The single essential failure

"If the automakers' difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, Dec. 8, 2008

There's been a lot of ire in the journalism world about Jeff Jarvis blaming journalists for their current fate. But I have to agree with him. Newspapers' difficulties today can be chalked up to the same essential failure as the carmakers': The belief they could avoid change.

The difference, mainstream journalists will argue, is that journalism was producing a quality product. Unlike Detroit, which kept producing gas guzzlers when the tide was turning toward more fuel efficient vehicles, the mainstream media kept producing important, democracy-foundational journalism.

I will argue that the difference is not so great.

Both have continued to produce products that customers increasingly don't want. In journalism's case, the mainstream media may continue to be producing "important news," but it's not in the form readers want. The same way Detroit continues to produce "transportation," but not in the form drivers want. So this is the point: It doesn't matter how "valuable" your product is. If your customers don't want it, your future is limited. To survive, you have to evolve.

This is how the traditional media failed. They believed they didn't have to change, because their product was so valuable. They were wrong. The world does need what they produce. But we need it in the form in which we'll consume it.

Photo courtesy of Ikhlasul Amal. Creative Commons license.

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.

The need to move from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance

I recently interviewed techPresident.com and Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Andrew Rasiej for a story on how new media turbo charged coverage of the 2008 presidential election. He made an important observation in that conversations: Many newspapers operate online with a scarcity mindset, when they really should have one of abundance.

For example, on Nov. 5, the day after the historic presidential election, the NY Times posted only a handful of photographs from the previous day—when they very well could have posted a slew.
I remember noticing that as well. I’d been in Oakland on election night. The next day I went looking for photographs of celebrations around the country. I wanted to see if they had been as wild as Oakland’s. (In fact, as I soon learned, many were much more wild.) I remember subconsciously being surprised at how few pictures the NY Times had up on its site. If ever there were a day to just throw out pictures galore, this was it.

This is the scarcity mindset. When you only have a certain number of physical newspaper pages, there are only a certain amount of photographs you can publish. So you get in the habit of choosing only the best and running with those.
But on the Web, bandwidth is limitless. So not only can you post a gazillion photos, should you choose to do so, but—and this is important—your readers actually expect you to—just as I expected the NY Times to.

Moving into the abundance mindset, and posting as much content as possible,* will help ensure the future of news organizations for two reasons.

-- It generates revenue. Think about how many more ad impressions the NY Times would have gotten from me—and people like me, hungry for images from that transformational day—had they posted a slew of photographs.

-- It allows you to meet your readers' expectations. Not making more content available, on the other hand, violates expectations, and that’s a very bad thing to do. It irritates people, decreases their loyalty, and reduces the chance they’ll keep coming back.

* A quick note on what I mean by “more” content. I don’t mean more stories necessarily. That’s unsustainable in these days of slashed staffs. “More” content doesn’t have to be about creating a lot of new work. Rather, it’s about using as much as possible of what you already have—photographs, interview transcripts, even interview audio turned into podcasts, plus all those little observations, behind-the-scenes happenings, and little nuggets that would never make it into a formal “story”, much less merit a story of their own, but that nevertheless could conceivably be of interest to someone, and therefore is worth throwing up on the Web as a standalone item.

Photo courtesy of Somerslea. Creative Commons license.

It's not about finding a new way to pay for the same old thing

On Thursday, I wrote about how the SF Chron's editor is thinking about jacking up the paper's newsstand price in order to cover operating costs. Today, I'm reading a post on PaidContent.org about how maybe some newspapers should convert to non-profit status as a means of ensuring their viability.

Come on, people. This is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The problem is not the business model. It's the product offering. How do we know this? Declining readership.

If readership were staying level--or, better yet, soaring--then you'd know you had the right product on your hands. And in that case, yes, tinkering with the business model would be the right tactic to take to ensure one's survival.

But declining readership tells a different story. It means there are fewer customers out there who want what you're selling. There's not a single business school out there that will teach the principle: "When you have a declining customer base, fiddle with the price structure." Instead, they'll say, "When you have a declining customer base, you have a problem with your product." Solution: Go back to the drawing board and rethink your product.

Journalists and news observers who continue to point to the business model as the source of what ails us are doing this business a disservice. What we need to do is to rethink the newspaper altogether. We need to go back to the drawing board, to develop a real understanding of what our potential customer base (ie: all the potential readers in our communities) want out of a "news" organization--and how they want to receive news--and then come up with a new product offering altogether.

Photo courtesy of Toots Fontaine. Creative Commons license.

Times Extra: An Assessment

The New York Times just launched "Times Extra", an "alternative" home page that appends to some stories a list of links for related stories at other websites.

The home page basically looks the same, except for the new list of links under certain stories, like the one at right.

What's future-of-news-y about it:

-- It embraces the mindset that "we aren't the only ones who know what's going on." In the early days of the Internet, the name of the game was attracting people to your site and keeping them there. Today, it's about helping your readers find the best stuff out there, irrespective of whether it's on your site or not.

This might seem counter-intuitive. If a reader leaves your site to go elsewhere, aren't you losing those ever-important eyeballs--and consequently your bill-paying ad impressions? In the short term, yes. In the long term, no. A site that declares, implicitly if not explicitly, "we know we don't have a monopoly on good information and interesting stories, and we want to help you find the best out there" builds trust. And trust these days is what builds loyalty. And loyalty is what keeps people coming back to your site. So you might lose a few ad impressions today by letting your readers go elsewhere. But that will more than pay for itself in the ad impressions you'll get in the future when they come back, because they've come to see you as the trusted source for news, wherever that news lies.

What's old-school about it

-- Not much.

(Though I'm not crazy about the green font -- It's hard to read -- But that's a nit. And it's just bad design, not old school -- It's OK. The Times folks will figure it out and improve later -- No need to get everything right the first time out of the gate.)

What else I'd like to see / What else I'd like to know

-- I'd like to know how the Times is choosing the links. Are editors hand-picking them? Or are they being automatically generated through some kind of bot?

One of the links listed under the Obama story in the image above takes you to a blog called Slog. That's cool. But who's "Slog"? If you told me the link to that site had been hand-curated, I'd have confidence it was worth my time. So would I if you told me it came from a bot built to find the best items out there. But right now, I'm wondering whether that list is randomly generated. If so, that's bad news. Not only would the list not necessarily be helpful, it could actually send me to a bunch of time-wasting stories. In that case, the value of the list would plummets and the Times would lose my trust as a reliable source of good information. Lose my trust, and you lose my loyalty.

-- I'd like to see a behind-the-scenes blog from the experimenters at the NY Times, sharing with us what they're doing, why they're doing what they're doing, and what they're learning from it. They could answer the above question in that blog, for example. They could also report back on how readers are using Times Extra. How many people who try it stick with it (as opposed to convert back to the regular Times home page)? Which links seem to invite the most clicks? How quickly do people who leave come back?

Many companies already offer these kinds of behind-the-scenes looks. The Google team has one. So does the Google Earth team. In fact, Google has a whole slew of behind-the-scenes blogs for people who want to look under the hood at what the company is doing. The NY Times -- and indeed all journos who are experimenting with new forms of collecting and disseminating news -- should have blogs reporting on their efforts. It's the only way to speed up our collective learning and turbo-charge the innovation we need to in order to save this business of ours.

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.

Why the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble

The San Francisco Chronicle is in worse shape than I thought. Their editor, Ward Bushie, went on local public radio show "Forum" today to discuss the future of journalism in general and the Chron in particular, and his entire mindset left my jaw gaping open in incredulity. Showing an amazing lack of strategic sense, Bushie seemed to be saying he could only see two possible ways out of the hole: raise advertising rates or raise the cost of the paper.

Hmmm…. Talk about thinking "inside the box."

Bushie didn’t talk at all about possibly rethinking the paper—either the Chron itself or the idea of a newspaper in general. He apparently assumes that the Chron—or newspapers in general—should continue to provide the exact same product that they offer today (ie: the combined international/national/local/sports/business/home/life/entertainment package that they offer today). There was no: “Let’s go back to the drawing board and see where our competitive advantages lie and figure out what value we can deliver to our customers and then come up with a bunch of potential alternative incarnations that we’d be able to knock out of the ballpark and support financially.”

Instead, Bushie spoke about potentially jacking up the price of the paper, which is 75 cents today. And what was his rationale for thinking this was a reasonable idea? Most cups of coffee are about $2, he said. And the New York Times already costs $1.50. (At least it does if you’re in California. Maybe not on the streets of NYC.)

Such faulty thinking is flabbergasting. A thing isn’t worth more, just because other things are worth more. A thing is worth what your customer thinks it’s worth--what they’re willing to pay for it. Given the plummeting readership in newspapers in general, I sincerely doubt that the average San Franciscan would be willing to pay more for something they are increasingly less interested in.

The other revelation that further called into doubt Bushie's ability to lead the Chron into the future was that he repeatedly spoke about how much the paper been talking to “their readers” to find out what “their readers” want. But these, in fact, are the wrong people to be talking to. In order to survive, newspapers need to enlarge their customer base. Newspapers like the Chron should be talking to people who don’t already read (and buy) the newspaper. They should be trying to figure out how to convert those people from non-customers into customers. Normally, I fully support talking to and designing for your customers. But not when your existing customers don’t form a sufficient base.

In short, Bushie’s mindset seems to be this:
“The Chron is a great paper. We should figure out how to continue to support it, in its current incarnation, though maybe with a few tweaks.”

But to survive—or rather, to grow into a thriving news entity—a newspaper’s mindset today needs to be:
“What sorts of news are the citizens of our community interested in? What portions of those can we be really good at delivering? And how can we deliver them in a way that the members of our community will consume them?”

The full interview (available for download) is here.

Image courtesy of AlbySpace. Creative Commons license.