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.

Someone Who's Bullish on the Future of Journalism

"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.

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.

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.

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.