Via Tim Carmody at Wired
With live television, we flip; with video on demand, we binge. This means that shows have to catch and hold our attention in very different ways — not just over the commercial, but from episode to episode, season to season, and from television to videogames, Facebook, or whatever else might capture our attention on a web-connected device.
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:
Here’s a great video that highlights a key point in the real disruptive power that the Web has had on publishing of all stripes. Stick with it until the end.
Apparently created by Penguin Group USA for a sales conference of Dorling Kindersley Books, it’s really a clever look at how off-base curmudgeons’ laments really are. Bravo!
Thanks to Lost Remote for the tip.
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.
In a small fit of clutter reduction this morning, I made the command decision to drop the New York Times and Washington Post national news feeds from my RSS reader, two long-time daily reads that began years ago before I discovered feeds at all.
Today, I monitor some 150 feeds daily (of course — and thankfully — not everyone publishes that often) and I just realized that in a week of news consumption, I’m more apt to just mark the feeds as read than to actually read, let alone click through to, anything on it.
Most interesting is that I’m not really missing anything. Between twitter, other blogs and news alerts there’s just not much new information in either feed by the time it comes around.
To be honest, I don’t have a single feed from a traditional news organization’s main online product. Blogs and others fill the gap. Full disclosure: I work in a newsroom, so there’s plenty of talk about big headlines, too, plus it’s my job to know what’s news locally, but I know I’m not alone in this.
I’m not the first to ask the big question of how news organizations can remain relevant when even their online news isn’t fresh enough. I guess it just hit home today.
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.
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.
Here in the mid-Willamette Valley, we’re in the process of switching from a really archaic copy-and-paste content management system to a vastly more powerful system in our newsrooms. I’m not doing as much reporting as I used to, instead I’m picking up more work moving this process forward and planning where we’re going. Good times.
While we lose some options in design and navigation as the company moves toward standardized design across properties, we’re expecting to gain tenfold in our ability to serve content better through tags and categories and a vastly improved (we’re told) search function.
I’ve been burned before so I don’t want to put my eggs in one basket, but I’m pretty excited about the options we’ll have once we understand the system more completely.
More importantly, though, is that we could (hopefully) be on the verge of a sea-change in how and what we post to the Web. First off, everyone in the newsroom is to be trained and will be expected to post their own stuff to the Web.
This led me to wonder if our Web content system could become our primary tool for managing and creating content. Maybe, but the system is primarily a publishing tool and doesn’t handle drafts and note-taking, so could lead to more problems than it’s worth right now.
This hasn’t stopped me from pushing for change in our newsroom processes.
My question for the past couple of weeks as we work through the specifics has been “Does it add value?” I read an interesting post this week by Tom Foremski about how the Web devalues anything it touches, or at least anything that can be digitized: music, TV, newspapers and magazines and software.
Foremski emphasises that this devaluation isn’t in the social value of these items, but rather in the cost necessary to produce and, especially, distribute them, a take on an idea developed by Clay Shirky.
It’s a point that’s clear to folks working to keep news organizations afloat these days and it calls for a new way of thinking about content and its relationship with readers. It’s also why the pay-for-online-journalism idea won’t, I believe, ever gain any real traction, especially the general interest publication I work for.
Information is everywhere and it’s free. Yeah, yeah, we know it’s not free to produce, but nobody cares about your bottom line. Find a way to get it done.
So why not make the Web operation into one big beatblog about the mid-Willamette Valley and break away from duplicating print and online?
Here’s the vision:
What I’m still working on are details about how to add value into the print edition.
To start, it’s important that we let online be online and stop posting the print version of stories to the Web site.
Those pieces are snapshots written for the newspaper and should maximize a readers’ experience with that medium with longer, more reflective stories and clip-and-save utility.
Let online carry the feedback, the early versions and the long tail.
Both have value at different times and for different people. Our goal should be to make a print subscription attractive to those who get immediate news online and teach print subscribers how to join the online experience.
This could develop into completely distinct print and digital products (I hope) and a new set of skills and workflow in the newsroom. I’m excited about the possibilities.
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:
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?
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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.
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