What do Lake Wobegon and journalism’s ‘golden days’ have in common?

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Matt

A colleague forwarded a quote this morning from Garrison Keillor, of “Prairie Home Companion” fame:

“This is the beauty of the new media: it isn’t so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people email it to friends and it slowly floods the country. What the new media age also means is that there won’t be newspapers to send reporters to cover the next war, but there will be 6 million teenage girls blogging about their plans for the weekend.”

He’s right about information sharing and the long tail, but he’s wrongheaded about the “good old days” of newspapers.

I guess Keillor is selectively forgetting that newspapers haven’t exactly been doing much sending reporters to cover anything overseas lately.

In fact, Lake Wobegon and ideas of newspaper journalism golden days have a lot in common: fantasy.

Life (and the news) “back in the day” was just as tough and fraught with issues as today. We just choose to forget the yellow journalism that spawned the Spanish-American War, the drive for celebrity and institutional malaise that gave Jayson Blair room to run and the controversial style (at the time) in coverage and design of the USA Today.

It’s all too easy to take the low road and declare all bloggers as miscreants in pajamas (except for those pesky journalists with access to an open source CMS), twitter simply a tool for narcissists (sometimes, but what about the other 60 percent?) and that newspapers have already tried online and failed (think again).

Actually, thanks to new media, I think journalism’s best days are yet to come.

“One size” solutions don’t really fit anyone

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Matt

Ryan Sholin posts this morning on a topic that has kind of rankled me for some time now: blanket pronouncements about about what “newspapers” should or shouldn’t do.

…if you’re in the business of publishing pronouncements, predictions, prayers, analysis, criticism, or full on takedowns related to the current state of the newspaper industry, please understand that despite the convenience it would provide for said ruminations, there is no such thing as a monolithic, uniform entity called “newspapers.”

I’ll say.

While we’re at it, let’s stop making the “save journalism” discussion all about saving newspapers. Good journalism isn’t only done on newsprint. To think otherwise is elitist and myopic.

Acts of Journalism will continue and practitioners will thrive. It’s professional journalism that is soul-searching.

One size doesn’t fit all. The sooner we accept it, the sooner we can move forward with solutions.

Associated Press DRM gets there the hard way. Wherever ‘there’ is.

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Matt

Have you seen AP’s new “protective format” for tracking and charging for links?

I most certainly don’t understand how this is supposed to work. For that, have a look at Steve Yelvington’s excellent post.

But the convoluted diagram does remind me of other ‘inventions’:

Taking journalism lessons from revolutionaries

Posted on April 24, 2009 by Matt

I just finished watching a fantastic video, produced for the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference.

Take a minute and check it out:

I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.

For the record, I live in Oregon (Beervana) and I love craft beer.

But I’m also a journalism fanatic and I just couldn’t help but think about my own professional values every time these folks were talking about their own work.

This weekend, many of the best and most heretical minds in the field will be meeting at BarCamp News-Innovation Philadelphia to hammer out some new ideas and models for remaking the news industry. I couldn’t make it to Philly, but I’ll be there in spirit and following along from afar.

And so, to journalists who feel abused and stranded by the industry that controls the work we love, let’s borrow the creed of passionate brewers to wrest control of our craft and duty and move boldly into the new century:

We must illuminate our strengths, keep true to our standards, educate those who seek to understand what we’ve created. We must draw hard lines, we must expose those who would seek to capitalize on what we have created. We must not chase after those who do not understand what we’ve created or care about what we do. We believe in quality, bold character, fun, responsibility, and we believe in pushing the boundaries.

Do good work in Philly. And every day forward.

Taking lessons from Internet ubiquity and radio

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Matt

Chris O’Brien has a great report on the steps NPR has taken to be leaders — not just in radio, but journalism itself — and how that has translated into a culture of innovation in the organization.

Among some fascinating stats (26.4 million weekly listeners, 38 foreign bureaus, $1.5 million in digital storytelling training) O’Brien hits on what I think is the real key behind NPR’s success:

NPR officials also credit the personal nature of their work, the fact that people connect with the voices of its reporters and personalities. That’s another lesson for newspapers: People like voice, and attitude. I think that’s been flushed out of a lot of newspaper writing which has become increasingly bland.

Indeed.

I commute an hour to work every day and while the afternoon drive is dedicated to decompression, which occasionally entails rocking out, my morning drive is all NPR. I’ll even break the music cycle if I happen to be on the road when Marketplace is on and I’m not generally into business news. It’s just that good.

So NPR’s success is due in part to telling stories in an engaging way to a captive (but not compelled) audience. Blogs and other distribution methods offer even more opportunity for personalizing news content and multimedia is a no-brainer.

So how do we convince the powers that be that investing time, effort and money into really doing online news delivery is a good investment?

May be we should start with Mark Briggs’ artful summation of On the Media’s report on the Pew Center’s latest survey of the future of the Internet:

The Internet will become completely ubiquitous. Half the survey respondents think that’s a good thing, half think it’s a bad thing.

No matter which side of the fence you’re on, Gladstone and Rainie end up agreeing that human nature is what will be revealed. We can’t blame technology.

Digital connectivity among people is an additive function. It does not replace offline networking. In other words, people are not more lonely or spend less time socially in the real world because of the digital connectivity.

We’ll become ridiculously mobile.

This isn’t Earth-shattering news, but it’s instructive to get it out in black and white (so to speak). It also provides a baseline for moving forward: Internet ubiquity is coming and bitching about how things have changed is a moot point.

Why make plans for anything else?

Excellent flood coverage at CR Gazette

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Matt

Shame on me for reading it first somewhere else, but my eyes were glued to Web coverage of Iowa flooding by the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

My friend Jason Kristufek heads up the paper’s Web efforts, and he’s been doing them proud.

From a map-enabled display of stories as they were breaking (sorry, no link) early on and wall-to-wall coverage during the event to reader-driven clean-up resources and assistance and postings of “Random Acts of Kindness” by volunteers in the area, the Gazette rocked under extreme conditions.

Great work!

“We don’t want to be Facebook. Facebook is Facebook.”

Posted on May 27, 2008 by Matt

Thanks to a recent conversation with a local economic development expert and programmer/web guru, I finally have a two line explanation of Web 2.0:

User-centric
Open data

Obviously, there’s a bunch to unpack there, which gives an aspiring new media strategist some hope for a prosperous future of innovation.

On Friday, mediabistro reported that NYT is developing an open API, with discussions about how much to open and how to bring data and stories to developers and — consequently — the public.

The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data…”
“The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” [Marc] Frons [chief technical officer] said. “How far we don’t know.”

In some recent strategy sessions in the organization I work for, we’ve talked about how to incorporate more of the two concepts into our own Web offerings and how to leverage our data (especially about local business and advertising) to take advantage of our toehold in the region. And during a recent Oregon visit, Jason Kristufek and I talked about how what data might be logical to open up.

It’s good to hear the big boys talking openly about this project, and it’s encouraging to hear that they’re struggling with the same basic questions.

But here’s where I think small (and corporate) news organizations can learn the most:

Times Digital is working on to build what Frons called “a news and information platform.” Given the current explosion in social networking, we had to ask if he saw NYTimes.com integrating some networking element. His answer: We don’t want to be Facebook. Facebook is Facebook. We’ll probably do something a little bit different. We’d like it to be like the email an article, only much more robust than that.

More often than not, corporate entities are busy reinventing the wheel with “features” they “roll out” that easily “plug in” to existing Web frameworks (in our case TownNews) but don’t really enhance usability. At best, they actually arrive on time and incorporate into the existing page like they’re supposed to. At worst, they just add to the clutter currently bogging down news Web sites and continue to push the old saw about being a Web destination.

With emerging developments like Google Friend Connect and Twitter, why spend time and money building your own social applications?

Link to feeds, build databases, and concentrate on how to make the Web (and the network) work for you. Note that this is not about “free labor” from readers. These are networks intensively managed by people building trust and habit among readers.

Excuses, excuses

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Matt

Aaron Swartz piles on the praise for a This American Life show focused on the U.S. housing market meltdown. Swartz starts off by drawing lessons to fix the news: declining circulation, talk show shouters, aging readers.

Here are three points he suggests we can learn from the episode:

It believed in the intelligence of its audience.
It didn’t assume you already knew the subject.
It was done in an entertaining and conversational tone.

Not groundbreaking, but good points. After a quick look at his blog, I see a non-journalist (at least a non-journalism-focused blogger) starting to understand the problem.

It’s the comments that get to me. Here’s a guy who’s wrangling with a fundamental question of our industry and this is how people respond:

The decline in sales is probably indicative of some other wider (societal) issue.
I don’t think there is enough time in the day to allow one hour programmes examining each and every pressing issue arising in the world.
I enjoy TAL too … but more relevantly, you might note they eke out a living on the fringes of the media world, competing with rant-radio and pop-music. Quality is a hard sell in terms of profitability.
1) this is not a model that can be replicated enmass. 2) this is not the reason why newspaper/print media companies are performing poorly.

Excuses. Whining. Plain and simple. And for someone who’s just starting to understand how fundamentally our industry must change, it’s discouraging.

So Aaron, if you can read this, keep up the good thinking. You’re right, and your three points illustrate good journalism, whether done today or 30 years ago.

No excuses.

Reader frequency: The elephant in the room?

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Matt

There’s an interesting conversation on new ad models going on in the Poynter online news e-mail list that started yesterday with Steve Yelvington, who forwarded a post from his blog for discussion:

The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we’re going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is /available advertising inventory/ that meets the advertisers’ needs. That inventory comes from audience, from reach (unique users) multiplied by frequency (pageviews per user). And while the reach numbers may look good, the frequency numbers suck.

Greg Harmon from Belden Associates chimed in to break down reader frequency into three groups and their mean frequency of visits:

Fly-by: Driven by episodic events picked up by Drudge, Digg, Yahoo, Google, whatever. Highly variable and can range from 15-20% to over 60% of monthly site traffic. Mean frequency: One visit per month.
Loyalist Incidentals: Familiar with the site but infrequent and come for a specific purpose a few days per month for a story, weather, etc. Inconclusive data makes it hard to separate this group from fly-bys. May be 40% of traffic.Mean frequency: Two times per month.
Core Loyalists: Most important; the real audience for advertisers. Visit an average four days per week, two to three times on weekdays. About 40% of traffic. Mean frequency: 40 times per month.

Harmon goes on to say that cookie-based reporting tools are part of our problem because people reset them, etc., making numbers are suspect.
Vin Crosby rode in with numbers from the NAA and Nielsen//Netratings data from March through August 2007:

She (The site’s media kit says that 57.1 percent of users are female) visited only 4.05 times per month, saw only 27 pages per month, and spent a total of 20 minutes and 20 seconds on the site during all those visits. * This means the AVERAGE USER of the premier DAILY newspaper in the U.S. visits LESS THAN ONCE PER WEEK.
* It means that she probably reads LESS THAN 27 stories there all month (because NYTimes.com, the maximize its number of banner ad exposures, tends to stretch stories over more than one Web page each).
* It means that she probably spends LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES on the site in each of those infrequent visit.
* And it also means that the NYTimes.com’s average user probably reads less of that newspaper’s content in a month than the paper’s average print edition readers reads in a single day.

His conclusion:

You can claim that daily newspapers (whether in print or online) nowadays reach an ‘exclusive audience,’ but the plain fact is that newspapers are general-interest publications. You can claim that frequency doesn’t matter, but I think that advertisers (and the newspaper sites’ ad sales people’s pitches) will say different. The bottom line is that 12 years after American daily newspapers first began publishing on the Web, their sites are read FAR LESS OFTEN AND FAR LESS THOROUGHLY than their companies’ dying newsprint editions and earn only a SMALL FRACTION of those dying editions’ revenues.

Good numbers will certainly help flesh out the picture, but it only serves to drive home the point in my mind that our focus in the newsroom must shift from the print publication to what we’re able to do online.

I’m still struggling to decipher Omniture data on my reporting blog, but I seem to have the same core readers. My paper is doing a self-promo featuring reporters out working with the tagline “More reporters, more local news.” You get the picture. Problem is, it’s made up of ads in the paper–preaching to the converted.

First thing is to get reporters aggressively (and effectively) blogging to create groupies and enhance the kind of content that only lives online. Then get the ads promoting the newsroom in other places: movie theaters, TV, billboards.

As a reporter, I’m a bit uncomfortable being the center of attention, but these are desperate times.

Thoughts on this? New ad models?

Matt Neznanski

A media, technology, journalism and idea mashup.

Category Archives: Journalism