Times Extra: An Assessment

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.

NYT "If You Were President" game: An assessment

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

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.

How to think about the new WaPo political news aggregation site

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.

Crowdfunding will work -- for some

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.

What we can learn from the Orlando Sentinel

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.

How to think about the new Slate Group

The New York Times reported today that the Washington Post Company has created a new business unit, The Slate Group, to develop new Internet properties. Slate.com EIC Jacob Weisberg is heading the organization, which today includes Slate; Slate V, the magazine's new video unit; The Root, an online magazine the Washington Post created for black Americans; and The Big Money, a business site to launch later this year.

Journalism observers will doubtlessly start stumbling over themselves to dissect the move, trying to figure out why the Washington Post thinks this is a good idea, what Weisberg's going to do, and what the secret sauce is going to be. Others will probably jump on it immediately, tearing the idea down and writing its obituary before it's even started.

Someone with an innovation mindset will look at this differently.

-- This is great news.
It's going to take thousands of experiments to discover the forms of journalism that are going to be successful at attracting and retaining readers going forward. Experiments cost money. We should be grateful for each and every dollar invested. Thank you Washington Post Company.

-- The Slate Group is not going to find the answer.
Anyone who expects that The Slate Group will go into their kitchen, mix up their ingredients, and come out with the winning recipe that's going to save all our butts doesn't understand how innovation happens. It takes numerous iterations to figure out the successful design of any new product. Look how many evolutions of the personal computer it took to get from the Apple Lisa to the powerful tools we have today. Same with cellphones. Remember those brick telephones we had in the late '80s? Not exactly the kind of thing everyone and their grandmother would want to carry around, the way they do today.

-- The Slate Group is going to find some answers.
Any time you run an experiment, you learn useful information. The Root probably knows a bunch of things today about what works--and what doesn't work--in building an audience among African Americans, that it didn't know, and maybe no one knew, before it launched this past January. Similarly, The Slate Group will learn a ton about online journalism by throwing up its sites and seeing what works. (And yes, of course, they already know a lot. Slate.com has been hugely successful. But there's still tons more to learn, to ensure the future of journalism.)

Hopefully, The Slate Group will share their learnings with the rest of the journalism community. The competition mindset still prevails in our business. Everyone wants to hold their cards close to their chest. But as I've written before, this is no time for hoarding learnings. We're in a race for survival. On the one side are the slowly dying newspapers. On the other are the innovations in the new medium. We want the innovators to figure out the new system before the old one dies. Sharing learnings accellerates innovation and will make it more likely we'll cross that line before newspapers collapse completely.