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.

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.

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.

The demand is not plummeting; it was never there

Howell Raines' mildly interesting piece on Jim Romenesko in the current issue of Portfolio is probably not worth the 15 minutes it takes to read it, but it does have a couple of nuggets worth reflecting on. I bring them to you here.

The first is Raines' observation that "it's not technology per se that's killing newspapers; it's plummeting demand for quality information."

I would propose that the demand for quality information is not plummeting. Rather, that it never was there to begin with. Technology has made it possible for readers to go elsewhere for the things they actually were seeking in newspapers. That is the phenomenon that is being revealed here.

We don't really believe that readers bought newspapers because they wanted the latest news from city hall, do we? If we're honest with ourselves, we'd admit that readers bought newspapers for the sports scores, the stock quotes, the TV and movie listings, maybe even the comics. The news? No. The news was simply a freebie thrown in with the other stuff customers were actually buying.

Readers were also buying newspapers--and reading the news--for other reasons that had nothing to do with the content itself, nothing to do with any desire to consume "quality information. Reasons like:

-- The desire to feel connected to the community

-- The desire to feel on top of what's going on in the community

-- The desire not to look stupid at the next cocktail party

In the design world, we call these "affective" attributes, the word "affect" being a stand-in for "emotional." Affective attributes are those that generate specific emotions or feelings in a person using a product. Not everyone who bought an iPhone did so because they thought it was the most useful and beautiful cell phone out there. Some bought it because they wanted to look cool, hip, down with the latest. Some bought it because they wanted to feel like they were on the cutting edge. Some bought it because they were afraid of missing out on something special.

Many purchase decisions are driven by these kinds of factors, rather than the practical value of the object in question. Exhibit A: Killer muscle cars that don't actually run all that well. The "quality" in the information? That's like the medicine in the cough syrup. No child who ever agreed to slurp down cough syrup did it for the medicine. They did it for the cherry flavor.

This might sound depressing, but it should be encouraging. Because it offers the key to the solution: Figure out what your readers really want from you--whether it's the sports scores or the desire to feel connected, or both, probably--and then figure out how to deliver the news so that the reader gets those things they're actually looking for.

And accept that there never was, and probably never will be, any meaningful demand for quality information. Except among a tiny minority of news junkies, and those of us in the business. Sure, when something like the domestic wire-tapping story or the Walter Reed scandal come to light, people are interested. But on a day-to-day basis? Really, they're more interested in the sports scores. And the stock quotes.

Photo courtesy of Yogi. 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