Newspapers are over, but news is not

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.

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.

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

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?

The necessity of triage

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:

1. Make it a priority


2. Create a process


3. Foster new collaboration


4. Offer incentives


5. 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?

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

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.

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.

What journalism can learn from a handwashing campaign in Ghana

Last Sunday's New York Times had a really interesting article about how public health workers in Ghana solved the problem of getting more people to wash their hands (and therefore reduce the incidence of child-killing diseases caused by dirt). Tellingly, the article wasn't in the international section. It was in Business. Even more interesting, the article held important insights for those of us in the news business who understand that the average American's lack of interest in the news is largely what is killing newspapers.

First the background.

The problem: Illnesses due to dirty hands, like diarrhea, kill a child somewhere in the world every 15 seconds. The solution is simple: Get people to wash their hands more frequently. The difficulty in that: Public health workers could not for the life of them get people in countries like Ghana to take up the habit. "We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn't change behaviors," Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine told the Times.

Then a lightbulb went off: Companies like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever have mastered the art of creating habits in American consumers (exhibit A: Febreze fabric cleaner: Who knew fabric freshner was a critical part of everyday life? Apparently no one, until P&G decided they needed to sell it.) If anyone could figure out how to sell the habit of hand-washing to Ghanaians, the public health folks decided, these guys could.

And they did.

First, they conducted a series of surveys to understand how and when Ghanaians perceived the need to wash hands. Talking about diarrhea and other diseases apparently had no effect, since, in the minds of Ghanaian mothers, those were just normal part of childhood, not dramatic calamities they were desperate to avoid. Next, they discovered that, when people did wash hands, their decision to do so was prompted by a feeling of disgust. They felt their hands were dirty--after cooking with oil, for example, or traveling through the city. Feeling their hands were dirty, they soaped them up and washed them clean. Now here's the interesting part: many Ghanaians didn't feel disgust after using the toilet. Hunh? You might say. That makes no sense to us. Exactly. But here's the thing: beautiful porcelain toilets had replaced latrine pits. In the minds of Ghanaians, then, toilets were actually associated with cleanliness.

With the marketers' help, the public health advocates figured out a new strategy. Forget about preaching about germs. Instead, cultivate a sense of disgust about using the toilet. "The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn't really sell soap use," the Times wrote. "Rather, they sold disgust. [emphasis mine]"

And apparently the campaign is working: Soap use after using the toilet has gone up 13 percent. And soap use before eating has gone up 41 percent!

So what do this have to do with journalism, you might ask. Very simple. Just about every single conversation among journalists about the demise of newspapers focuses on how bad this is for the country. News is important, the argument goes. Newspapers should be saved because of the "critical democratic function" they perform. (For the latest culprit, see Eric Alterman's piece in the upcoming issue of The Nation.)

What the Ghana handwashing story tells us, however, is you can't make people pick up a habit if they don't see the value in it, even if the value is objectively there. To us, avoiding germs is a perfectly valuable thing to do. To the Ghanaians, it wasn't. And no matter how much the public health workers tried to bang it over the Ghanians head that they needed to avoid germs, it didn't have any impact on their habits. It wasn't until the public health folks took the time to understand how the Ghanians saw the world, what was important to them, and what was effective in triggering certain behaviors, that they were able to craft messages that generated the behaviors the public health folks were gunning for.

The same goes for journalism in the States. We journalists can talk until we're blue in our faces about the importance of journalism. But if the average reader doesn't perceive that importance,* that argument isn't going to move any mountains. We will be more likely to succeed if we can appeal to something that does matter to the average American reader. I don't know what that is. But I ask you: What value can you think of that would be effective in "selling" the news-reading habit to the average American? What does the average American care about, that would get them in the habit of reading the news?

Tip: Think outside your journalism mindset box. Really. Think beyond everything you were taught in newsrooms and j-school. That's our mindset, our germs-should-be-avoided belief system, as it were, that the average American doesn't share. Instead, what is their mindset?

--------------------------------------------
* And after the lead-up to the Iraq War, who can really blame them? We subscribe to our mythology, that we provide a valuable public service. But there are many non-journalists out there who have every reason to be skeptical of that claim. But that's a whole different topic.

Photo courtesy of asplosh. Creative Commons license.

What we can learn from the new iPhone launch

Yesterday, Steve Jobs launched the new version of the iPhone. The move was met with the usual fanfare and hoopla that accompanies such announcements in the world of techies and Apple afficionados. But the move also contained a lesson for those of us in the news business.

Many traditional newspeople take a look at news on the Internet and recoil. They see flash and snark and gossip and... well, not a lot that looks like the journalism they have long revered. And maybe they're right about what they see. The problem, though, is that they're seeing what is here today, not what will be there tomorrow.

Apple launched the next generation iPhone because the first version wasn't good enough. In the tech world, this isn't considered failure. It's business as usual. Every product goes out the door as "v1". Companies then learn from real-world use of their product what works and what's lacking. They go back to the drawing board, tweak, and launch v2. And so on. Internet Explorer, for example, is on v7. So is iTunes. Microsoft Word is at least v11.

The key to having faith in the ability of the Internet to deliver the news we care about lies in having faith that technology evolves. You might not be able to do everything you want to today. But you will be able to tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of chakote. Creative Commons license

Think like a designer

The people who figure out the future of news are going to have to think like innovators or, alternatively, like designers.

An old Fast Company article I clipped long ago and came across recently cited two key designer qualities that probably don't come naturally to most newspeople but that will be essential for figuring out the future:

-- There are no perfect solutions
"The work style in conventional companies is to seek the perfect answer. That's inefficient and slow. Designers 'try it, prototype it, improve it'--and move on."

Similarly, newspeople aren't comfortable with the old "throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks." We're trained to get it right. Get it fast, of course, but get it right. When it comes to figuring out what new forms of journalism are going to attract and retain readers, however, we need to toss that mindset out the window. Instead, experiment. Accept that about 70% of your experiments will flop. Get over the idea that a newsperson should never be wrong in public and instead get used to the fact that your flops will all be public. But your flops will also help you move forward, faster. You'll quickly learn what works and what doesn't--knowledge you can use to inform your next experiment. Which leads to the next point.

-- Don't wait for the proof
"Traditional companies reward those who 'prove that something actually operates or that something must be.' Design shops reward those with the foresight and courage to act on what 'might be.'"

Same as above. Have a reasonable intuition about something that might attract or retain readers? Give it a shot. After all, it's the Web. It doesn't take a huge amount effort to throw something up. And if it doesn't work, it's just as easy to take it down.

From "The Business of Design," by Bill Breen, Fast Company, April 2005

Photo courtesy of Craig Anderson