from to pay for your investigative reporting, or even just your daily beat reporting. Cold, hard truth.

After all, why do you think Sports Illustrated even has a swimsuit edition? Why do newspapers have movie listings, or recipes, or, for goodness sake, that thick auto section that's almost nothing but ads?

There is a way to make news pay online. You just have to think in terms of the 80 / 20 rule: What's the 20% of content that's going to pay for the other 80%?

In fact, if I were to screw my evil marketing director hat on good, I might even propose that news organizations set up a dedicated Department of Juicy Content That Draws Clicks, instead of requiring editors from the traditional world of journalism to have to think this stuff up. After all, if you're going to do it, you might as well hand it over to folks (ex-Maxim staffers perhaps?) who are going to give it everything they've got.

* Via The Media's Thriving, via PaidContent.

. . .
What's that? Oh, you want the link to the SI swimsuit videos? You sure? OK, here you go. :)
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009_swimsuit/video/jarah-mariano.html

College journalists are mutinying

2009-02-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

Student journalists can't stand it anymore. They say their j-school profs are out-of-touch and incapable of properly preparing them for the future that awaits them. So they're mutinying. In a manner of speaking.

Next weekend (Feb. 22), College Journ is having a "Bring a professor chat" on ways to modernize college journalism curricula.

"We’re not just suggesting, but demanding an education that prepares us for the real world of 21st-century journalism."

That from the organizers.

Smart, smart, smart. And telling. The subject of whether j-schools are doing a good job preparing their students for the future comes up every now and then in the journo blogosphers. Looks like it's reaching a tipping point.

Photo courtesy of Frodo Babbs. Creative Commons license.

The inmates are running the asylum

2009-02-13T17:50:00.000-08:00

Charlie Rose hosted a segment on the future of newspapers earlier this week. The guests? Someone from the Wall Street Journal, someone from the Daily News, and the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time.*

What's wrong with this picture?

If you were doing a story on the future of the prison industry, would you only invite prison administrators? Or would you invite people from think tanks or wall street analysts or people who were experimenting with innovative methods of incarcerating and reforming convicted criminals?

To find the future of the news business, we have to stop looking to the inmates.** We need to understand that the answers might come from -- probably will come from -- people whose worldviews have not been shaped by the system in need of reform.

* WSJ: Robert Thomson; Daily News: Mort Zuckerman; CNN/Time: Walter Isaacson.

** No pun intended. The title of this post comes from a book of the same name, a classic in the world of software design, about why technology products designed and built by software engineers without input from the outside world result in devices no one can actually use.

Photo courtesy of insunlight. Creative Commons license.

The best newspaper websites are probably not the best news sites

2009-02-06T15:06:00.001-08:00

What's wrong with this picture? No, not the one on the right. What's wrong with the fact that the NewspaperProject.org -- they of the Super Bowl-related ad proclaiming the greatness of newspapers -- today touted a summary of the Top Ten Best Newspaper Websites?

Answer: It's great that the creators of this list (Internet strategists The Bivings Group) are finding good stuff at newspaper websites. But it would have been a lot more helpful to the news business if they'd created a list of the Top Ten Best Sites Delivering News.

Draft that second list, and you'll find a lot of great insights about how to do news online.

But draft only the first list, and all you're going to see are what newspapers are doing online. This is a flawed data sample. Not just because newspapers aren't the only ones doing news online. But because newspapers actually bring biases to their work that probably both get in the way of finding the best possible ways of doing news online and that also lead them to create things that might look good to newspaper folks, but probably are orthagonal to what readers actually value.

This isn't to say that newspapers aren't doing good stuff online. It's just to say that:

If you want to find the future, you first have to get out of the box.

Photo courtesy of thousand names. Creative Commons license.

If you have to tell people you're cool...

2009-02-03T18:50:00.000-08:00

A consortium of newspaper execs is apparently running an ad in newspapers, the thrust of which is: "We're not actually dead yet."

The problem with this, as anyone who's ever been to high school knows, if you have to announce you're cool. . . well, you know, you're probably not.

On the plus side, at least they have a blog. The purpose of the newly launched consortium, called NewspaperProject.org, is, according to their blog, "to support a constructive exchange of information and ideas about the future of newspapers." If they have a blog, at least they get the first principle of the new world -- that it involves having a conversation with people outside your walls.

Let's hope they're listening.

(Via AgencySpy)

The media is thriving

2009-01-31T12:51:00.000-08:00

There's a new Twitter feed in town you might want to check out: The Media is Thriving.

It's a riff, of course, on The Media is Dying, the dismal feed that chronicles the daily demise of newspapers and the like.

The Media is Thriving is the brainchild of Rick Bass, co-founder of The Barbarian Group, a digital services company headquartered in Boston. Bass found The Media is Dying terribly depressing. Not to mention, horribly misguided.

The media isn't dying, he says. It's thriving. And his feed seeks to prove it, with observations like:

The fact that online newspaper uniques are going up.

A quote from Reuters' CEO: "I have no idea what journalism will look like in five years except that it will be different than now. That's a great thing." (emphasis mine)

Rosy reports from various media companies showing revenue going up.

It's worth noting that when Bass says "media", he means all media, not just journalism. But this should be no less encouraging for those in the news biz. The data demonstrates that people will consume media, when it's presented in a compelling form. This doesn't mean all Britney all the time. Or that it has to be dumbed down. Or presented by anime characters (not that that would be a bad thing, necessarily.)

It just means that those in the news business would do well to study and learn what forms of media are soaring, and how the news biz might adapt lessons from those fields into their own biz, to make their product (the news) more compelling.

For example: What can you learn from how YouTube manages to suck you in to figure out how to serve up content on a news site? Who hasn't, after all, gone to YouTube to check out a single video forwarded to them by a friend, only to be sitting in front of a screen an hour later, checking out the 15th video they had never intended to watch? How awesome would it be to suck readers into your news site the same way?

Newspapers are dying. Their presentation format no longer works for most people. But media is not dying. It's thriving. Journos who seek to learn from media in general will figure out how to create a product that will carry journalism into the future.

Image courtesy of FreeRangeLife. Creative Commons license.

How the New York Times can save itself

2009-01-30T22:34:00.000-08:00

The New York Times is struggling, right? Its parent company just accepted a $250 million investment from a Mexican businessman. And now there are reports it's looking to sell its share of the Boston Red Sox in order to raise cash. That, after news that its revenue for the last quarter of 2008 fell almost 50% over the comparable period the previous year.

As inconceivable as it sounds, the Times could actually go under.

But it doesn't have to.

There is, in fact, a simple way it can save itself: Go open source.

The Times should lay itself open on the table. Put it all out there. What's working. What's not. Where revenues are coming from. Where they're not. What areas are getting traffic. What isn't. Lay everything out in the open that right now is only discussed in closed board rooms.

Then, invite the world to share ideas about how to get the Times on more solid footing. What should get more coverage? What should get less? How should they rejigger the entire format of the newspaper, how should they integrate social media, how should they use interaction with readers to change the way they report? Where should they look for new revenue streams? What current streams should they jettison?

Do that, and I promise you, the ideas will roll in.

Sure, some of those ideas will be rubbish. Some will be ingenious, but ultimately unworkable. And some will hold the kernels of the solution.

Why not do this? What does the Times have to lose? Nothing, right? I mean, if they're going down anyway, why not open themselves up and see if some smart soul out there -- or souls, plural, more likely -- has a brainstorm.

As the good folks at Wikinomics say, when it comes to innovation, when it comes to creating something entirely new:

"Increasingly, you should assume the best people live outside your organization."

[emphasis mine]

In other words, the folks at the New York Times may be the best out there at beat reporting, investigative journalism, and even long-form narrative (via the Magazine). But when it comes to figuring out the future of journalism, the simple odds are that the smartest people who can help them figure out how to move forward are not within the walls of the Grey Lady. Not even, necessarily, within the walls of any consulting firms they might have retained to help them. They are somewhere out there.

So why not solicit their help? You'd tap the best people for your investigative teams, wouldn't you? Why not do the same for, well, your very survival?

So what do they have to lose?

Well, there is one thing. They'll lose their seat on Mount Olympus. They'll lose their status as the "be all and end all" of the journalism world. They'll have to admit that they're human, just like the rest of us.

The sad thing is, this isn't really a big deal. Anyone who's ever fallen from grace--a high school sports star who gets to college and realizes she's not really all that, a middle manager who flubs and gets demoted back to individual contributor, a parent who messes up big in front of their kid--anyone who's ever been through that knows two things: a) it totally sucks and b) it's never the end of the world. In many cases, in fact, it opens up whole new vistas.

So, come on New York Times. It's time to do the thing that, at some point in life, everyone finds themselves having to do: Ask for help.

Photo courtesy of FreeRangeLife. Creative Commons license.

The perils of not staying current with your readers

2009-01-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

"If you don't stay current with users, they invent around you."

More wisdom from the authors of Wikinomics.

Folks in the newspaper world might not think much of the new news organizations cropping up, like the West Seattle Blog or the "-ist" clan" (SFist / Gothamist / Austinist etc...), but the fact that places like these are vibrant sources of information for their communities means that they are staying current with something that readers value, and the traditional media ignores (or, moreover, disdains) them at their own peril.

Photo courtesy of TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³. Creative Commons license.

The media needs to do a better job of reporting on itself

2009-01-27T16:18:00.000-08:00

In an article in Adbusters about the state of journalism, titled "State of Emergency," Sean Condon writes:

"If the media wants to find a solution, it's going to have to start doing a better job of reporting on the problem."

I couldn't agree more.

One of the things that has baffled me the most is how traditional reporters who can provide the most incisive analyses of other industries often seem fundamentally incapable of viewing their own clearly.

If they were able to view the newspaper industry clearly, we wouldn't be having a lot of the debates that are currently going on in journalism circles. Instead, we'd all be able to see--and agree on--the following things:

Slashing jobs without revising your product strategy has always been a direct path toward collapse.

Continuing to produce the same product when your customer base (ie: the demand for your product) is shrinking is similarly a direct path toward obsolescence.

Declaring you are a public good entitles you to nothing. (If it did, we'd have fully funded health care, education, and job training programs.)

So why doesn't the traditional media take as cold-eyed approach to the shortcomings and challenges within their own industry as they do with, say, the current crisis in the automotive industry?

It's not malfeasance or misdirection. Instead, it's simply human nature not to be able to regard something clearly in which you are personally vested. Some journalists so deeply believe certain "truths" about the newspaper world, that they can't see that those truths are more mythology than reality. For others, the problem is that their identities are too wrapped up in a very specific idea of what it means to be a journalist. To have to look that idea in the face, and accept that some of it is (irrevocably) broken, means having to let go of that thing that has defined them and their place in the world.

These are perfectly human responses. But from a pragmatic point of view, they are hampering traditional journalists' ability to clearly understand what's happening to their industry, and thus, armed with that clear understanding, to help it move forward.

So what can traditional reporters working at newspapers do to develop the ability to see--and report on--their industry clearly?

Put the fear on the shelf.
Seeing the industry for what it is is scary for someone living inside it. You'll feel fear just looking at it. Maybe even panic. Accept it, but don't let it get in your way. Feel the fear. Put it in a box. Put the box on a shelf in the back of a very deep closet. And leave it there. It's a natural feeling. But it's not going to do you any good right now.

Ask yourself: If this were a different industry, what questions would I be asking?
If this were the health care industry, the automotive industry, the industry that produces incandescent light bulbs, what questions would I be asking to determine whether the industry had legs, whether it could survive, and what other industries were emerging to challenge it? And then ask those questions.

Ask yourself: If this were a different industry, who would I be talking to?
Who would I be interviewing to get their reading on the state of that industry? Then get their reading. And give that reading as much credence as you would give to their reading on any other industry.

And then write the story as if you were writing about another industry.
If it helps you quell the fear, and get through the first draft, substitute "the automotive industry" for "the journalism industry" and write what you've learned. You might be surprised by what you produce. And you more than likely end up doing a huge service to everyone--your colleagues and those on the outside--who are trying to figure out how to enable journalism to survive, even if newspapers themselves are dying.

Photo courtesy of Gabriela Camerotti. Creative Commons license.

Data Point of One: Why podcasts trump newspapers

2009-01-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

A friend in Seattle recently observed that, despite having grown up with a newspaper-reading habit, she couldn’t feel particularly distressed about the pending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (The Hearst Corp. announced earlier this month that it would cease publishing a print edition of the paper in 60 days if it couldn't find a buyer.) My friend cares about the news. And she’s just the kind of accomplished, business school grad, tech industry veteran you’d expect to be interested in public affairs. But the fact is, she hasn’t subscribed to a local newspaper in years. The newspaper format just doesn’t work for her. With three kids under 10, the idea of having a window of time where she could actually sit down and read a newspaper is ludicrous.

What she does instead is listen to podcasts. Specifically, Slate’s weekly "Political Gabfest." Podcasts work for her. She can listen to them while folding laundry, exercising at the gym, or toodling around in the car on errands. Not only that, she actually looks forward to listening to them. This isn’t a “take your vitamins” kind of habit. She enjoys listening to Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz go back and forth on the week’s events. It’s sort of like grabbing a cup of coffee with a fun group of friends, she said.

Newspapers aren’t dying because people don’t care about the news. Newspapers are dying because the format doesn’t work for the average person. News organizations that can figure out how to deliver the news in formats that work for their target audience will find a future. Organizations that can figure out how to create a compelling offering that “readers” are excited to dive into will find a future. Organizations that continue to insist that news should be delivered in 500-word, inverted pyramid stories on pieces of paper that require you to devote your full visual attention to them them probably won’t.

It’s a mindset thing. Organizations that can break out of thinking that news is only news if it looks like your father’s news are doomed. Organizations that say to themselves, “How can we deliver this information in a way that fits people’s lifestyles today?” are on their way to finding the future of news.

Photo credit. Creative Commons license.

Why startups will find the future and newspapers won't

2008-12-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

"He concluded it would be easier to start from scratch rather than try and change a longstanding culture."

This from a story about a Philadelphian banker who left a name-brand financial institution to start the first green bank on the East Coast. Green banks work on "triple bottom lines." In addition to evaluating the financial bottom line of a loan, the also consider the borrower's impact on the environment and on people.

Such an idea runs counter to the aforementioned "longstanding culture" of most banks. Banks are traditionally about making money. To ask them to potentially compromise their ability to reap the largest amount of money possible is anathema to their very programming. Which is why the Philadelphian decided to start his own venture, rather than try to make it work within the walls of the name-brand institution.

The same could be said about the world of journalism. Much of what needs to be done to find the future of news runs directly counter to core principles in the newspaper world. The idea that news first and foremost belongs on newsprint, for example. That stories should be written in inverted pyramid-style. That the reporter is the voice of authority. That the news organization is in control.

Sometimes longstanding cultures are simply too entrenched to enable the requisite revolutionary ideas to grow and flourish. Which is why the future of news will likely be discovered by the succession of startups that are already emerging, rather than by newspapers themselves.

Photo courtesy of FreeRangeLife. Creative Commons License.

E&P got it wrong again

2008-12-26T15:48:00.000-08:00

Joe Mathewson's column in Editor & Publisher a few days ago argues that a non-profit business model might be key to ensuring newspapers' survival.

Sadly, he's got it all wrong.

Mathewson is not necessarily wrong about the non-profit model. I don't have any immediate thoughts on the viability of the non-profit model of journalism. Instead, he's wrong because he thinks that the source of the newspaper industry's woes today lies in its economic model.

It doesn't.

The source of the industry's woes lies in the fact that it no longer creates a product readers want to consume. Yes, finances are contributing to the industry's decline. No one's arguing that declining ad revenues are not a factor. It's just that they're not the determining factor. The determining factor is the product itself.

The fact that Mathewson doesn't get this is encapsulated in the following comment: "A not-for-profit newspaper, of course, should have a vital online version." As if this online thingy were an afterthought, an appendage, a nice giveaway. This is archaic thinking.

A visionary thinker would put it the other way around: Increasingly, consumers like to get their news online. A new news organization should explore innovative ways of delivering news online -- and continue to print a dead-tree edition only if it can prove that the dead-tree edition has a sufficiently large customer base to merit its production.

It's a point I keep hammering away at: Until news leaders adopt the correct mindset, not only are they incapable of helping the news business find its future, they are a downright impediment to any progress.

Photo courtesy of Toots Fontaine. Creative Commons License.

A practice worth repeating

2008-12-26T13:16:00.001-08:00

Here's a practice worth repeating: Voice of San Diego education reporter Emily Alpert is making a deal with readers: "Post questions you have about the SD school system, and I'll spend my Fridays tracking down the answers."

It's a great news strategy because it:

Produces better coverage. Alpert & the Voice of San Diego get tipped to all sorts of interesting goings-on worth reporting on that they might not have heard of otherwise.

Builds loyalty -- and thus increases readership. Anytime you allow someone to participate in what you're doing, you build a sense of ownership in them, and that ownership builds commitment to stick with you.

Increases ad impressions. It's a system that requires repeat visits (once to post the question and once, at least, to get the answer). That ups the number of eyeballs hitting the site.

To make it work, however, Alpert is going to need to do the following:

Track down as many answers as possible. Asking people to participate then not delivering on your promise is a sure way to turn off readers.

Deliver high-quality answers. Not just perfunctory statements from spokespeople. But genuine explanations to the issues readers want answered. Nothing will turn readers off faster than getting the same boiled over statements they could have gotten themselves.

Sure, Alpert will probably get more questions than she can possibly answer. And getting high-quality answers also takes time. So how should Alpert negotiate these challenges in ways that build loyalty?

Communicate with her readers about what she can and cannot do. Behind every reader is a reasonable human being. Human beings much prefer getting feedback, even if it's not the news they wanted, than silence. Ever been on a plane that's sitting at the gate long after its scheduled departure time? Does your blood pressure go up with every minute that passes with no news from the crew about the reason for the delay? And does it go down the minute someone explains what's going on, even if it brings bad news, like it's going to take another 45 minutes to fix whatever the problem is? Same thing with this. As long as Alpert communicates back what she can and cannot do, readers will be happy. But not giving any of the backstory will provoke discontent.

Enlist readers to help her answer. Encourage other readers in the know to post whatever they know. At a minimum, it'll turbo-charge Alpert's own reporting, helping her focus her efforts on the places where the answers lie. At most, it might even result in the answer itself, saving Alpert from having to do any groundwork herself.

Alpert's strategy is a great example of how moving news on to the Internet is not about just throwing the same old content that appears in print form out into the ethernet -- but it's about using the specific capabilities of the new media to produce better coverage and increase readership.

Journalism is alive and well

2008-12-22T14:48:00.001-08:00

"Journalism is alive and well. It has merely moved beyond newspapers. It's not about the Internet. It's about better, faster more appropriate ways to communicate."

-- A comment from a visitor to The Journalism Iconoclast (not a bad place to hang out, if you're interested in the future of news)

Photo courtesy of d'n'c'. Creative Commons license.

Newspapers are over, but news is not

2008-12-16T07:41:00.000-08:00

The Chicago Tribune is going into bankruptcy. Detroit papers are reportedly considering limiting home delivery. The Cincinnati Enquirer is the latest to announce layoffs.

For the last few years, journalists have protested that, all signs to the contrary, newspapers are so essential there's no way they could disappear. But there is no other way to interpret the above events, except that newspapers are disappearing.

Don't believe me? Pull out a piece of paper. Plot these latest developments on a graph. Then plot all the other recent developments in the newspaper industry: declining readership, plummeting revenue, layoffs. Plot a trend line. And now ask yourself: Where is the arrow headed? It's not ambiguous. The end point is the disappearance of newspapers.

But this is not cause for despair. The disappearance of newspapers is not the same thing as the end of news.

This is a difficult point to grasp, if you are one of the folks who believe that newspapers and the news are the same thing. But they're not, no more so than "horse and buggy" is the same thing as "transportation." Newspapers are merely one kind of delivery vehicle for news. The news will continue, even if this particular delivery vehicle disappears.

"Really?" you ask. "If you're right, show us the new vehicles, the 'motor cars' that will replace the 'horse and buggy' newspapers."

Ah, yes. Well that's the thing. The new vehicles haven't been invented yet.

Sure, there are a bunch of experiments out there. Voice of San Diego. spot.us. outside.in. Some people look at them and mistakenly believe that, because they are the only alternatives out there, they by definition constitute the future forms. They look at those incarnations, see all the ways in which they fall short of what newspapers provided, and conclude that their position is correct: Newspapers are so essential they cannot fail, because only they can provide the public services so essential to a democracy.

But this is faulty thinking.

To look at Voice of San Diego et al and believe they are the final forms is to misunderstand how innovation happens. You don't go from one fully designed form to another. Rather, as you evolve from one to the other, you go through a series of iterations, a series of experiments, a series of throwing stuff up against the wall and seeing what sticks. From those series of experiments, from those series of learnings, you eventually develop the final forms.

Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley understands this. Very few of the ideas we had about how to use the Internet back in the 1990s--and the websites and businesses we developed based on those notions--still exist today. (Pets.com, anyone? Space.com? ExciteAtHome?)

But every website that does exist today is a descendent of those experiments. Every website, every contemporary use of the Internet is built on the learnings of those prior experiments.

And so it will happen in the news business. The new forms won't appear before newspapers die completely. (I actually believe it will take 20 years before the new forms are fully baked.) But the new forms will appear, eventually.

Again, it's experience in a place like Silicon Valley that gives one that certitude. New forms always emerge to satisfy needs. And there is a desire for news. Just not in the form that it's currently being delivered. People once liked and found value in the newspaper delivery vehicle. Just as they once liked horses and buggies. But no more. The old delivery vehicle no longer meets readers' needs and expectations. Which is why they are abandoning the form, even as the need persists. And given the persistence of the need, entrepreneurs and other problem-solving types will continue tinkering with forms until they figure out the new ones.

And that's why there's no need to worry. Newspapers are dying. But the news will survive. Just not immediately. And definitely not in any form we are used to seeing.

Photo courtesy of mrpattersonsir. Creative Commons license.

Could we please stop using the word “blogger”?

2008-12-15T20:24:00.000-08:00

In a recent post on the Pulitzer decision to open its awards to online-only news organizations, MediaShift pointed to Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall’s receipt of the Polk Award earlier this year, saying he was “the first blogger” to win such a prestigious award.

To which I reply, could we please stop using the word “blogger”?

Mostly because the term is loaded, and more importantly because it is inaccurate—if we define inaccurate as “incorrectly describing the thing being described.”

The term “blogger” is loaded because it still evokes images of dubiously informed pajama pundits pounding away at their keyboards in the middle of the night, offering little real value to the world of journalism, other, perhaps, than alternative ways of looking at news reported by others.

But as more and more serious journalism is being distributed using blog platforms, continuing to use the term does a disservice to us all. It’s not just that its somewhat dismissive connotations are quasi-disrespectful to the folks who are not “dubiously informed pajama pundits.” It’s also that using the term perpetuates the notion that most people who communicate via blogging platforms are indeed such folks when, in fact, they are not necessarily so. Perpetuating those incorrect impressions gets in the way of understanding the actual—and valuable work—that many journalists are doing online. A journalist distributing journalism online should be called a “journalist.” Only then can we all understand—and appreciate—that what they’re doing is, in fact, journalism.

If that’s not enough to convince you, how about the simple point of accuracy? The word “blog” describes a delivery mechanism, just as the terms “newspaper”, “TV”, and “radio” all describe delivery mechanisms. The term “blog” does not describe the activity performed by a person using that mechanism. Just as someone who appears on TV may do so in any number of contexts—actor, talk show host, reporter—a person who uses a blog to communicate to the world may be performing any number of activities—opinionating, traveloguing, reporting. So to use the word “blogger” to refer to someone who uses blogging technology is as inaccurate—and potentially ridiculous, if you actually think about it—as it would be to refer to someone who communicates via TV as a “TVer”.

So here’s my plea. Starting in 2009, could we retire the word “blogger” and, instead, simply label people using blogs according to the specific work they are doing? Call a journalist a journalist, a pundit a pundit, and people who do both (like Marshall) "a journalist and pundit."

Photo courtesy of procsilas. Creative Commons license.

The single essential failure

2008-12-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

"If the automakers' difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, Dec. 8, 2008

There's been a lot of ire in the journalism world about Jeff Jarvis blaming journalists for their current fate. But I have to agree with him. Newspapers' difficulties today can be chalked up to the same essential failure as the carmakers': The belief they could avoid change.

The difference, mainstream journalists will argue, is that journalism was producing a quality product. Unlike Detroit, which kept producing gas guzzlers when the tide was turning toward more fuel efficient vehicles, the mainstream media kept producing important, democracy-foundational journalism.

I will argue that the difference is not so great.

Both have continued to produce products that customers increasingly don't want. In journalism's case, the mainstream media may continue to be producing "important news," but it's not in the form readers want. The same way Detroit continues to produce "transportation," but not in the form drivers want. So this is the point: It doesn't matter how "valuable" your product is. If your customers don't want it, your future is limited. To survive, you have to evolve.

This is how the traditional media failed. They believed they didn't have to change, because their product was so valuable. They were wrong. The world does need what they produce. But we need it in the form in which we'll consume it.

Photo courtesy of Ikhlasul Amal. Creative Commons license.

New media tools power coverage of Blagojevich scandal

2008-12-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog has a great piece on how community news site Windy City is using new media tools to turbo charge their coverage of the Blagojevich corruption schedule.

Two innovative tools they created to report on this story:

-- "Blagojevitter" -- a page that lists all Twitters with words "Blagojevich" or "Jesse Jackson" in them.

-- A word cloud of the federal complaint against Blagojevich. A word cloud is a visual representation of how frequently particular words are mentioned in a particular document. The more mentions the bigger the word. A quick glance at the word cloud tells you which words are used most frequently.

"So what?" you might ask. What does this really tell us? Neither is the equivalent of a straight news story that answers the questions Who, What, Where, When, and Why.

True. But they're still valuable. They're still worth providing for your readers. Here's why:

Blagojevitter

-- For journalists, think of this as a new kind of primary source. Just as going out and doing a bunch of "man on the street" interviews helps you understand what happened and what people think about it, reading these tweets can help you build a picture of what's happening and help you get a read on what your community thinks about it.

-- For readers, this is fun and interesting. Sure, they won't get out of reading the tweets the same thing they'll get out of reading a standard news story. But some readers like this primary source stuff. As a Washington Times reporter recently told me, the rise of phenomena like YouTube have made the average person on the street increasingly used to reading and watching unfiltered information. It's building an appetite for raw information. News organizations should start thinking about how to provide that.

Word cloud

-- As E-Media Tidbits pointed out, "This approach can provide insight into a document -- even on a subconscious level. For instance, this image makes it obvious that the Chicago Tribune is a significant topic of the complaint."

-- Again, those insights are important both for journalists, who can treat it as a primary source, and readers who are hungry for raw information.

The fact that both of these are valuable even though they aren't "real" news stories illustrates a final point: In the new world, traditional news articles are no longer the sole offering of merit.

Rather, any piece of information you can put out there that helps provide insight into a news story or feeds you readers' hunger--whether it looks like a traditional story or not--is a value service to your readers.

Screen shot taken from Windy City Blagojevich word cloud.

The need to move from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance

2008-12-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

I recently interviewed techPresident.com and Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Andrew Rasiej for a story on how new media turbo charged coverage of the 2008 presidential election. He made an important observation in that conversations: Many newspapers operate online with a scarcity mindset, when they really should have one of abundance.

For example, on Nov. 5, the day after the historic presidential election, the NY Times posted only a handful of photographs from the previous day—when they very well could have posted a slew.
I remember noticing that as well. I’d been in Oakland on election night. The next day I went looking for photographs of celebrations around the country. I wanted to see if they had been as wild as Oakland’s. (In fact, as I soon learned, many were much more wild.) I remember subconsciously being surprised at how few pictures the NY Times had up on its site. If ever there were a day to just throw out pictures galore, this was it.

This is the scarcity mindset. When you only have a certain number of physical newspaper pages, there are only a certain amount of photographs you can publish. So you get in the habit of choosing only the best and running with those.
But on the Web, bandwidth is limitless. So not only can you post a gazillion photos, should you choose to do so, but—and this is important—your readers actually expect you to—just as I expected the NY Times to.

Moving into the abundance mindset, and posting as much content as possible,* will help ensure the future of news organizations for two reasons.

-- It generates revenue. Think about how many more ad impressions the NY Times would have gotten from me—and people like me, hungry for images from that transformational day—had they posted a slew of photographs.

-- It allows you to meet your readers' expectations. Not making more content available, on the other hand, violates expectations, and that’s a very bad thing to do. It irritates people, decreases their loyalty, and reduces the chance they’ll keep coming back.

* A quick note on what I mean by “more” content. I don’t mean more stories necessarily. That’s unsustainable in these days of slashed staffs. “More” content doesn’t have to be about creating a lot of new work. Rather, it’s about using as much as possible of what you already have—photographs, interview transcripts, even interview audio turned into podcasts, plus all those little observations, behind-the-scenes happenings, and little nuggets that would never make it into a formal “story”, much less merit a story of their own, but that nevertheless could conceivably be of interest to someone, and therefore is worth throwing up on the Web as a standalone item.

Photo courtesy of Somerslea. Creative Commons license.

It's not about finding a new way to pay for the same old thing

2008-12-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, I wrote about how the SF Chron's editor is thinking about jacking up the paper's newsstand price in order to cover operating costs. Today, I'm reading a post on PaidContent.org about how maybe some newspapers should convert to non-profit status as a means of ensuring their viability.

Come on, people. This is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The problem is not the business model. It's the product offering. How do we know this? Declining readership.

If readership were staying level--or, better yet, soaring--then you'd know you had the right product on your hands. And in that case, yes, tinkering with the business model would be the right tactic to take to ensure one's survival.

But declining readership tells a different story. It means there are fewer customers out there who want what you're selling. There's not a single business school out there that will teach the principle: "When you have a declining customer base, fiddle with the price structure." Instead, they'll say, "When you have a declining customer base, you have a problem with your product." Solution: Go back to the drawing board and rethink your product.

Journalists and news observers who continue to point to the business model as the source of what ails us are doing this business a disservice. What we need to do is to rethink the newspaper altogether. We need to go back to the drawing board, to develop a real understanding of what our potential customer base (ie: all the potential readers in our communities) want out of a "news" organization--and how they want to receive news--and then come up with a new product offering altogether.

Photo courtesy of Toots Fontaine. Creative Commons license.

Times Extra: An Assessment

2008-12-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

The New York Times just launched "Times Extra", an "alternative" home page that appends to some stories a list of links for related stories at other websites.

The home page basically looks the same, except for the new list of links under certain stories, like the one at right.

What's future-of-news-y about it:

-- It embraces the mindset that "we aren't the only ones who know what's going on." In the early days of the Internet, the name of the game was attracting people to your site and keeping them there. Today, it's about helping your readers find the best stuff out there, irrespective of whether it's on your site or not.

This might seem counter-intuitive. If a reader leaves your site to go elsewhere, aren't you losing those ever-important eyeballs--and consequently your bill-paying ad impressions? In the short term, yes. In the long term, no. A site that declares, implicitly if not explicitly, "we know we don't have a monopoly on good information and interesting stories, and we want to help you find the best out there" builds trust. And trust these days is what builds loyalty. And loyalty is what keeps people coming back to your site. So you might lose a few ad impressions today by letting your readers go elsewhere. But that will more than pay for itself in the ad impressions you'll get in the future when they come back, because they've come to see you as the trusted source for news, wherever that news lies.

What's old-school about it

-- Not much.

(Though I'm not crazy about the green font -- It's hard to read -- But that's a nit. And it's just bad design, not old school -- It's OK. The Times folks will figure it out and improve later -- No need to get everything right the first time out of the gate.)

What else I'd like to see / What else I'd like to know

-- I'd like to know how the Times is choosing the links. Are editors hand-picking them? Or are they being automatically generated through some kind of bot?

One of the links listed under the Obama story in the image above takes you to a blog called Slog. That's cool. But who's "Slog"? If you told me the link to that site had been hand-curated, I'd have confidence it was worth my time. So would I if you told me it came from a bot built to find the best items out there. But right now, I'm wondering whether that list is randomly generated. If so, that's bad news. Not only would the list not necessarily be helpful, it could actually send me to a bunch of time-wasting stories. In that case, the value of the list would plummets and the Times would lose my trust as a reliable source of good information. Lose my trust, and you lose my loyalty.

-- I'd like to see a behind-the-scenes blog from the experimenters at the NY Times, sharing with us what they're doing, why they're doing what they're doing, and what they're learning from it. They could answer the above question in that blog, for example. They could also report back on how readers are using Times Extra. How many people who try it stick with it (as opposed to convert back to the regular Times home page)? Which links seem to invite the most clicks? How quickly do people who leave come back?

Many companies already offer these kinds of behind-the-scenes looks. The Google team has one. So does the Google Earth team. In fact, Google has a whole slew of behind-the-scenes blogs for people who want to look under the hood at what the company is doing. The NY Times -- and indeed all journos who are experimenting with new forms of collecting and disseminating news -- should have blogs reporting on their efforts. It's the only way to speed up our collective learning and turbo-charge the innovation we need to in order to save this business of ours.

In praise of experimentation

2008-12-04T16:59:00.001-08:00

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof started Twittering in November.

Here’s what I love about it, as reflected in a tweet on Dec 3:

@sashak and @myoung Thanks for the welcome. I'm trying to avoid going extinct. Help teach me how to do this....--ndk

Kristof has no idea what he’s doing… and yet he’s trying it anyway. That’s the kind of mindset we need in the news business: Just try it and figure it out as you go.

Here’s the second thing I like about it: “Help teach me how to do this.”

Gone is the traditional journalistic “we know best” arrogance. (Not that I’m accusing Kristof of being arrogant. I've never met the guy, but he actually seems like one of the most down-to-earth journos out there.) In place of that distance-creating arrogance are:

a) The admission that he’s ignorant (or, put another way, a beginner),

b) A recognition that the folks out there can probably help us journos find our way to the future, and

c) A willingness to help them help us.

All of these are incredibly valuable mindsets for finding our way forward. Kristof's courageous dive into something he doesn't quite understand--but realizes might hold a key to the future--is a model to emulate.

Why the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble

2008-12-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Chronicle is in worse shape than I thought. Their editor, Ward Bushie, went on local public radio show "Forum" today to discuss the future of journalism in general and the Chron in particular, and his entire mindset left my jaw gaping open in incredulity. Showing an amazing lack of strategic sense, Bushie seemed to be saying he could only see two possible ways out of the hole: raise advertising rates or raise the cost of the paper.

Hmmm…. Talk about thinking "inside the box."

Bushie didn’t talk at all about possibly rethinking the paper—either the Chron itself or the idea of a newspaper in general. He apparently assumes that the Chron—or newspapers in general—should continue to provide the exact same product that they offer today (ie: the combined international/national/local/sports/business/home/life/entertainment package that they offer today). There was no: “Let’s go back to the drawing board and see where our competitive advantages lie and figure out what value we can deliver to our customers and then come up with a bunch of potential alternative incarnations that we’d be able to knock out of the ballpark and support financially.”

Instead, Bushie spoke about potentially jacking up the price of the paper, which is 75 cents today. And what was his rationale for thinking this was a reasonable idea? Most cups of coffee are about $2, he said. And the New York Times already costs $1.50. (At least it does if you’re in California. Maybe not on the streets of NYC.)

Such faulty thinking is flabbergasting. A thing isn’t worth more, just because other things are worth more. A thing is worth what your customer thinks it’s worth--what they’re willing to pay for it. Given the plummeting readership in newspapers in general, I sincerely doubt that the average San Franciscan would be willing to pay more for something they are increasingly less interested in.

The other revelation that further called into doubt Bushie's ability to lead the Chron into the future was that he repeatedly spoke about how much the paper been talking to “their readers” to find out what “their readers” want. But these, in fact, are the wrong people to be talking to. In order to survive, newspapers need to enlarge their customer base. Newspapers like the Chron should be talking to people who don’t already read (and buy) the newspaper. They should be trying to figure out how to convert those people from non-customers into customers. Normally, I fully support talking to and designing for your customers. But not when your existing customers don’t form a sufficient base.

In short, Bushie’s mindset seems to be this:
“The Chron is a great paper. We should figure out how to continue to support it, in its current incarnation, though maybe with a few tweaks.”

But to survive—or rather, to grow into a thriving news entity—a newspaper’s mindset today needs to be:
“What sorts of news are the citizens of our community interested in? What portions of those can we be really good at delivering? And how can we deliver them in a way that the members of our community will consume them?”

The full interview (available for download) is here.

Image courtesy of AlbySpace. Creative Commons license.

I was wrong

2008-11-19T13:24:00.000-08:00

Last week I railed against newspaper CEOs and their Nov 14 confab at the American Press Institute on how to salvage their industry. It was the blind leading the blind, I said. How could these guys, who'd driven the newspaper business into the proverbial ditch, ever be the same folks who'd be capable of figuring our way out? A summit among them, I declared, was a waste of time.

Well, I was wrong.

I'm still going to hold on to my reservations about the CEOs themselves. I need to see concrete proof that they know what they're doing before I'm willing to give them a by. But Steve Miller and James Shlein, the turnaround specialists hired to lead the meeting, actually do seem to be on the right track. API published a summary of their recommendations. I have to admit that a lot of the things they're advocating are things I've called for myself.

Act like an entrepreneur; stop thinking first about why a new approach won't work.

I talked about the value of experimentation and not waiting until something is fully baked--even at the risk of failure--in this post about how to think like a designer and this post about two newspapers' different approaches to using Twitter.

Create a portfolio of initiatives; recognize that some will fail and kill those quickly.

"If I were a newspaper publisher today" talks about the need to create just such a portfolio.

Don't wait for every data point before taking action. "Ready, fire, aim" should be the operating principle.

In "How to think about the new WaPo political aggregation site," I noted how polished the new "Political Browser" site was and indicated that that was a red flag for me. A polished design could indicate that someone thinks they've figured it out when, really, we all need to be in "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks mode."

Use downsizing as a tool when necessary to achieve a larger strategy, not simply as a cost-cutting goal.

I haven't really talked about this, but I totally agree. Downsizing without restrategizing just doesn't make any sense. If you're going to downsize, if you're going to leave yourself with fewer staff than you need to deliver a quality product, you need to rethink your product and come up with one that you can deliver with quality, given the amount of people you have.

Figure out how to leverage core competencies into new directions and new niches.

In "The end of news *as we know it*", I talked about how the demise of newspapers doesn't mean the demise of news. News will continue, but in new forms. The mission of people in the news business today needs to be to find those forms.

Be honest with employees, and get ideas from those on the front lines.

See my "How about Googling up?" post for ideas on how to leverage Google's "20% project" idea to get great ideas from the front lines.

Don't sit and cower and weep about your problems. Inspire.

In "Who, exactly, is the problem?" I talked about the need to put the recriminations aside and dive in and try to find the future.

Collaborate with outside entities that can bring expertise or resources.

Yup, agreed with that in "Getting ahead--and producing better journalism--by letting others help us." Also talked about how Dan Rather might have avoided getting fired, if he'd brought in the wisdom of the crowds before he put the Bush/National Guard memo story out into the world.

Pay attention to, and leverage, the brand.

I haven't addressed this, but I agree that, in the future, brand will be an important competitive advantage.

In sum, then, these strike me as extremely wise guidelines. Every news exec, whether on the business side or editorial, and, come to think of it, every person working in the news biz, should post this list on the wall next to their desk, fold it up and stick it in their wallets, and slap it on their bathroom mirror. And then they, we, all need to strive to live by these rules every day until we find the future of this crazy, struggling, but not hopeless business of ours.

Image courtesy of southtyrolean. Creative Commons license.

The surge in newspaper demand on Nov. 5 don't mean a thing

2008-11-17T14:01:00.000-08:00

When the news started coming out on November 5 that people were lining up to grab copies of newspapers the day after Barack Obama was swept into office, journalism discussion boards around the country lit up. "See!" they all said, in one way or another. "People really do want their newspapers."

Or, as Washington Post staff writer Paul Farhi put it in a letter "To newspaper readers everywhere," which was posted on Poynter: "Finally, You recognized something in me [the newspaper] again. Something that had been dormant all these years. That You needed me."

But they got it all wrong.

To back up a second. When you design a piece of software, or probably when you design anything, you draw up a list of "use cases." These are the scenarios in which you expect your users to need to, well, use the tool you're developing. From those use cases, you extract "requirements" (ie: the system needs to do X, the system needs to do Y). And from those, you decide how you're going to fashion the thing.

What happened on the Wednesday after election day was simply a use case--the use case of "I want a memento of this momentous occasion." That's a very different use case than "I want to get news." To draw a larger conclusion about the future of newspapers than simply that people wanted a keepsake in the wake of a dramatic event is like suggesting that Burl Ives (were he still alive today) has a recording career simply because people like to listen to a particular song of his around the holidays. It's faulty thinking, and it only keeps us from clearly understanding what it actually happening in this business (ie: fewer and fewer people want to get their news from dead trees) and even further from finding our way forward.

Someone Who's Bullish on the Future of Journalism

2008-11-14T16:18:00.000-08:00

"I'm sitting here at LaGuardia feeling absolutely bullish about the state of journalism."

Whoever said that has to be off their rocker, no?

Well, not exactly. David Cohn is an ambitious twenty-something journalist who's been hacking his way toward the future of news future. He's currently leading spot.us, a massive experiment in seeing if crowdfunding* can be used as a model to fund journalism. Previously, he teamed up with new media thought leader (& NYU J-School prof) Jay Rosen on New Assignment.Net, another project to explore potential new models for journalism. And before that, for those looking for traditional journalism cred, he wrote for Wired, SEED, and, yes, even the New York Times.

In a post on his DigiDave blog today, Cohn wrote that the reason he's feeling so bullish is because of the massive number of experiments going on, right now, to invent the future of news. (See his post for some examples.) "The answers are out there," he wrote, "in every startup (journalism focused or otherwise), community, blog, micro-blogging, micro-financing and CMS on the web."

How does that work, you ask? What does it mean that "the answers are out there in every startup?"

This is standard innovation practice. This is how Silicon Valley works. Thousands of players dive in, all with good ideas about how to make a particular industry work. They put their ideas in play, and, out there, in the market, and over time, the ones with legs emerge. But the ones that don't ultimately succeed also contribute. Because others learn from their experiments. They learn what works and what doesn't. They get new ideas for something new to try.

"What we need right now is 10,000 journalism startups," Cohn wrote. "Of these 9,000 will fail, 1,000 will find ways to sustain themselves for a brief period of time, 98 will find mediocre success and financial security and two will come out as new media equivalents to the New York Times."

I agree. This, simply, is how we are going to find the future. And we will find it. Through experimentation and trial & error. Eventually we will find the future. It will look nothing like what we know journalism to be (which is why those startups Cohn mentions can seem so baffling to traditional journalists). But we will get there.

* DEFN: "Crowdfunding": Getting the public to pay for your project.

The blind leading the blind

2008-11-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

I just don't get it. One of the biggest news stories of the day is the imminent implosion of GM and other car manufacturers. It's driving everyone crazy that we're thinking of bailing out corporations that willingly refused to read the writing on the wall, rejigger their business models, and position themselves for the future.

And yet.

Today, 50 newspaper CEOs are huddling at the American Press Institute in Reston, VA, to figure out how to salvage their industry.

On the one hand, their own newspapers are reporting on what numbskulls those automotive CEOs are and how they got us into this bind we're all collectively in--and even in some cases, how those recklessly mismanaging bums should be tossed out so that bailout money doesn't go to waste. And on the other hand, they can't seem to realize that, in looking at that story, they're staring into their own.

There isn't a single person out there who believes the car manufacturers will find their way into the future without it being dictated to them from clearer-thinking folks. So why, I ask you, why does the news business think that the executives who exhibited the very same behavior as those car executives--who clung to the old ways of doing things when it was clear those old ways had no future--will be the ones to now figure out the future?

You know who should be in that meeting? The people who've been working on the future, who've figured out how to do journalism in the new world. Why didn't they invite the head honchos from Talking Points Memo, Politico, Nerve & Babble, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Yahoo! News, TreeHugger and Huffington Post? Granted, not all of these are "news" sites in the traditional "newspaper" sense of the word. But they are all sites that report news--and are doing so profitably. So maybe they know a thing or two about how to make things work in this new environment we're in.

Albert Einstein once said something to the effect of: "You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that got you into it." So why, could someone please explain to me, does the news industry think it can?

Note: For a lively conversation on this topic, visit Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine.

PS: Upon further research, I think this is worse than I thought. According to a note on the API website itself, this is a meeting about how to "turn around" the news industry, and it's being led by a management professor and turnaround guru. Now, I'm not an expert in these things, but don't turnarounds only work when a company is underperforming within an otherwise healthy industry? I just don't see how they can do much good when it's the industry itself that is problematic. In that situation, you need innovation, not turnarounds, no?

Photo courtesy of clagnut. Creative Commons license.

NYT "If You Were President" game: An assessment

2008-11-12T17:46:00.001-08:00

The New York Times has created this cool "If You Were President" tool where you can vote on who you should think Obama should appoint to various cabinet posts.

What's "future of news"-y about it:

-- It's fun. The news doesn't have to be serious. Yes, choosing cabinet secretaries is serious business. And most of the players appear to be making serious choices. (Daffy Duck has yet to make it into the rankings.) But anything a reader can play with is fun. And fun is good--for building brand loyalty and generating return visits.

-- It's putting control in readers' hands. It moves away from the old school "we tell, you listen" mindset and invites readers to participate.

What's "old school" about it:
-- It doesn't go far enough. Why aren't they taking a Fantasy Football approach to this? Why don't they let people create individual accounts, so they can "own" their teams? Why don't they let people debate the pro's and con's of each candidate? Just imagine the discussion it would generate. That's a huge missed opportunity to score return visits -- and multiple ad impressions.

Good on the New York Times for going beyond the text-only mindset. But come on guys. Let go completely. Put it in the readers' hands and let them go wild.

The new Politico 44 site -- An assessment

2008-11-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

Politico has a new site up -- "Politico 44," subtitled "A Living Diary of the Obama Presidency."

What's "future of news"-y about it:

-- It's breaking away from the newspaper-y "mental model" of news--everything thrown into the same package. Instead, the editors are thinking about their readers and what their readers want. Is there appetite for Obama news alone? Great, they clearly said, let's create a "product" that delivers just that.

-- The "President Elect's Calendar" feature (right). Sure, it might feel like it's not telling us much (yesterday just had four items: Obama goes to gym, Obama arrives at office, Obama goes to Vets Day memorial, Podesta briefs reporters), but that's OK. It's breaking out of the "everything as text" mindset of traditional journalism. And that's a good thing.

What's "old school" about it:

-- It's lifeless. There's no party going on there. Just a bunch of stuff the Politico staff has thrown up there. No interaction. Nothing dynamic. Nothing in a crowdsourcing direction.

-- When you click through to a story, you lose your location -- you're thrown back into Politico regular. Sure, that might be a good way to drive traffic to Politico. But it won't last. People come to destinations because they want to feel like they're somewhere. Something that's just a wrapping paper over the old stuff won't build loyalty.

Good on Politico for giving this a shot. But like all v1's, it's going to need a few more iterations, many probably, before it finds its groove.

Time to choose: Deck chairs or lifeboats

2008-10-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

Cheering the fact that the new design of the physical-paper Boston Herald "looks better" than the old design is like saying the Titanic, as it was going down, looked better with new curtains.

Come on people! You have to stop re-arranging deck chairs and start building lifeboats.

Why passion is key

2008-10-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

While flitting around Twitter today, I came across the tweet stream belonging to the CEO of Zappos, the killer online shoe store. In one of his recent tweets, he made the following observation:

What I've learned in life and business: the people that care most always win. I've been on both sides. If you're most passionate, you'll win.

The wisdom seemed apropos to the news business.

I've talked before about how news organizations have to put their futures in the hands of staffers who are most passionate about the places news creation and delivery are going. Not the most senior staff. Not the ones with the greatest experience or most impressive accomplishments according to the traditional, paper-news metrics. But the people who are really jazzed about how we'll be able to generate and deliver news in the brave new digital world. Not only because they are more likely to win, as the quote above says. But also because only they will have the drive to keep on through the tough slog that awaits this business.

Photo courtesy of ms4jah. Creative Commons license.

If at first you don't succeed...

2008-10-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

"If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0."

It's an old saying in the tech world. But it reflects the mindset that has enabled Silicon Valley to produce the likes of Apple, eBay, PayPal, and Google. This mindset says: "There's no such thing as failure. There's only version 1.0. And then version 2.0. And then 3.0."

Things aren't expected to work great -- or even work -- the first time around. But that's OK. Things not working right the first time around doesn't constitute failure. It constitutes a necessary step on the way to figuring out what does work.

It's a mindset news organizations simply need to adopt. They need to move away from "We don't release it to the world until it's fully baked" to "Let's throw it up against the wall and see what sticks."

So let's say it again: "If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0." (And then go back to the drawing board to start working on version 2.0.)

Photo courtesy of eyesplash Mikul. Creative Commons license.

How to think about the new WaPo political news aggregation site

2008-09-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

Last week, The Washington Post launched a new offering called The Political Browser, a site to aggregate the best of political news from around the Web. Say what? Yeah. Just like The Huffington Post or Real Clear Politics.

So here's how it works: The Post scours the Web for great political stuff and posts its favorites on their site. And then various members of their political team weigh in and comment on that other stuff.

Say what, again? You mean, all that stuff that the traditional media has been railing against, the Post is now doing? Yeah.

So how should folks in the traditional media think about this?

Here's what I like about it:

The Post is experimenting.

And you all know how I feel about experimenting. Anything that might help us figure out the future of news is a good thing.

The Post has turned around and embraced a practice that for so long was discredited and derided among the traditional media.

This is a good sign. It means the leadership there is breaking out of the inside-the-box thinking that will sink any enterprise that is trying to adapt to new conditions.

Here are some things the Post should consider, as they move forward:

Is the person who's leading the effort wildly passionate about new media, and do they have a near-maniacal vision about how they want to execute the project?

The site won't work if the folks at the Post are merely copying what's being done elsewhere. If the conversation behind the site went something like this, "Hey, look at those other aggregation sites. They seem to have some legs. Hey, you, random person over in the corner, tag you're it. Take this on and figure out how to make it work." If that was the conversation, then the site is doomed to fail.

The Huffington Post and Real Clear Politics and all the other (successful) aggregation sites work because they have a driving vision about what they want to do and especially about the kind of content they want to post. The selection process becomes a voice, if you will, and it's the voice that builds audience loyalty.

Here's an analogy. Let's say you want to open a sporting goods store. One of the things that will drive your success is if you have a vision of the kind of sporting goods you want to sell and the "personality" you want your store to have. A store that has no selection criteria, that just kind of takes whatever, will never have the success of, say, a lululemon, the wildly successful yoga apparel retail chain that builds devoted followers because it does, in fact, have a personality that buyers identify with and want to be part of.

So to succeed, to build a devoted audience, The Political Browser is going to have to have a personality. And the personality is only going to come from someone with a driving vision of what they want it to be about.

The visionary who drives The Political Browser must be given complete latitude to execute how they see fit.

This won't work if there's some committee looking over their shoulder, questioning various decisions or getting jittery and asking them to pull back. The project needs to have the latitude to try all sorts of different things. And yes, many of those things will be duds. And some of them might even end up embarrassing the Post. But this is par for the course, and there is no way but through. The Post are like newbies at soccer right now. You got to give them time to learn the game. And any time you're learning a new game, you fumble a lot more than you score.

Here are some red flags:

The site is much too purty.

That's good right? No, it's bad. A site that looks as polished as The Political Browser means one of two things: The creators think they've figured out the formula (when they really should be in "throw it up against the wall mode," or they are placing an undue emphasis on design (when it really needs to be about the content). Take a look at Huffington Post or RealClearPolitics. They've been around for years, and they still look like were designed by somebody's brother-in-law on his day off.
Talk about revenues.

The site's executive editor, Jim Brady, told Editor and Publisher that he hopes the site will become political junkies' first-stop shop for political news from around the Web--and generate revenue via ads.

There's nothing wrong with trying to drive revenue, of course. That is the name of the game: How to find ways to drive traffic that will generate revenue. I just hope that the Post will give The Political Browser a little time and not immediately evaluate it based on revenue earned. No site whose primary goal was "generate revenue" ever succeeded in building a loyal audience. The first goal has to be to create a great site full of great stuff that people become addicted to. Then worry about the money.

Jarvis agrees: Zell is not the problem

2008-09-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

This is quite exciting.

Sometimes I feel like the lone cranky voice out here, the party pooper at the journalism party, because I refuse to blame "rapacious" businessmen or cultural superficiality for the demise of the news business but instead lay the blame at the feet of reporters themselves. But now, it turns out I'm not alone.

Respected media commentator and Internet strategist Jeff Jarvis, he of BuzzMachine (#520 on Technorati's list of the top blogs -- not too shabby, given that there's only, like, a jillion blogs out there), declared last week that "Zell is not your problem. You are."

The post was written in response to a suit filed by a group of current and former LA Times staffers against Sam Zell, accusing him of "recklessness in the takeover and management" of the paper.

The Times veterans should not be suing Zell, Jarvis declared. They should be suing themselves.

The rap sheet included the following crimes:

"When the paper was the most overwritten, under-edited consumer of wasted ink and paper in the United States of America, boring its audience with jump after jump of self-indulgent text and forcing readers to flee for TV, did you get out your pencils and start trimming and tightening? No."

"When the internet came, did you all - every one of you as responsible, smart journalists, on your own - leap to get training in audio and video? Did you immediately hatch new ways to work collaboratively with the vast public of bloggers able and willing to join in local journalism? Not that I saw."

Not to toot my own horn, but what the hey, this is exactly what I wrote about last month in "Who, in fact, is the problem?"

At the time, I quoted Newark's mayor paraphrasing MLK in saying that, "The problems of today are not the vitriolic words and the evil actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people."

My point was that, in challenging times, the average person can't sit around and point fingers. The average person has to get off their duff and be part of the solution.

And, as someone who's felt like that lone cranky voice, it's enormously exciting to hear others making this point. I genuinely believe that the only way we'll be able to find the way forward is if every single person working in this business accepts that the old days are gone, faces the reality of our new environment, and dedicates themselves to exploring new--and effective--ways of doing what has always been the so very important mission of the news business: informing our communities about what's going on in them.

So how should newspapers use Twitter?

2008-09-24T06:07:00.000-07:00

On Monday, we talked about two newspapers that made poor use of Twitter. Which raises the question: What is a good use of Twitter?

Another way to ask this question is: If I were still back at one of the Silicon Valley tech companies I used to work at, and that company was actually a newspaper, how would we think about how to use Twitter?

The first thing we'd do is recognize that Twitter is a unique technology with unique attributes. Which means that even though is kind of looks and acts like a different technology we're already using (ie: RSS), we shouldn't immediately assume they're the same and start using Twitter for the same kind of stuff we're using RSS for.

Unfortunately, many newspapers are doing exactly that.

RSS is a great way to draw readers to your newspaper's website. It solves the reader's problem of "I don't want to have to visit a bunch of websites in order to decide what I want to read today. Instead, I want the headlines of all my favorite websites in a single place, so I can decide what I want to read." And that's how many readers use RSS. They sit down at their computer, open their RSS reader, and start to read the day's news. (Or yesterday's, if they're behind. Or last week's, if you're as behind as me.)

A quick survey of newspaper tweets (like The State Newspaper in Columbia S.C., or the Chicago Tribune, or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) shows that a bunch of editors looked at Twitter and said to themselves: "Oh, hey, this looks like RSS. Let's use it exactly the same way to broadcast our headlines and bring readers to our sites."

But they were wrong.

Twitter is a different technology with different attributes than RSS. And more importantly, users use it completely differently. Not acknowledging that users use it for something different than RSS is setting newspapers up for failure. What worries me most about that is that, once they fail to build up an audience using Twitter in this way, they'll decide that Twitter "doesn't work." And then close it down and never use it again.

And again, they'd be wrong. More importantly, they'll be losing a big opportunity to serve their readers -- and build up a revenue-generating audience.

So let's start at the beginning: What do "different attributes" and "different usage styles" mean?

Take cars vs. bicycles, for example. A very simplistic interpretation would say: "Oh, hey look: Things you can sit on that will take you somewhere." If that's all you understood about them, you might make the assumption that, since a car can take you on a 400-mile trip, a bike can too. Which, of course, it can't. And if you'd gotten on that bike expecting it to take you 400 miles, and then got winded after five, you'd probably think the thing sucked, kick it to the curb, and never use it again. And again, you'd be wrong. And worse, you'd miss out on an opportunity to enjoy all the great things bikes can do.

So what are Twitter's attributes?

-- Real-time delivery of something happening now

-- The ability to get updates on my cell phone, so that no matter where I am, I can find out what's going on now

-- Really short missives (no more than 140 characters)

-- Able to include links to the Web

-- Potentially interruptive (if I set my cell to beep at me when I receive a Tweet, it's going to interrupt whatever I'm doing)

And what's Twitter's usage style?

-- Users use it to stay on top of real-time events. As its founders stated, it's designed to answer the question, "What are you doing now?" (A very different question / problem, we should note, than what RSS was designed for.)

The next thing we'd do at my fictitious company is ask ourselves: Given Twitter's attributes and usage styles, what are the situations where it would make sense to use it? ie: In what situations would a reader enjoy or appreciate receiving short, real-time updates that are potentially interrupting whatever else they happen to be doing at the time?

You see where I'm going with this? The reader is not going to say, as you've already figured out: "I want you to interrupt me to tell me whatever the latest story you posted to your website is."

Instead, they'll say: "I want to follow along on something happening now that I can't attend but that I'm really interested in."

The obvious first great use, then, is sports games.

And not just major league sports or record-breaking Olympic swims. In fact, local papers will probably much better serve their readers by tweeting popular local games -- football, basketball, or hockey, for example. Think how many people in the community are heavily invested in those games. If they can't be there, wouldn't they love to be able to follow along from whereever they are? And not just the actual plays, but also the lousy ref calls, any fights that break out, and maybe even occasional commentary on the cheerleaders. Anything that helps a tweet recipient feel like they're actually there and participating.

Then next great use is any live event in which there's great community interest.

The first thing that comes to mind is the OJ Bronco highway chase. That was, of course, a long time ago. But it occured to me because he's back in court this week. And yeah, I realize that just about nobody had cell phones back then. But if we had, and if we hadn't had access to a TV while OJ was cruising down an LA freeway at 10 mph, wouldn't we have loved to have followed along via Twitter?

For a more recent example, we can turn to the Orlando Sentinel which tweeted the launch of the shuttle Atlantis back in August. Shuttle stuff is huge in the Orlando community. Most people can't attend the launches, of course. But there's probably a bunch of people who'd like to follow along and feel like they were there.

Or, for example, the day Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick finally got arraigned. Motown had been following his saga for months. How many people would have loved to have been (virtually) present for the day he finally had to face the judge?

So how do you make money from this?

Once our ficitious company had defined the situations in which it makes sense to tweet, the next question would be: Is there any way to use the tweets to attract readers to the website? After all, there are no ads in a tweet. No ads, no revenue. If tweets aren't going to be a complete financial hole, we'd have to figure out how to use them to lure recipients to our website.

The answer, thankfully, would probably not be -- is probably not -- particularly complicated.

Let's take the local football game, for example. Reading the tweets will probably only whet a reader's appetite for more, especially if it was a particularly dramatic game. So invite them (via tweets with links) to come on over to the website and watch clips of the best plays. Or read in-depth analyses of what went right (or wrong). And I should note this isn't a completely original -- or unproven -- idea. As I wrote about in a previous post, the NBA had been using a similar offering to drive traffic to their website.

Similarly, live-tweeting a mayor's arraignment just drives appetite for all the Web-based goodies related to that story. After you're done with the play-by-play, shoot over a few tweets describing the related video clips, podcasts, blog posts, photos, etc... available on your website. Junkies will click on through.

One more note: To do this successfully, newspapers are going to have to set up tweets differently than they do now. Most of the ones that are tweeting offer a single tweet channel that includes everything from the latest crime news, to football player trades, to city council goings on. Again, this is an implementation by someone who thought Twitter was the same as RSS.

Instead, smart news organizations will set up seperate Twitter channels for separate types of news or events. There would have to be some kind of mechanism for letting readers know what kind of channels were coming up (eg: "Sign up for tomorrow's tweets on the Kilpatrick arraignment" or "Follow the Cougars-Buccaneers game on Twitter on Thursday"). But the point is: People will want to follow discrete events, rather than getting ongoing grab bags of everything, so this is something news organizations will have to figure out how to set up.

Photo courtesy of apesara. Creative Commons license.

Who would you fire?

2008-09-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

Newspapers are experimenting with new tools left and right, as well they should. One they're trying to get a handle on is Twitter.

As you probably know, Twitter is a tool that lets you dispatch mini-updates -- up to 140 characters in length. Recipients can choose to get them in any number of places: On their cellphones, in their RSS readers, etc....

Newspapers are trying to figure out whether Twitter has any value to them. They're asking themselves what are the situations, if any, where sending 140-character bursts is useful to readers? And, of course, can Twitter be used to generate audience loyalty that can somehow contribute to the bottom line?

As happens whenever you experiment, not all your efforts pan out. There are two recent examples where newspaper Twitter reporting fell flat on its face.

-- As Hurricane Ike loomed, the Houston Chronicle created a special Twitter account that people could subscribe to get the latest storm info. But, as Cory Bergman over at Lost Remote points out, they totally bombed with their implementation. Instead of posting immediately useful information -- like "Bridge X now closed" or "Johnson HS in Town Y now accepting displaced residents" -- they have simply posted headlines to their stories, along with links to the articles online. Now let's think about this for a moment. If you're in the middle of a hurricane (or its aftermath) and are trying to make game-time decisions about what's best for your family or business, are links to stories online really the most useful information you could be receiving? Obviously not.

If you're getting the tweets on your cell phone, you might not have Web access to get to the articles. But even if you do, do you really want to stop what you're doing to read an inverted-pyramid story about this thing or that? No, of course not. You just want information you can act on immediately, like "Avoid this street" or "FEMA grant applications being accepted at the library from 10-12."

-- Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain News has also been experimenting with Twittering, sending play-by-play updates from the Democratic National Convention, for example.

They got themselves into journalistic hot water, though, when a reporter sent to cover the funeral of a three-year-old victim of a widely covered traffic accident used Twitter to send minute-by-minute updates. The Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits blog challenged the news value of such tweets as "the father is sobbing over the casket" and "family members shovel earth into the grave." The Colorado Independent called the reporting "Utterly, and unforgivingly, inconceivable." Posters at a forum on SportsJournalists.org called for those involved to be fired.

Which leads us to the question of the day. Between these two incidents, if you were going to fire someone, who would you fire? The creator the benign yet useless Houston Chronicle tweets? Or the people behind the conceivably tasteless Rocky Mountain News tweets?

If it were me, I'd fire the Houston Chronicle staffer.

OK, "fire" is a little strong. I would have them reassigned.

As for the Rocky Mountain News folks, we'd definitely do a debrief and draft "lessons learned." But fire them? Not for a minute. Here's why.

The key to figuring out the future of news lies in experimentation. It is only through experimentation that we'll figure out what new forms of journalism both serve our readers and generate the revenue news organizations need to survive and thrive. In today's environment, we should never fire staffers who experiment and fail -- especially when they fail. Failure is a necessary part of learning and growing. (In fact, I remember a friend of mine once telling me soon after he started at the New York Times that the editors there had told the newcomers that if they weren't messing up every now and then, they weren't trying hard enough.)

But people should be fired for being stuck in the past. And that's why I'd fire -- OK, reassign -- the Houston Chronicle staffer who authored those benign but useless Hurricane Ike tweets.

To explain:

-- The Houston Chronicle people fundamentally don't understand the technologies they're working with. They are stuck in the old world model: "We write articles. Our goal is to get our readers to read our articles." People who start out with that mindset will never be able to find the future. As tough as it is, news organizations need to get people like that out of the way so that the people who do get where things are headed can do their work and find the future.

-- The Rocky Mountain News folks do get what the new technologies are all about. It seems like they messed up in this one case, but that's OK. Try it and learn from it. You'll never find what is valuable and useful unless you're willing to push the bounds.

Here's an analogy. There are some people I know who will only go to a show (theater, music, etc...) if it's received a stamp of approval and they're guaranteed that it's going to be great. I take a different approach: I'm willing to try anything that sounds like it could be interesting. Invariably, some of the shows bomb, and I end up walking out at intermission. But because I was willing to take risks, I've also found a lot of good shows that my safety-minded friends never saw. It's only by taking risks that we make discoveries.

When it comes to weekend entertainment, the stakes are pretty low. So I have some friends who never get to discover cool shows because they aren't willing to take risks. So what. No harm done.

In the news business, however, the stakes are higher. The stakes are, in fact, our very survival. As such, we must be willing to take risks. Playing it safe may ensure that we never accidentally transgress. But it will also ensure that we don't have a future.

How about them college papers?

2008-09-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

I talk a lot here about the need to experiment, to take risks, try stuff, throw it up against the wall, see what sticks. That kind of no-holds-barred experimentation is the only way to find the future models for reporting and delivering the news.

I just had a new thought on this idea: Why aren't college newspapers doing this very thing?

Wouldn't college newspapers be the perfect place to try some of this experimentation? Why insist on their continuing to publish daily, physical newspapers? Why not just say to them: Go online, play around, and tell us what you learn about attracting and retaining readers?

Most college papers do, of course, have an online presence. But surf around them, and it's hard to find something groundbreaking.

There could be something going on that I'm not aware of. But if there isn't, I'd love to see a massive, coordinated project along the lines of the 100-newspaper project I described before: Gather at least 100 college newspapers and get each one (or teams of several) to pursue a project aimed toward attracting and attaining readers. And then share the results with each other--and the world.

There are a bunch of foundation-funded programs out supporting various "adult-run" experiments. But if you're going to make a bet, I think it would be hard to find a more sure thing than letting the next generation -- the tech-savvy, fearless, not-stuck-inside-the-box-of-the-old-canon generation -- go wild. Surely, they would find some of the answers.

Photo courtesy of Stinkie Pinkie. Creative Commons license.

The dangers of relying on insiders (to save you from dire straits)

2008-09-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Slate's new online magazine, a business and financial news hub called The Big Money, had an interesting piece yesterday on the mutual demises of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch--and offered an insight into why one of them was able to find safe harbor through acquisition while the other simply imploded.

The difference, suggested writer Henry Blodget (yes, he of the Merrill Lynch securities scandal, but who has since rehabilitated himself as a business and tech writer), lay in the fact that Merrill has been helmed for the last year by an outsider brought in to save the company, whereas Lehman continued to be led by a long-time insider.

The story suggests an important lesson for news organizations and the challenges they face.

Granted, financial organizations are imploding due to a crisis of their own making, whereas news organizations are being battered by external forces. But the net effect is the same. Both industries have been facing dire straits. It is possible that the lesson from the Merrill / Lehman parable is that a clear-headed, dispassionate outsider may be better able to find the way forward than one whose understanding of the world--and identity--is wrapped up firmly "inside" the box.

In the news business then, the way forward may be found by news organizations that bring in outsiders--to lead, to set priorities, to make the hard decisions about what beloved elements of the news business will be jettisoned and what supposed travesties will be adopted--rather than relying on long-time journos to try to invent futures for the institutions they hold dear.

At what point do you simply get off the treadmill?

2008-09-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

An acquaintance who works at a local news station told me the other day that staffing changes are impairing the station's ability to develop quality news. Upon re-read, that last line feels like a "duh." But let me explain.

Specifically, he said that the station has three categories of staff: a) FTEs, ie: people with real full-time jobs; b) steady contractors, ie: people who work regularly and full-time for the station, but who don't get benefits and who can be terminated on a moment's notice; and c) traditional freelancers, ie: people who are pulled in for specific jobs but otherwise aren't part of the "team."

The problem with the setup, he said, is that, while the station has all the bodies it needs to do the work, it isn't necessarily getting the best work out of them. The problem is with that middle category of people. The station thinks it's a good deal: It has the bodies it needs, but if it faces an economic downturn, it can let them go immediately.

What they don't realize--or perhaps do and simply don't care about--is that a person who can be let go immediately doesn't give you their best work. Not because they're holding back on you out of resentment or the like. But simply because, in order to hold on to their job, they become a "Yes Man." Good journalism results when journalists fight for the stories they believe in. When they stand up to editors and say, "No, this is where the real story is." Good journalism does not result from journalists who never challenge a editor's take, for fearing of getting laid off.

It's stories like these that make me wonder whether traditional journalism even has a future. Instead of taking truly bold moves, making leaps to completely new ways of doing things, so many organizations seem to be simply trying to cut and reconfigure their way to profitability within the old model of doing things. And yet, you'd think that when you get to the point where reconfiguring just makes the quality go down even further, you'd conclude there is no future here.

It reminds me of that old line from the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

At that point, I wonder, why don't folks just get off the treadmill and move to a new game altogether?

Holding up a mirror to our bias

2008-09-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

A new website, Skewz.com, is allowing regular folks to vote on whether particular news stories are biased right or left. As you can see from the images at right (or from the website itself), these aren't binary verdicts. Rather, sliders indicate the degree to which a collective readership believes a particular story leans left or right.

It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it will have much standalone appeal. It would be more useful if the ratings were integrated into the original content. Like when you're reading a blog and can see that one post got 115 Diggs and another only 4. Those kind of indicators become handy guideposts to help you quickly locate the most interesting content. Similarly, Skewz ratings would be a great tool if they were embedded directly into articles on news websites themselves. How cool would that be? As a reader, you'd get an immediate indication of where the stories were coming from.

That will never happen, of course. Can you imagine the New York Times or CNN folding anything into their sites that seemed to suggest they weren't being 100% objective? Of course not. Which is why I like this site for another, more profound reason: For the very fact that it provides hard-to-ignore feedback to the mainstream media that, no matter how much we try to be objective, and no matter how much we believe we're being objective, there are very few readers out there who believe we are.

When blogs and other forms of new media started hitting the scene, my friends working in the mainstream media resoundly trashed them for their bias. They didn't constitute real journalism, my friends would say, because they weren't objective.

I argued back that there were certainly many points on which the MSM could challenge the journalistic merits of the bloggers emerging at the time. But objectivity wasn't one of them. The traditional media, I argued, has never been objective.

Needless to say, I didn't get many converts to my way of thinking. And it's certainly not a point of view I would have agreed on before I'd been out of journalism for a while.

Traditional reporters resist the idea that they are biased because they confuse the concept of "having a bias" with "having an agenda." For the sake of this argument, I'll agree that most traditional reporters do not have agendas. Most reporters do see their duty as finding out what's happening in the world and reporting on it without slanting it.

But the thing is: Not having an agenda is not the same as not having a bias.

Let me backtrack for a moment. "Bias" is probably too loaded a term. Let's use "framework" instead. Everyone has a framework they use to organize their understanding of the world. A set of assumptions, if you will, that tells them: This is important; that not so much. This person's point of view carries weight and should be paid attention to; that person's less so. This event will have meaningful ripple effects in the world at large; that one fewer.

We reporters have traditionally believed we weren't biased because we believed our frameworks were accurate representations of reality. It was easy to buy in to that belief, because the number of voices out there were limited, and most of those voices shared the same framework. If all journalists more or less saw the world in the same way, it was easy to believe our collective framework, our collective way of viewing the world, was the one true, unbiased, way out there.

The explosion of voices and perspectives made possible by the Internet, however, is exposing that belief for the fallacy that it is. There is no single way of looking at the world. The act of choosing a framework (or simply buying in to one created by those who came before us), then, becomes an act of bias. It becomes an act of deciding that some things are more important than others.

Take all the brouhaha over Sarah Palin right now. How many news outlets out there are pounding away at the story about Palin and "the Bridge to Nowhere." Many. Next question: Why are they devoting so much energy to this story (over other stories they could be pursuing)? Answer: Because they believe this story is more important than others. That ordering of importance is the result of framework that asserts: "A politician misrepresenting the truth is an important phenomenon, more important than others that we could be reporting on."That framework necessarily has a bias. There are plenty of individuals out there who don't agree with the assertion that a politician's misrepresentations are more important than other aspects of their career, beliefs, etc....

It's not that they believe that misrepresentations are totally unimportant. There are few people out there would would say the media shouldn't report when a politician strays from the facts. But different people would disagree over how much coverage a specific straying warrants. Some people would look at the amount of coverage being generated over the Bridge to Nowhere and say it's exactly right. Some would say it's a bit too much. Some a lot too much. Some not quite enough. Some not even close to enough. Each of these different assessments is a product of the framework with which a particular individual sees the world. Each represents a bias about what is more or less important.

So where am I going with this?

A key to surviving and thriving in the future of journalism is to understand and embrace the fact that we have frameworks that organize our understandings of the world--and, therefore, that we have biases, biases about what is more and less important. We need to embrace this and acknowledge this because our readers already believe this about us--and won't trust anyone who tries to deny it.

Going forward, trust will be a driver of loyalty. Readers who trust you will stick with you. Readers who don't trust you won't. This doesn't mean that readers have to agree with you. Trust isn't a necessarily a product of how much they like what you say. It's more a result of whether they think you can be believed.

Think about your own circle of friends, for example. There are probably people you trust more than others. Your level of trust probably doesn't have as much to do with how much you agree with a particular person than with how much you believe they are a straight-shooter. You're far more likely to trust someone you don't agree with who, as far as you can tell, has personal integrity, than someone who seems to agree with you but always seems just a bit shifty.

So what does embracing and acknowledging our frameworks mean, in practice? It means just that: Owning up to our frameworks. It doesn't mean going to the extremes and branding every news outlet as an agent of opinion, like The Nation or The National Review. But it does mean letting go of our defensiveness on this point. It means listening to people who challenge our frameworks. Not dismissing them, simply because they're asserting we're biased.

Some traditional journalists may resist this because of the deeply ingrained belief that to concede bias is to somehow concede failure. But I don't think it is. I think that owning up to our frameworks will actually make us stronger journalists. In some cases, it will open us up to new ways of looking at the world that deepen and expand our reporting. In other cases, it will simply enable a lively discussion to flow from a piece we've reported. In either case, in all cases, however, it will enable our audiences to receive richer, more complete understandings of the world we live in. And, after all, isn't that what we are hoping to achieve, as journalists?

A power shift is underway

2008-09-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've talked before about the need to join forces -- both to find the future of news (by collaborating with other news organizations) and to find the news itself (by collaborating with the general public). It's not an original idea, of course -- though it sometimes sounds pretty revolutionary within the media world.

Still, this is the point that others who follow broader trends in the world of business and industry are making as well. And they also note that the news business--because it is a business--is not immune to these emerging realities. Specifically, it's a point that Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams make in their new book, Wikinomics:

"A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish.

"Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated, cut off from the networks that are sharing, adpating, and updating knowledge to create value."

So come on news organizations. Stop operating in isolation. Join forces to create the future. And deliver ever better news.

Photo courtesy of Valerie Everett. Creative Commons license.

We have more to work with than we might think

2008-09-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin had barely finished her landmark speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday before Yahoo! Buzz posted a whole page detailing answers to the burning questions the speech had generated.

The article, written by one of Yahoo!'s editors, explained what a hockey mom is, whether Palin really sold the Alaska guv's jet on eBay, and which race had made her hubby such a snowmobile stud.

Sure, these aren't heavy-hitting policy questions. But they were some of the things voters most wanted to know--as revealed by the terms they were entering into Yahoo!'s search engine.

The page was noteworthy for those of us trying to figure out the future of journalism. By turning to its search logs, Yahoo! was able to home in with laser-like precision on what the public most wanted to know--and whip out the answer almost instantaneously. In its own small way, the article sent convention coverage to a whole new level.

Think about it for a minute. The traditional approach to covering a convention speech goes like this:

Report on what the speaker said
Ask talking heads what they think and report that too
Get a few man-on-the-street quotes (whether at the convention or on some actual street in your hometown) and report those too
Done

In the pre-digital world, that might have been enough--even though it makes for a pretty bland story, and rarely a particularly revealing one. Who among us, after all, hasn't been able to predict what the talking heads and men-on-the-street were going to say before we asked them (as reporters) or picked up the newspaper (as readers).

In the old world, however, that might have been enough. With the resources at our disposal, we couldn't really have been expected to do more than that. And since no reader was getting better than that elsewhere, they were quite happy to eat what we fed them.

No more.

There are new tools in town, and the news organizations that figure out how to use them will be the ones generating more compelling coverage--and attracting more readers.

That's great for Yahoo!, with its search logs, you might be saying at this point, but what does it have to do with newspapers?

The larger point I'm aiming at is that in the digital era, anyone with a website has more resources at their disposal to identify news leads and generate compelling stories than the average journalist usually thinks of.

When we think about finding and reporting news, we follow the traditional m.o.: Get wind of something (through press release, phone call, or back-of-the-bar chitchat). Pick up the phone and track it down. Write it up. And publish.

But today, thanks to the Web, we actually have another possible starting point for identifying potential stories: the data that our servers gather and tabulate every day. What do your server logs tell you about the kind of information your readers are interested in and looking for? Looking at those logs on a regular basis can give you insights into potentially compelling--exciting--stories that readers will gobble up and pass on.

The gloom-and-doom mindset over the future of news comes when we think about journalism in terms of how we've done it in the past and think about how much harder it is to do--and to reap readers with--in the future.

But it's a lot easier to get optimistic when we turn away from thinking about how much we've lost from the old world and start thinking about how much we're gaining from the new one. The new world doesn't look like the old one--but it does give us a slew of new resources to accomplish the same task we've always aimed for: Generate compelling and meaningful information about--and for--our communities.

Good news: Folks are reading more... online!

2008-09-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

A new survey says Internet usage by people in the top-fifth earning households in the U.S. more than doubled in the last five years. This is good news for news organizations. It means if you build it (correctly), they will come.

The survey, by market researcher Ipsos Mendelsohn (and reported by AdAge), determined that Internet usage had gone up from 10.7 hours five years ago to 22.1 hours today. The survey didn't give any indications of what these people read online or what attributes they particularly enjoy of the sites they visit. And of course, it's reasonable to assume that not all of that usage is spent reading. Some of it doubtlessly involves shopping. Some of it playing online games. But some of it is allotted to reading. So it's reasonable to assume that the amount of reading the affluent do online has gone up in the last five years.

This is good news for news organizations. It means online journalism does have a future. The key is to learn more about what sorts of sites people like visiting and then to dig deeper to understand what it is about those sites that make people keep coming back.

In tech design, we call this "researching user requirements." In other words: What are the attributes that a site has to have to build reader loyalty? Think about a regular phone vs. the iPhone, for example. They're both phones. But the iPhone has attributes that make it immensely more popular than other phones. Its aesthetics. The ways the user gets to interact with the device. The things it can do.

Just as not all phones are created equal, not all online media are created equal. But again, as I've said before, the locus of the inequality is not necessarily in the subject matter. Just because you're writing about city council meetings and another site is writing about Paris Hilton doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get fewer hits. (OK, maybe that's a stretch, but you get the point.) It's not what you write about that will determine whether readers come to you. It's how you write and present the information.

When delivering their product online, news organizations need to get away from the methods they use to deliver their product (information, news) in print and instead think about which methods make consuming media online enjoyable. And once we get a handle on that, we then need to think about how we can present our stories -- whether they be about school board measures, local housing prices, or offshore drilling -- in a way that people enjoy reading--or, more precisely, experiencing--them online. How should we structure stories for maximum online enjoyment? How should we design the pages in which they lie? What functionality should we incorporate in and around the stories?

The answers to those questions don't need to be a mystery. The answers, as the X-Files used to say, are out there. It just requires a little user research to find out what people already like about online content. Once that data is collected, online editors can extract generalizable principles to guide the structure and design of future content. To get more readers. And thus more hits.

Photo courtesy of striatic. Creative Commons license.

The importance of getting inside your reader's head

2008-08-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

A recent study of negotiating strategy showed that dealmakers who can see the world through the eyes of the person they are negotiating with are more likely to arrive at a mutually acceptable deal that people who don't.

The focus of the study was to figure out whether it was more important for negotiators to focus on the head or the heart. The answer was the head. Specifically, the study revealed the importance of understanding exactly why your opposite number is at the table and what they really want out of the deal.

The study holds important implications for people trying to figure out journalism's way forward.

In any deal, there's a buyer and a seller. Same thing in journalism. We journalists--or, rather, the organizations we work for--are the sellers. Our readers are our buyers. The deal we are negotiating is: "Give us your eyeballs" (so we can sell them to advertisers). The products we're selling are our stories. The currency our readers pay with is their time. According to the new study, the better we understand why our readers might want to give us their time, and consequently their eyeballs, the more likely we are to get them.

This is a tough question for us journalists. Traditionally, we've assumed that readers open up the newspaper "because they want to be informed." I would suggest that's not necessarily the case. There are myriad reasons why readers used to open the newspaper:

To feel "in control," presumably by learning everything that had happened in the last 24 hours
To avoid looking foolish when current events discussions come up
To feel the thrill of seeing your team do well, or the agony of their defeat
To feel "in control" by reviewing the latest stock prices and getting feedback confirming that their stock strategy was on track
To laugh, by reading the comics
To experience the excitement of learning about exotic countries far, far away
And so on....

I don't know what the actual answer is. But news organizations need understand exactly what it is readers hope to get in return for the time they give us. That way, we can shape our offerings--our products--so that readers get what it is they want.

One caveat: When I start talking like this, friends who've never left the world of traditional journalism respond as if I'm suggesting this means we should consider selling all kinds of stories that aren't "proper" news. I'm not. I'm suggesting that we understand our readers' motivations and then shape our stories so that our readers get out of them what they're looking for. You can still report on town council meetings. But perhaps we'll learn to shape those stories in ways that are more enticing to readers than the formulaic and--let's be honest with ourselves here--often drearily boring approach we've used to report on civic life in the past.

Photo courtesy of frankblacknoir. Creative Commons license.

Getting ahead--and producing better journalism--by letting others help us

2008-08-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

Wikinomics is a great new book about the open source economy that holds important lessons for us journalists.

The subtitle "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" underlines the book's thesis. Technology has made it possible for people to collaborate on projects in ways never before possible. Industries that grasp the power of collaboration, and put it to use in product development, are getting ahead.

Proctor & Gamble, for example, once an insular company, now famously outsources much of its R&D, through a program called "Connect & Develop." The company publicizes a research question they're working on and promise a big payoff to the researcher anywhere in the world who solves it for them. Thousands of individuals or smaller companies around the world, with deeper experience in the relevant areas than P&G has in-house, race to try to find the answer first. The approach gets P&G farther faster than when they did all their research, secretively, in-house.

The book is full of such examples in which companies that open themselves up and invite the participation of anyone who's inspired to participate actually get ahead faster than those who try to keep everything in-house.

So what does this have to do with journalism?

Journalism is a notoriously secretive profession. A reporter gets a whiff of something, tracks it down doggedly, all the while trying to keep his/her project a secret from others, less s/he get scooped.

The open source method (a name coined in the tech world for computer programming projects in which new software is developed collaboratively) could turn all this on its head. Imagine how much farther you'd get as a journalist, how much better a story you'd produce, if you told the world what you were working on and let the world help you with your reporting. Here's what you'd gain:

A much quicker understanding of what's at stake
A much more accurate interpretation of the information you've gathered
Quicker access to documents
Insights it never would have occured to you to look for
And in the end, a deeper, richer, more accurate and more complete story

In fact, this is already happening at organizations that are giving the open source method a shot. The Fort-Myers, Fla., News-Press posted an appeal to the community to help them investigate a proposed sewer and water rate hike. The response was overwhelming. Readers flooded the paper's online forums to discuss the story and share what they knew.

The newspaper got help from everyone from retirees who had worked for sewer authorities elsewhere and could explain their ins and outs, to a local homeowner who'd been investigating on his own and had collected dozens of internal memos, to a local activist who similarly had been tracking the local utilities system and had other forms of documentation.

Just think about how much time this approach saved the News-Press and how much better an investigation they got out of it.

One of the handicaps of being a reporter sometimes is that you don't even know what it is you need to look for. The private citizens who responded to the News-Press' appeal helped the paper clear that hurdle much faster than they would have had they fumbled along on their own.
Another handicap is that, without deep experience in a particular domain, like sewers and rate setting, you're not sure how to interpret the information you receive. Sure, we like to think of ourselves as quick studies. But there's no substitute for someone with a lifetime of experience helping you understand the meaning behind the information you've collected.
A final handicap is getting access to documents. Even if you know what you're looking for, it can take a while to find it. In this story the News-Press benefitted from others' legwork.

The idea of opening ourselves up to the world doubtlessly feels uncomfortable to many journalists. We've been taught to keep our cards close to our chests, lest we get scooped. And we've been taught that "we're the professionals" and, as such, that we know best how to do this journalism thing.

But in some cases, it's clear that open source methods produce better, more complete, and more accurate stories. And isn't that, in the end, what we're all aiming for?

Crowdfunding will work -- for some

2008-08-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

Sunday's New York Times "Week in Review" section carried a story about "community funded reporting," also known as "crowdfunding." This is an experimental business model for funding journalism that sort of works like everyone's favorite microfinance site Kiva: A news story with a proposed budget is posted on the website of the crowdfunding organization, Spot.Us, and once enough regular folks pony up the money to cover the budget, a journalist proceeds to report and write the story.

Right now the idea is being tested in Northern California only, with the support of a two-year, $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. Stories that have been proposed include fact-checking of local political ads, ethanol as the weak link the California's energy strategy, and what really happens to recycled trash in various municipalities.

Here are my predictions about whether this experiment is going to work:

Crowdfunding will emerge as one of many new business models for journalism. This is because, unlike in the past, when journalism was all based on the same advertising-driven business model, in the future, there will be different kinds of business models for different kinds of journalism.
Crowdfunding will work for some kinds of stories, but not all. Mainly for stories that readers really care about, and that aren't already being covered elsewhere.
The success of crowdfunding will depend on how closely it emulates the social networking aspects that make Kiva work. It won't be enough for journalists simply to post the results of their work. They will need to find ways to make their contributors feel connected to the whole endeavor.

Crowdfunding already has a track record. Chris Allbritton traveled to and reported from Iraq, based on $15,000 in contributions from his readers. In the fall of 2004, when Talking Points Memo was just one guy's opinion blog, Josh Marshall raised about $5,000 from his readers for a trip to cover the New Hampshire primaries.

What made these appeals work were two things. First, the authors had a personal connection with their readers. Their readers enjoyed reading their take on things and felt personally invested in the writers themselves. Second, the readers really cared about the subjects being covered.

Going forward, crowdfunding will work for the same reasons, with a few twists. In the beginning, people will pony up dollars because they're excited about the topic. In the long run, however, contributors will continue to fund the work of specific journalists whose work they really like, the same way television watchers vote with their remotes by tuning in to Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. Those audiences are not tuning in because of any particular story either show is covering. Instead, they're tuning in because they like Stewart or Colbert's points of view, the way they talk about what's going on in the world.

A few more things will help make crowdfunding work. The more Spot.Us works to make contributors feel invested in and a part of the work, the more likely they'll have repeat customers. How do you do this?

Reporters will need to let their readers get to know them as people, by talking about who they are and why they care about the stories they're reporting on.
Reporters will also need to bring their readers along as they're doing the reporting, not only posting regular blog-like updates about their latest research, but by engaging in a coversation with funders, letting the funders help them think about what parts of the story are important, about where to find various pieces of information, and possibly even help them actually do some of the reporting.
And lastly, reporters will need to share the success of the story with their funders. When they're finally done, the journalists will need to celebrate with their funders, cementing the feeling that they were all--journalist and contributors alike--in the project together.

People today participate in group endeavors not just because they believe in the endeavor itself. In our increasingly lonely society, people also participate in order to feel connected to others. The more Spot.Us reporters can make their funders feel like they're part of a grand endeavour, rather than just wallets on the sidelines, the more funding they will attract in the long-run.

Crowdfunding will not be the panacea to the financial challenges journalism faces as a whole. But it will be one solution that will enable some of the reporting we--and our readers--care about to continue.

Photo courtesy of striatic. Creative Commons license.

Who's your competition? (Part 3)

2008-08-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

My previous two posts talked about reasons why newspapers should not view each other as competitors and instead should collaborate to discover new methods to generate and deliver news. Here's the last reason.

When I talk to friends at newspapers, I get the sense they think that discovering those new methods will give them a competitive advantage over other news outlets. If they discover some clever new way to direct traffic from Google to their news sites, they'll be ahead of the game.

If I've learned anything from my time in Silicon Valley, however, I've learned that this is not the case.

Anyone who discovers a nifty new way of doing something has a competitive advantage for a few short moments. And then everyone else figures out how to do the thing the first company did. And then that new method becomes standard. At this point, having access to the method doesn't give anyone a competitive advantage. It's how different companies apply the method that puts them ahead.

Take printing presses, broadsheets, and photography. Those are all methods. Every newspaper uses them. No one has a competitive advantage simply in the use of the tools. What differentiates them is how they put them to use. The New York Times and the Podunk Review both use printing presses, broadsheets, and photography. Yet it's how the New York Times puts those to use that sets it above the rest.

All of which is to say: Not joining forces to discover the new tools and methods is a fatally short-sighted strategy. Smart news organizations will join forces with others during this phase. Then, once the industry as a whole has figured out how to generate and deliver news in an economically viable way in the new environment, only then will it make sense to start competing against each other again.

Photo courtesy of Herkie. Creative Commons license.

Who's your competition? (Part 2)

2008-08-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

A fundamental principle of free market economics, as I noted on Monday, is that businesses succeed when they offer a better product or service than their competitors. Because of this, businesses keep their cards close to their chests, especially when they're developing new offerings. Not only do they want to be the first to market. They also don't want to give away their "secret sauce."

Normally, this approach makes sense. There's one situation where it doesn't: The case in which an entire industry might collapse before any one organization with in it can find a new offering that will save its skin.

This is the situation the newspaper industry finds itself in today. Every news organization is scrambling to try to figure out how to survive the onslaught of challenges that has them slashing staffs and cutting back on coverage. Isolated experiments in new ways of delivering news are taking place here and there. But for the most part, there's very little cross-organization collaboration to find new ideas.

Newspapers are still caught up in the old idea that other news organizations are their competition. Historically, newspapers have taken a firm stand against collaborating with each other. This makes sense when you're vying for scoops on a presidential campaign trail. Or even from your local city council. It doesn't make a lot of sense when your entire survival is at stake.

Remember the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster? The one Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into Thin Air? The two climbing outfitters on the mountain that season--Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness--were die-hard competitors, perpetually vying for high-end clients to take the top of the world. When disaster struck, however, they didn't hesitate to do what needed to be done. The teams joined forces to save as many lives as possible.

It's easy to see what needs to be done when someone's life is at stake right in front of you. It's harder when the concept seems more abstract and slightly removed. But the situation the news industry faces is no less dire. Its entire existence is at stake, unless it can find its way forward.

Facing a challenge of this proportion--how to reinvent news coverage and delivery so as to ensure the industry's economic survival--requires a massive R&D effort, mainly because most experiments will fail. It's only through the collective effort that the new methods will be discovered.

I remain baffled at why there's so little collaboration between news organizations on this question. When I talk to friends in the news business, the answer seems to lie in the fact that the old mindset prevails. Instead of looking at the magnitude of the challenge and saying, "We better join forces," the competition mindset has become all the more entrenched, as news organizations seem themselves vying over the crumbs of reader clicks.

This is a short-sighted strategy. Individual organizations may prevail over others in the short run. But in the long-term, they will all go down. As Ben Franklin once said, "We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Photo courtesy of Kappa Wayfarer. Creative commons license.

Who's your competition? (Part 1)

2008-08-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

One of the core ideas in free market economics is that businesses succeed when they deliver a better product or service than their competition. OK, fine. So then the question becomes: Who's your competition?

Newspapers have traditionally thought of their competition as other newspapers. Maybe also TV news. But essentially, other purveyors of news. Because, after all, everyone reads or watches the news. So you'll get the most readers if you have the best news. Right?

Not anymore.

Newspapers' competition today is not other news organizations. It's anything else someone might do with their free time, other than reading the news. YouTube, MySpace, blogs, Epicurious, World of Warcraft, MarketWatch.com, Second Life, and so on.

Staying on top of the news is no longer a priority for many Americans. It's possible it never was. It's possible many people read the newspaper for other reasons: Habit, entertainment, the desire to feel connected to other human beings, the desire to feel a part of a community.

Let's take those last three for a moment: entertainment, the desire to feel connected, the desire to feel part of a community. Today, thanks to the Internet and other forms of digital entertainment, it's possible to satisfy those needs without ever touching a newspaper or any other news entity.

So as the news business tries to find its way forward, as it tries to preserve and grow its audience, it needs to be asking itself not just: How can we deliver the best possible news, better than anyone else who might be delivering news? But: How can we deliver an experience so great that the average person will choose spend time with us, rather than doodling around on Facebook, trying to up their score on "Madden NFL," or catching up on old episodes of "Desperate Housewives."

It's an odd thought, of course. And by no means am I suggesting that newspapers have to develop Desperate Housewives-type serials in order to attract readers. Instead, the idea is this: Newspapers have to ask themselves: How can we make the experience of reading the news as enjoyable as catching up on an old episode of DH. Or playing Madden NFL. Or updating your profile on Facebook.

Photo courtesy of Auburnxc. Creative Commons license.

Who, in fact, is the problem?

2008-08-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

In a recent Esquire article, Newark mayor Cory Booker paraphrases Martin Luther King:

"The problems of today are not the vitriolic words and the evil actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people."

These words could apply to the news business as well.

The problems that the news business faces today are not solely the responsibility of the Sam Zells and others who are slashing and burning journalism staffs. The Sam Zells are not the only villains in our current drama. The problems are the responsibility of every person in the industry, from the top muckety mucks to the lowly scribes. And so, as the old saying goes, if you're not working on the solution, you're part of the problem.

The past does not exist anymore. The future has to be created. This is a scary reality to face. It means we're all bobbing out at sea, with no map to guide us. We all have to help the business find its way.

If you're a reporter, and all you want to do is to do the same old job you always did--get up in the morning, pound out a story or two, and go home--you're part of the problem. Every person needs to devote some portion of their waking hours to teasing out the answer to the question: "How, going forward, can we attract and retain readers?"

I know this is not a comfortable thought. I know it's not what most journalists want to do. But it is the reality. If you're not comfortable with it, for whatever reason, consider leaving the business. If you need job security, you need to find another job. If you have no interest in experimentation, find a job where you can do whatever part of this job it is that you love to do. There are many jobs out there where you can exercise your writing skills, your reporting skills, your love of art, sports, politics, or business. But the bottom line is this: If you're not willing to pick up an oar and help row, you're just dead weight and you need to get out.

On the other hand, if you love the business, then you need to strap on some courage and take some risks. The business is in a crisis. And crises require good men and women to extend themselves, to take risks, to try things they never thought they could do. It's going to be a rocky period, one full of uncertainty, and you might not survive it. For all you do, you still might get the ax. But that is a risk one takes to save something one loves. And it's the responsiblity of every single one of us. It would be nice if this were a simple problem that the higher ups could fix with a little spread-sheet rejiggering. But it's not. It requires a complete re-invention of the business. The ideas on how to do that will not come from the boardroom. They will come from this odd corner or that. From this experiment that succeeded, and even from that one that failed.

The problems that the news business faces today are not solely the responsibility of the "evil business people" tearing newsrooms to shreds. They are the responsibility of every person working in the business. And so are the solutions.

Photo courtesy of Bombardier. Creative Commons license.

The book of lists: Things we know

2008-08-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

There are some great "things I know" lists out there where people in the news biz enumerate the hard truths they believe to be true about the state of journalism and this transition we're in the middle of. Here are three I highly recommend:

William Lobdell's "42 Things I Know"

Veteran LA Times journalist Lobdell volunteered to be part of the recent round of layoffs. He left his job Aug 1 after 18 years in the biz. In an email exchange with an OC Weekly reporter, Lobdell made the sobbering admission that he had concluded that "the risk of staying at the paper had become greater than the risk of leaving."

His list of "42 Things" offers his assessment of the news industry, including the fact that the newspaper business model is broken (#3), no one knows how to fix it (#4), and that's probably because it can't be fixed (#5).

He also says:

A news web operation can support far fewer journalists and layers of editors. It requires a different mindset. (#17)

Sam Zell isn’t the ultimate villain.... In the long run, he’s just an accelerator for a downfall that is happening naturally. (#20)

We operated as though we had a monopoly on truth and great journalism for far too long. We didn't listen to our critics and sometimes our readers. That cost us. (#24)

Ryan Sholin, "Ten Obvious Things You Need to Get Through Your Head," and "Ten Obvious Things, One Year Later"

Sholin is a San Jose State University grad student in mass communications. He's also a former Web developer and online editor. Plus, he's located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Maybe those things combined have contributed to his point of view.

"Ten Obvious Things...," written in June 2007, was one of his most popular blog posts ever. He updated it a year later. Among his thoughts:

Your major metro newspaper could probably use some staff cuts. If you’re not writing about local news, your paper’s readers are probably getting what you do from somewhere else. (#3)

Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. (#7)

You ignore new delivery systems at your own peril. RSS, SMS, iPhone, e-paper, Blackberry, widgets, podcasts, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter — these aren’t the competition, these are your new carriers. (#8)

THE GLASS IS HALF FULL. There is excellent work being done in the new world of online journalism and it’s being done at newspapers.... You don’t need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind. (#10)

Mindy McAdams: "The Survival of Journalism: 10 Simple Facts"

McAdams teaches university courses in online journalism and the use of technology for communication. She says:

Journalism CAN be done, and done well, without newspapers. (#2)

Newspapers were a nice business.... It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passenger ships, it will never work again. (#5)

The business model to sustain journalism in the 21st century has not been seen yet. (#9)

Photo courtesy of Claudecf. Creative Commons license.

The necessity of triage

2008-08-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

Last week, I wrote about how Google's 20 percent policy* fosters innovation and suggested that news organizations similarly consider giving their employees time to imagine and experiment with new ways of attracting and retaining readers. I also noted that most news editors would probably scream bloody murder at me for suggesting that they give their staffers a full day a week to work on something other than feeding the news beast, at a time when so many newsrooms are struggling to meet daily news demands. And I wrote that, in order to ensure that the operation even exists tomorrow, newspapers have to be willing to sacrifice some daily news demands today.

Happily, I'm not the only one who thinks this.

Chris O'Brien is a business reporter who's covered Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News for most of the past decade. He's also working on The Next Newsroom project, to design an ideal newsroom from scratch.

There must have been something in the Bay Area water last week because O'Brien expressed many of the same thoughts as I was having, over on the MIT MediaShift Idea Lab blog. Specifically, he wrote:

If 100 percent of your newsroom's time is devoted to just producing your current products, then you're already doomed.

And he said:

No one can simply order up innovation on demand. Wish as you might, the innovation fairy won't sprinkle pixie dust on your newsroom while you sleep. But you can encourage innovation, nurture it by lowering barriers, supporting those employees with entrepreneurial drive, and providing a fertile environment for their ideas.

He also noted that myopia regarding how to innovate is not unique to the newspaper business. It's characteristic of any business that enjoyed a long period of uncontested domination:

It's the classic fate that strikes any once-dominant company when the world turns upside down. It happens all the time in world of technology. Look no further than Microsoft, which after more than a decade, is still trying to adapt its business to the Web, as evidenced by its ill-fated bid to buy Yahoo (another company that's failed to innovate). The Redmond giant can't let go of a legacy product (Windows) enough to reorient itself to where the market and its users have gone.

O'Brien's prescription is one many Silicon Valley technology companies use to create the future and ensure the continuing health of their businesses:

Make it a priority

Create a process

Foster new collaboration

Offer incentives

Evaluate and learn

Again, this might seem overwhelming to news leaders already feeling strapped. But hopefully it's actually encouraging. It gives permission to editors to to do what needs to be done, even if--or, rather, especially when--doing so requires violating the canon. Previously, newspapers held firm to the notion that they needed to be the institutions of record, that they needed to cover everything newsworthy going on in their communities, that to miss a story was an almost unrecoverable shame.

In this new world, however, news organizations need to triage. They need to be willing to let go of some stories today, some news coverage today, so they can focus efforts on ensuring the survival of the institution as a whole.

* Google gives its employees one day a week to work on a project of their choosing.

Photo courtesy of otisarchives1. Creative Commons license.

How about Googling up?

2008-08-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

When I was laboring in the trenches of Silicon Valley, one of things I admired about Google (who was a next door neighbor for a while) was that they gave their people one day off a week to work on a project of their choosing. And not just some project they had chosen from a list drafted by the Google leadership. Just the opposite. They were allowed to work on any project that they dreamed up that rocked their boat. Any idea that entered their little heads that they thought might be cool to try to bring to fruition. The projects, of course, had to be something to that might be useful to Google. Employees couldn't go off and build macrame birdhouses or 12-layer wedding cakes. But as long as it was something that might one day be useful to Google, it was fair game.

The policy was based on the idea that letting smart people work on stuff that they dreamed up and were passionate about was much more likely to produce useful inventions than a top-down process where the muckety-mucks, or even a committee, decided "what we should build next." People working on their own projects get to say to themselves, "Hey, what tool would I like to have?" And then they get to figure out how to make it happen. And since they're invested in, or at least inspired by, the project, they're much more likely to figure out a way to make it work.

The reason why the Google 20 percent policy works is that, in the world of knowledge or creative work, not all hours are created equal. On an assembly line, one man-hour essentially equals another man-hour. At the end of 40 man-hours of work, you have a number of widgets equal to 40 x the standard rate of widgets-created-by-a-person-in-an-hour. Knowledge work isn't like that. Creative work isn't like that. The output from one hour of an indifferent, or demotivated, employee's time does not equal the output from one hour of a motivated employee's time. You know this. Think how much more you get done when you're jazzed about a project, and how much more excellent the outcome is, than when you're indifferent about it.

So what does this have to do with newspapers? I previously wrote about how, if I were a newspaper publisher today, I'd organize 100 newspapers in a massive R&D project. This is a related idea. If I were a newspaper editor today, I'd seriously consider giving my staff one day a week to work on any idea they wanted as long as its ultimate goal was: Find ways to attract and retain readers. (And it goes without saying, of course, that I'm talking about attracting and retaining readers online. Print is on its way out. It's just a matter of time.)

I can picture, of course, an army of newspaper editors telling me I'm friggin' crazy if I think they're going to give their people one day a week to work on some project of their own, when the paper is already short-staffed due to layoffs and the ever-voracious Web. But here's my response. And I say it, really, with the greatest respect and compassion for the position newspaper editors are in: The Titanic is going down. You can either use your staff to maintain the ship, or you can use them to build a lifeboat. In scenario A, it's going to go down and take most of your people with it. In scenario B, there's a fighting chance that some will survive and that a more seaworthy vessel will have been built. Newspaper reporters are smart, creative people. Given the chance, I imagine they will come up with some pretty neat ways of presenting stories online or with some pretty cool tools that will draw in more readers than the standard slap-up-our-print-stories-onto-the-Web approach that most newspapers are taking today.

What we can learn from NBA.com

2008-08-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

Fast Company is always a great source of ideas on innovation and adaptation to changing conditions. The June 2006 issue (which I came across while culling my ever-growing stash of magazines) did not disappoint. There on page 97 was a story about how the NBA was using the web to hook a whole new generation of hoops fans. Their innovations sparked some interesting thoughts about things the news business could do online to similiarly attract and keep readers.

Here are a few things NBA.com did:

-- They realized that unlike TV watchers, Internet users weren't interested in watching a whole game over the Internet. So how to give them something they would want? Slice and dice game footage to give fans the ability to watch short snippets, especially snippets of the specific players or plays the fans were interested in.

-- NBA.com made it possible for fans to have specific snippets beamed directly to their handheld devices, based on preferences they had set for specific teams or players. Again, slice and dice and serve up specifics, rather than the whole 2 1/2 hour game.

-- They started to monetize the services by embedding short ads in the clips. And again, though the article didn't go into it, I'm guessing those weren't simply repurposed 15- or 30-second spots from TV. I'm guessing the ads were specifically designed for the devices (Internet or handheld) to achieve the advertisers' goal (brand impressions) without providing a bad experience for the user (like forcing them to watch a 15-second ad in order to watch a 15-second clip).

-- At the time of the article, NBA.com was also toying with the idea of sending text messages about specific developments, when a player had hit a certain number of points, for example. Clicking on the message would take the user straight to a live broadcast of the game. That way, the fan could tune in only if the game met certain conditions the fan considered interesting.

Newspapers could learn a lot from NBA.com.

The first thing is the whole mindset issue. The NBA didn't just look at the Web and say to themselves, "How can we use this thing to do the exact same thing here that were doing on TV?" (ie: broadcast games) They realized it was a different beast and that fans would want to use it differently.

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg once told me that one of the problems some print editors have had in transitioning to the Web is that they look at the Web and see words and so they assume that a reader wants to interact with the content there in the exactly same way as they interact with a print newspaper. And that all the editors have to do to make the Web work for them is to convert their print stories into digital form. Some of them don't get that a reader approaching the Web is going to want to do different things than a reader approaching a piece of newsprint. The difference is subtle, Weisberg said, but it makes all the difference in whether an online site succeeds or fails.

Second, the NBA realized that the nature of the Web made it possible to deliver things that had never been possible to deliver via television. With TV, broadcasters can only send a single thing out to the entire audience. So they choose the thing most interesting to the majority: the entire game. In the digital world, however, it's possible to serve up different things to different members of the audience, based on what those individuals request. Had the NBA simply used the new medium to do the old thing (send a single thing to the entire audience), they would have missed the real opportunity on the Web (the ability to enable individuals within the audience to receive only those things most valuable to them).

Indeed, noted the Fast Company article in explaining how NBA.com was different from its peers: "The strategy at most entertainment companies looking to capitalize on the new networked gadgets is just to peddle out the same old stuff in new places." The NBA's key insight was that people wanted to do different things on the new devices.

Specifically,
* In the old TV world, the user desire was simply: "Show me what is going on now."
* In the new digital world, there were two new desires:
-- "Show me only those aspects of past events that I care about"
and
-- "Notify me if a certain event has taken place or a specific condition has changed, so that I can take a particular action that is important to me"

Understanding those new needs, NBA.com built on the old content (game footage) and on activities they were already doing (following games in real time) to create new types of content (player snippets, play snippets, event-driven text messages) to meet those new desires.

So, off the top of my head, what similar kinds of things could newspapers do to attract and keep readers?

-- What if readers could sign up to get news only about certain public figures or certain issues they cared about? In San Francisco, for example, if they wanted to get alerted every time there was a new item about supervisor Chris Daly? Or about parking regulations? Or about a business in a specific industry? Or even a specific restaurant?

The New York Times is already doing a version of this with its Keyword Alerts, which enable readers to tell nytimes.com to send them only those stories that include the readers specify (like "Afghanistan," "interest rate," or "Manolo Blahnik," for example). More newspapers should be doing this.

-- How else could the news be sliced and diced and delivered to readers in ways that make sense on handheld devices? It can't, of course, be a matter of just shoving an article or a blog post down the pipe. It would have to involve reshaping the content into a snippet that was useful to someone who's receiving it at work, while riding the bus home, or at a baseball game. I don't have the answer, but I'm sure it's there.

-- And how else could the news be provided to meet the desire "Notify me if a certain event has happened or a condition has changed, so that I can take a particular action that is meaningful to me"? Again, I haven't thought this one through, but I'm sure there's an answer. Or many.

Photo courtesy of spcoon. Creative Commons license.

Minding the gap

2008-08-04T17:24:00.000-07:00

Last week, The News Hour noted that with the termination of the Los Angeles Times' standalone Book Review section, only three newspapers still had separate book sections: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

The News Hour invited Steve Wasserman, a past LA Times book review editor, to comment on the demise of book coverage in print and the explosion of literary commentary online.

Wasserman took the position that this demise is catastrophic: "Despite the robust nature or at least very excited nature of the conversations on the Internet, the best criticism still being written today is being published in magazines," he said. "It will be a long time before the Internet gives us a forum in which people unsupported by institutions can deliver us that kind of literary criticism."

In these few phrases, Wasserman makes himself both right and wrong.

He may be correct that the caliber of online criticism does not match the best of what is in print. I say "may be" simply because I don't follow this world, either in print or online. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And he may also be correct that it will be a long time before this caliber exists online. Again, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. (Though I suspect that at least some independent online reviewers would challenge him on that, perhaps including Kassia Krozer, editor of Booksquare.com, who was also on the show.)

Where he's wrong, though, is in the big picture. Just because there will be a gap between the demise of quality print-based reviews and the rise of quality online criticism doesn't mean the demise of print is a calamity. It just means exactly what he said: There will be a gap.

This is what happens when one industry dies and another emerges to take its place. It takes a while for the new industry to pick up all the slack left behind by the old industry. Whether you think that's a calamity or not depends on your viewpoint. I'm pragmatic, so it doesn't bother me. The gap is only temporary. I have faith the new industry will take on the old roles. I have faith.

Photo courtesy of austinevan. Creative Commons license.

What we can learn from the Orlando Sentinel

2008-08-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

The Orlando Sentinel, it turns out, has taken a novel approach to ensuring its survival: It turned basic notions of how to run a newspaper on its head.

-- They taught their reporters to think of themselves as "news gatherers" responsible for delivering for both Web and print

-- When it came to breaking news, they taught their reporters to think "Web first"

-- They eliminated editing layers and increased front-line accountability

“We were very newspaper-production driven,” Sentinel editor Charlotte Hall told the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "I wanted to see ourselves in the new world as driven by news gathering across platforms."

Yay!

Here's what I like about this:

-- The Sentinel realized that many of its modus operendi (modi operendi?) were merely artifacts of the constraints imposed on journalism when journalism gets delivered in paper format once a day.

They realized that, when you have multiple means of delivering journalism, you can jettison some of the givens you previously took for granted.

-- They broke out of the mindset of being newspaper reporters. And instead, they taught themselves to think of themselves as "people who gather news and disseminate it in different ways." Mindset is hugely important. Everything you do follows from who you think you are. When the Sentinel taught its people to think of themselves as newsgatherers first, it probably liberated them from some of the thinking that was blocking them from operating effectively in the new world.

Photo courtesy of sskennel. Creative Commons license.

The Future of News

Data Point of One: What Happens When Readers Only Want *Raw* News?

What 'The Big Short' Has to Say About the Journalism Industry

The Chron's Massive Fail on Sunday Business Feature Should be a Wakeup Call to Newspapers

There is No Silver Bullet. And Trying to Find One Just Puts Us Further in the Hole

Why Schultz is Wrong About Anonymous Comments

Of Course No One Was Suprised That A TV Story Was Shot with an IPhone

Don't Bother with the Investigative Journalism "Strike Force" Idea

What journalism can learn from KodakGallery.com

What INDenverTimes did wrong

Pulitzers measure nothing about a newspaper's viability

Why are these editors so downright giddy?

Why the Wall Street Journal doesn't count

Why doesn't the SF Chron have a real "Prop 8 Central"?

Views of Political & News Videos Up 600% -- Now What?

Sometimes, it makes more sense to start from scratch

Walter Isaacson does journalism a grave disservice

Timesmen in the Twilight Zone

How to get 6MM views without really trying

College journalists are mutinying

The inmates are running the asylum

The best newspaper websites are probably not the best news sites

If you have to tell people you're cool...

The media is thriving

How the New York Times can save itself

The perils of not staying current with your readers

The media needs to do a better job of reporting on itself

Data Point of One: Why podcasts trump newspapers

Why startups will find the future and newspapers won't

E&P got it wrong again

A practice worth repeating

Journalism is alive and well

Top Newspaper Stories of the Year -- Really?

Newspapers are over, but news is not

Could we please stop using the word “blogger”?

The single essential failure

New media tools power coverage of Blagojevich scandal

The need to move from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance

It's not about finding a new way to pay for the same old thing

Times Extra: An Assessment

In praise of experimentation

Why the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble

I was wrong

The surge in newspaper demand on Nov. 5 don't mean a thing

Someone Who's Bullish on the Future of Journalism

The blind leading the blind

NYT "If You Were President" game: An assessment

The new Politico 44 site -- An assessment

Time to choose: Deck chairs or lifeboats

Why passion is key

If at first you don't succeed...

How to think about the new WaPo political news aggregation site

Jarvis agrees: Zell is not the problem

So how *should* newspapers use Twitter?

Who would you fire?

How about them college papers?

The dangers of relying on insiders (to save you from dire straits)

At what point do you simply get off the treadmill?

Holding up a mirror to our bias

A power shift is underway

We have more to work with than we might think

Good news: Folks are reading more... online!

The importance of getting inside your reader's head

Getting ahead--and producing better journalism--by letting others help us

Crowdfunding will work -- for some

Who's your competition? (Part 3)

Who's your competition? (Part 2)

Who's your competition? (Part 1)

Who, in fact, is the problem?

The book of lists: Things we know

The necessity of triage

How about Googling up?

What we can learn from NBA.com

Minding the gap

What we can learn from the Orlando Sentinel

Data Point of One: What Happens When Readers Only Want Raw News?

So how should newspapers use Twitter?