An iPad strategy is only as good as the information flow

Posted by Matt on March 8, 2010  | 

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 by Matt on March 5, 2010  | 

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 by Matt on December 19, 2009  | 

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:

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 by Matt on November 23, 2009  | 

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

Posted by Matt on September 18, 2009  | 

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 by Matt on May 27, 2008  | 

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.

Make new friends, but keep the old…

Posted by Matt on May 6, 2008  | 

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?

Reader frequency: The elephant in the room?

Posted by Matt on April 16, 2008  | 

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?

Ditching the baggage

Posted by Matt on April 11, 2008  | 

Interesting post today at masteringmultimedia, who pulls this piece from Rosenblumtv’s post he calls microeconomics:

The web offers not just another platform for distribution of product, but rather an entirely new calculus for how an online media company can be run. By its very nature, it changes the construct of most media businesses. Migrate your newspaper to the web completely and you suddenly lose the cost of ink, paper, presses, pressmen, delivery trucks, distribution and paperboys. Tell your writers to work from home and you can lose the building, the desks, the lights, the cleaning services and most of the management as well. Cut all those costs, and suddenly your ad based web revenue can look pretty good in comparison. Its the overhead that is killing you. Lose it. You don’t need it.

This reminds me of a post on wemediaguru in which Jason talked about newspapers opening a coffeeshop in the newsroom (or at least the building) and inviting the public in to work and hang out.

At the time, I thought it was a little goofy, but now it seems to me that if news organizations ditch all the old baggage, they could move to downtown spaces, upgrade the facilities and have all those reporter-bloggers punching away next to freelance programmers, designers and whoever dropped in for a mega-latte.

I think the key is to retain the paper’s brand more than anything. I was up in Vancouver, Wash. a couple of weeks ago in the Columbian’s brand new building. It’s beautiful, and the paper’s staff uses the first four floors, with office space available on the top two. But what really grabbed me was the use of the paper’s brand in the architecture.

The pictures here don’t do it justice, but the cool lobby area features huge portions of the paper’s nameplate etched in the glass and inside on the walls. Clips help set the paper in the city’s history.*

My point is that what matters is the brand and the product, not how it’s delivered.

*Note: The fancy building didn’t help the Columbian. In Dec, 2008, they were forced to move back into their old location. In May, they filed for Chapter 11 protection.

Serving readers

Posted by Matt on March 6, 2008  | 

My good friend Jason over at wemediaguru has a good post that I wanted to touch on.
In response to a Rob Curley post on serving audiences and giving readers what they want:

A perfect example at where I work is the fact that accident stories and crime are well read on our web site but often those pieces get buried in the B section of the print product.

He continues:

Curley’s point is this and it has been said before: If we don’t listen to our audience we will quickly become irrelevant both as information providers and as solid businesses.

It occurs to me that there are a couple of things that exist of the old way of doing journalism that have always kind of seemed to live in a bit of “editorial limbo.” For example:

• Ever have an editor who asks great questions of a story, the kind that really serve to make a topic relevant to readers, and then make completely unrelated choices for page 1?
• Most journalists love covering breaking news and getting the story first, but balk at really publishing right now as in a blog or online posting.

Obviously, the Web presents new challenges and opportunities for the business (and service) of news. But maybe if we start thinking of these new tools as ways to cut through the b.s. and do the kind of work we’ve aspired to, the hill we’re climbing might get a bit less steep.