Category Archives: Strategy

Why the watchdog is only as good as the chicken dinner

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Dog and ChickenMy friend Jason posted a comprehensive list of items to consider when crafting a mobile strategy for local media. It’s solid, and I found myself drawn to the “Audience approach” portion of the post:

  • Recognize mobile users are task driven and formulate everything around that
  • Know what users are doing on mobile devices in the market
  • Sharing+Location+Socializing

My takeaway from the list, and the audience-centered approach in general, was that it outlined not just a mobile strategy, but a real set of targets to shoot for across an organization. I got a little picky about this in my response to the post; after some further thinking, I’d like to elaborate.

I live in Salem, Oregon and work about an hour south in Corvallis. Of course, when I worked as a reporter here, I knew pretty much everything that was going on in Corvallis. About Salem, however, I knew very little. Part of the curse of commuting, I suppose. My wife is active in the community and plugged in to a range of groups, but we decided to take the local paper, thinking it’d help us broaden our knowledge of chicken dinner stuff.

Keep in mind that we decided to subscribe for three primary reasons:

  • Reporting on community issues so we’d be better citizens
  • Community events information to get involved locally
  • Timely listings of fun stuff to do

Also keep in mind that this would be a bit of an experiment for me: reading a paper in a town I lived in without working in the newsroom that produced the product.

It didn’t last long. I found the reporting incomplete with just a few local stories and all the usual national and international stuff I’d read elsewhere fully 18 hours before my paper arrived. The papers kept getting thinner, with less room for the events and community information I wanted. A few months after we started subscribing, the paper went on a major campaign to promote their columnists, none of whom I found very insightful or entertaining. The truth is, the useful information just wasn’t there and we decided that it wasn’t worth the money we were paying.

This week, I read that the paper had been recognized by APME for “Digital Innovation in Watchdog Journalism.” The award-winning story was of waste, corruption and fraud in a local education service agency. It was a great series: deeply reported, with great online tools to sift and visualize data, and led to overhaul of the agency staff.

I don’t mean to detract from their good work, but my concern is that an award like this will tell the editors and managers that what they are doing is just right. We were subscribers when this story unfolded. Award-winning watchdog journalism couldn’t overcome the paper’s lack of day-to-day utility.

I read or heard a long time ago that journalism is information people use to organize their lives: who to vote for, what to do Saturday night, things to talk about over dinner. It’s all about utility and it’s only as good as it is useful (newspaper’s called fishwrap for a reason). In a competitive information market, we all have too many choices to put up with mediocre options.

In my experience, starting with what’s essential for maximum utility and relentlessly simplifying around that core makes for a more focused and useful product. For media companies, that utility generates habit and trust. You’re there when they needed you. And when you have deep or broad stories to tell in a narrative and multimedia way, you get the eyeballs and time you’ve earned, without reservation — even pride. Without the recognition of a customer’s real needs, you do your finest work and lose them anyway.

A mobile strategy is essential. When it’s the starting point, it’s even better.

On pandas, lobsters and apps that rock both.

Posted on by
Reply

If you can get through the panda and lobster analogies for how we interact with Google and Facebook (it took me a little time, but I’m onboard now: pandas are searching, eating machines; lobsters find a trap and get stuck), Adam Rifkin has an interesting post about corporate culture at Google and how the company’s focus on search makes them less suited to building killer social applications.

Rifkin’s got good points and if Buzz was any indication, Google’s probably not the company to build the next super-wow social app. Rifkin’s concerned because of a list of stats about ad traffic on Facebook and Twitter as a growing force in search. It’s true that the online market is more diverse than it was even a couple of years ago. But while Google would be crazy to sit idly by while others slide into the driver’s seat, especially in the search market, I think it’s most critical to understand whether you’re creating for pandas or lobsters and embrace that completely.

I’d be interested to compare traffic across all of Google — especially their API — with Twitter and Facebook. I’m not sure what you’d find, but my experience is that I’m searching on google.com much less but their applications (especially on my Android phone) are so much more a part of my daily life than ever before. So I’m an even more efficient panda thanks to Google’s ability to put leaves right where I need them. I’m also pretty protective of the relationships I’ve made on Facebook and Twitter and very aware that the three don’t often cross very naturally.

My point in this, really, is threefold:

  1. Rifkin assumes that success for Google must include a beatdown of Facebook and/or Twitter. I disagree. Understanding the kind of service you provide and (better yet) knowing the type of audience you’re serving is more important than trying to beat someone else at their own game. Today’s news of Google acquiring semantic search company Metaweb is more exciting to me than yet another social app.
  2. If the Internet has taught me anything, it’s that there’s room enough for more than one big player, especially when each completely rocks their specific niche. The days of “one ring to rule them all” are over. Thanks to Frodo. And networked computers.
  3. The message of “Knowing Thine Audience” is hyper relevant to content strategists as well; it’s what keeps getting newspapers into trouble because it’s so easy to bounce between the first and best sources. General interest is as bland and unattractive as it sounds. Find a niche and rock it.

With quality information, everything else falls into place

Posted on by
Reply

More than anything, the real shift in the practice of providing information, whether it be about an organization or a product or a community, has been the demand for quality information. There’s an interesting post over at the Nieman Journalism Lab today that captures the cause of real angst into a real simple statement:

Worry less about journalism and more about quality information, however it gets gathered and distributed.

There’s more history and philosophy about the Knight News Challenge, and it’s worth a read. But for a tweet-worthy synopsis of what every 21st century information worker’s primary goal should be, there’s the take away.

Working on an iPad strategy? Hold on there, tiger

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

I’m not going to point any fingers because I think everyone has the best of intentions, but I fear that calls for community newspapers to have a strategy for the iPad are misguided — with one caveat, which I’ll get to.

Apple’s new touchscreen device kind of looks like an e-reader and, chances are, it’ll excel at that function. But to expect that old print-centric information architecture and design will be rescued by an e-reader in everyone’s bag is like tilting at windmills. That train left the station a long time ago, folks.

The iPad, rather, is an extension of the mobile ethos of information delivery based on locality and specificity:

What information do I need to know about where I am, on topics of interest, from people I trust.

Now, if an iPad strategy is a wholesale reinvention of the newsroom and means development of a brand new content strategy, I’m all for it. Because in reality (maybe more than Steve Jobs wants to admit), the iPad is just a big mobile phone that doesn’t make phone calls.

My concern is that newsrooms — especially small community newsrooms — aren’t prepared to provide information in an always-on mobile world anyway. And to focus on one aspect of a product (the e-reader) but miss the real power in its connectivity is going to be devastating.

I remain cautiously optimistic.

Attention as a resource

Posted on by
Reply

Chew on this bit of full RSS feed philosphy from John Gruber (@daringfireball) when you’re doing whatever you do on the weekend:

Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

Thanks to @danielbachhuber for the tip-off.

Hey newspapers, quit worrying about what Google’s buying and serve your customers

Posted on by
Reply

News that Google is considering gobbling up Yelp has everyone twittering about how nothing’s safe from the search-blog-mail-chat-office-data giant. I generally avoid leaping into this kind of fray since I don’t really have a dog in the fight and don’t care to add to the hype.

But when I saw this tweet Friday afternoon, I had to come out swinging:

I think not.

http://twitter.com/pachecod/statuses/6807927866

Newspaper business directories are losers. First off, I speak from experience that newspaper community-based business directories are impossibly unwieldy to manage (you never get everyone included, so you’re not really the authority) and are about 10 laps behind the big-dog search industry that is always innovating ahead of your game.

And tying a directory to a walled community is a non-starter. Think you can compete with the draw and activity of a 350-million-and-growing active community? Come down off your high horse. Now try again.

Actually, newspapers should be concerned if their advertisers aren’t calling them to ask what the news means for their business locally and how they should respond.

For years, newspapers ad reps were the captains of a local business’ strategy to reach customers, for obvious reasons. While the Web disrupted, expanded and democratized the channels, we panicked and threw stuff at both readers and advertisers with the hope that we’d get the water back behind the dam.

Meanwhile, local advertisers were bombarded with SEO snake oil and social media hype and left out in the cold by their long-time allies if they weren’t convinced by confusing print ad pricing or iffy online banner campaigns.

Seth Godin wrote this morning about how effective it is to fight the natural flow of market forces, especially in a disrupted market like newspapers:

Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.

Google owns search; it’s a habit. Hell, it’s a verb. No local directory is going to touch that kind of reach. Instead, a complete strategy for a local business should include a Google business listing, a Facebook fan page and a branding campaign in the paper and online.

Like the proverbial reed that bends in the breeze but survives the typhoon, the local news organization’s best bet is to be the conduit for that work — the first call an advertiser makes when they hear of a new method to reach customers.

And, because technologies change, merge and shift, our advice and platforms must be flexible enough to adapt. Local business doesn’t need another business directory, they need a partner and a media hub. (I’ve been working on one version. More to come on that soon.)

So if Google buys Yelp, fine. Go out to your restaurant clients and teach them how social media works. Get them into the data stream, help them understand why it’s a good thing that people are talking about them and be available when the landscape changes. Because it will.

But you’ll be there. If you build relationships, that is.

The elephant in the college town: university news and communications

Posted on by
Reply

Some of us within the news organization I work for and a sister organization nearby (both owned by Lee) have been talking about how we’d remake our news products and news-gathering.

One of the things that has come up, though not with any kind of serious consideration yet, is the impact that a land-grant university’s news machine has on a small-town newsroom.

The Gazette-Times is in Corvallis, OR, population 49,807. We’re also the home of Oregon State University, home to 21, 969 students and 2,918 faculty.

That means that just a few blocks from our newsroom is another team of communicators in News and Communication Services working 40 hours each per week to promote the university and its mission. Their OSU Web page lists as many full-time staff as we have reporters.

One of our former reporters who is now working for OSU send a tweet today that spurred some thinking (and this off-the-cuff post): the university is using Skype to connect news organizations with faculty experts. Cool idea.

But the bigger question here is how we as a tiny newsroom should cover the university. Is anyone looking to us to break stories about research breakthroughs in our town? We already cover the hell out of athletics, but can only pick and choose about the rest of the work happening on campus.

I’ve been starting to think that we use the well-crafted science reporting directly from the university. Build a science page in the paper and link to news releases online.

Obviously, the news and communications crew has a pro-university slant that they’re working with the marketing department to put forward. Why is that so tough to swallow when it comes to news about research, but we readily gulp it down when it comes to athletics?

I’m not saying that we stop covering budget impacts, town and gown issues and on-campus enterprise reporting. I’m suggesting we emphasize that over the half-hearted (and often half-understood) science churnalism that we’re often reduced to.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave them in the comments.

Creating distinct roles for print and online

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

I was asked by my boss this week to respond to some strategic planning coming from the company, specifically related to crafting distinct roles for print and online in newsrooms.

I think it’s a great idea and I’m really hopeful that the concept moves forward. The big issue is deciding how to divide the two products and what they’re naturally good at doing.

Here’s an excerpt of my reply:

First, we’ve got to know the things we do in print that really work:
1) condense a lot of information;
2) create a product that combines good writing with a familiar structure. And it’s portable!
3) take the time to slow down, put things into context, tell stories and draw some conclusions;
4) invite readers to slow down, draw connections, take a journey through information and craft thoughtful responses;
4) deliver a lot of our product to a lot of places in a big damn hurry. Daily.

Next, look at the Web’s unique strengths:
1) immediate delivery using reader-supplied hardware (low overhead);
2) interactivity invites people to help report the story with tips, corrections and original reporting (contributed photos, etc);
3) can offer text, audio, video to provide other angles, tell stories in different ways;
4) searchable;
5) transparent (more on this later).

Print stops and takes the long view. The Web is a stream of networked information. That’s how they are distinct and how we craft different roles for them.

I think we stop posting full print stories to the Web and instead post incremental updates, heavily linked, with reporters standing in the stream splashing information out, if you will. We become curators of the information stream, highlighting interesting bits and directing people to the right places and conversations.

This also means that we’ve got to be taking part in the conversations to make the most of tips and feedback that come over the transom. (Here’s where we break the notion that a blog is not dirty word nor a reader comment stream nor a dumping ground for reporters’ musings. They are a powerful CMS tool that reach a large audience and invite a particular kind of give-and-take.)

This is where the transparency comes in: people can see where our tips are coming from, how we’re reporting a story, and how the organization has reported it in the past. They can easily read more by following links, etc. Active consumption of news. (Read David Weinberger for more on this.)

In print, we do what we’ve been doing well and what people depend on, while ramping up our game on all fronts. We tell important stories and guide people through complex subjects. We focus on crafting dynamic designs that grab people’s attention and energize them. We present vetted feedback and general interest information. We understand the gravitas of print and make use of it by offering some exclusives and reprints suitable for framing.

This isn’t mutually exclusive. Short posts online as a news item develops can lead to an in-depth story in a few days. A series of quick hits on government decisions can culminate in an analysis of the kinds of issues a council takes up and how it discusses them. Multimedia of an event can drive interest in a printed feature story.

Even if all of this became top priority, it’d take a lot of work to get newsrooms to embrace them. But that’s part of the fun.

Other ideas? Send them my way and we’ll discuss.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Make new friends, but keep the old…

Posted on by
Reply

Note: This post started as a reply to a post by WeMediaGuru, but it just got too long for that format and turned into its own animal.

Today, Jason at wemediaguru notes words from Mike Blinder of the consulting firm The Blinder Group, which works with media companies to maximize revenue:

The mafia (yellow pages) comes to town every year and steals 18 to 20 percent of the revenue that newspapers should be getting in their local market. Google is doing a great job at killing yellow pages. The enemy of my enemy is my friend today.

Jason’s wondering if incorporating Google is a wise strategy for media companies, especially those who are considering local search, but aren’t entirely sold on the idea.

Building a Web strategy without Google is like trying to start a business in town 30 years ago without placing a newspaper ad.

The fact is that many people (though admittedly less all the time) think the Internet IS Google. Take Steve Krug’s example of people typing whole urls into Yahoo or AOL. The big problem Google has, though, is in rooting out relevant local information. But it’s getting better and we (local media) aren’t part of the solution.

Take my wife and me. We like local restaurants, quaint hotels and out-of-the-way sightseeing. Up until a couple of years ago, a pre-roadtrip Google search brought such local gems as Super 8 Motel and Pizza Hut.

That’s changing, in part because others are starting to realize that while Google might be the shotgun approach, once a source of good local information earns their trust, they’re the go-to for future information.

Take a Google search for restaurants in our current town.

There are three things to note here:

  1. Our newspaper isn’t among the top ten sites for information on the topic.
  2. The top two sites contain reader reviews and do, in fact, highlight some pretty cool local eateries.
  3. The search has brought up a couple of local restaurants who have done at least a passable job at SEO. Without an ally in the local media company, locals are taking the Web into their own hands.

There are some obvious lessons in all three. But where to go from here?

Why not become the local expert in getting local businesses in front of Googlers? Could we start consulting those who already have a Web presence in SEO (for a fee) and a link?

Obviously, reader reviews are a big part of Web 2.0 trust-building. Businesses don’t often want to take the bad with the good (and years of pandering local business coverage have taught them bad habits about dealing with us).

Why not sell ad space, for example, next to reader reviews of that business? Then maximize Google’s ability to access that information?

Am I out of my mind here?