New media tools power coverage of Blagojevich scandal

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.

In praise of experimentation

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.

So how *should* newspapers use Twitter?

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?

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.

Twitter won't last -- and what that means for us

Twitter won’t last. It’ll be gone in two years. And the reasons why give us insight into digital journalism and how it will evolve.

Twitter is a hit, right? It’s caught on so fast that usage has crashed its servers. A superficial assessment would conclude that they really got something there. And that they’re so big and so far ahead that no one will ever be able to catch up. In other words, they came out of nowhere and cornered the market on this thing that no one even realized was a product. Kind of like Crocs, you might say.

But that superficial assessment would be wrong.

Here’s what a more sophisticated analysis would conclude:

-- Twitter accidentally discovered a latent need. Several actually. There was a need out there for what Twitter provides. Once Twitter it appeared, and people started playing with it, they discovered it was incredibly useful. And they discovered ways of using it that probably even the Twitter creators never imagined. Not just to update friends on the latest flavor of oatmeal they're eating. But to coordinate social gatherings on the fly. To broadcast messages from local emergency services. To do market research for consumer products.

-- No company could have identified these needs through market research alone. Companies, especially large ones, generally use market research to discover new product opportunities. But you couldn't have discovered the opportunity for Twitter, as it's designed today, through market research. That's because people aren't always good at articulating (or imagining) what would make their lives easier. Sure, they can tell you: "The buttons on my cell phone are too small. Their hard to push. Can you make them bigger?" Or, they can tell you: "The laces on my running shoes always break. Can you make them stronger?"

But it probably wouldn't have occured to people to say, "Give me a better way to meet up with my friends when I'm out on a Friday night." Because they had cell phones. And as far as they knew, those worked pretty well. You can't imagine a 63" plasma TV when you have a 12" color box that seems pretty nifty in comparison to the black-and-white box you just got passed on to your little brother. And they wouldn't have said, "Give me a better way to do market research." Or, rather, they couldn't have given you enough information in that request that your product designers would have read the research report and said, "A-ha! Let's build a Twitter." Sometimes you can only discover what people need by giving them something to play with and seeing what they do with it.

-- Nevertheless, even though Twitter accidentally discovered something that others missed, and even though so many people have taken to it, and even though its growth rate is so high that its infrastructure can’t keep up with usage, that doesn’t mean that no one else will be able to catch up.

That’s because Twitter isn’t a mature product. It’s an experiment. No, the Twitter folks probably don’t see it that way. But people who study how new technologies emerge and evolve probably do. It's better to think of Twitter as an experiment than a mature product because it's not like the creators envisioned Twitter to be what it has become. Its users have made it what it is, not its creators. Like many inventors, they probably just said, "Hey, I kind of sort of an idea of something that might be useful. Since it's not particularly difficult to build, let's just throw it out there and see if anyone uses it."

The output the Twitter experiment, however, is not a fully fleshed-out product. Rather, the discover is an insight: The insight about the latent needs it is fulfilling. Unfortunately, that insight doesn't give Twitter a competitive advantage over would-be competitors. It's not proprietary. Anyone can use it to build their own Twitter-like tool.

And they probably are. Because Twitter doesn't have any other advantages that would normally keep competitors out.

• Twitter is not best-in-breed. OK, it's currently the only-in-breed. For now. But the thing is, despite all the myriad ways Twitter is being used, the application probably doesn't meet them as well as it could. After all, it wasn't designed with those uses in mind. Someone who designs an application that meets those needs more easily and more conviently will exert a strong pull on current Twitter customers.
  
• It won't be particularly expensive to switch. If you come out with a better car than the one I have now, I have a big reason not to switch: The money it's going to cost me to buy the new ride. But Twitter is free, and a competitor will similarly probably be free, at least at first.
  
• It won't be particularly difficult to learn how to use other Twitter-like applications. If you come up with a better corporate database application than the one I have now, I have another big reason not to switch: The amount of time it will take my staff to learn and become proficient at the new tool. But how much simpler an application can you get than Twitter? How much more difficult could a competitor be?
  
• My Twitter buddies will probably adopt the new tool too. If you create a better country club than the one I attend now, I have a third big reason not to move: All my friends are at my current club and few, if any, will switch to the new one. Since it will be easy to acquire and learn the new Twitter-like app, my Twitter buddies will almost all adopt it when I do.

Given that Twitter has no meaningful advantages to give a competitor pause, a Twitter-killer will almost certainly emerge sometime in the next two years. Probably sometime in the next year. If I know anything about Silicon Valley, I can guarantee you that someone is already working on it. Probably many someones.

So what does this have to do with journalism? A few things:

-- The forms and practices of online news are going to evolve similarly quickly. A tool or an approach that works today will quickly be overtaken by a better one that emerges tomorrow. This is a foreign idea to people who’ve long worked in an industry where the canon was pretty much fixed for 50 years, or more. People who succeed in the online world will be the ones who have the flexibility of mind to embrace new ways of doing things but not make the mistake of believing that the new thing is the new canon. Take blogs, for example. The ways of using blogs to connect with readers are evolving. Any newsroom with a blog bible that isn't open to frequent revision will soon find its blogs losing currency.

-- Every new thing online newspeople try is an experiment. And the purpose of each experiment is not solely to see if the new thing will drive traffic. Creating traffic-drivers is important, of course. But more important is to understand why the new thing is driving traffic. What previously unidentified or unaddressed reader need(s) is the new thing meeting? Once you understand that, brainstorm: What could we do to specifically address that particular need(s) better than the old new thing is? Then create something new based on those insights. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

-- Newsrooms must experiment. It's no good fuzting at the drawing board and only releasing something to the world once it's fully baked. Because there's no way to get most things right until you've let your customers (readers) play with them. News organizations need to get in the habit of throwing something together, tossing it out there, analyzing the results, and using the resulting insights to inform the next revision.