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Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

Journalists (and publishers) can learn a lot from a crude comic strip

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , on February 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »


The crude yet brilliant online comic The Oatmeal had a recent strip related to online piracy – inspired by the artist’s frustrated attempts to find a legal source for a show he wanted to buy – that actually had a moral highly relevant to traditional media companies trying to make their way in the new-media world: If you put all your focus on control instead of what your customers want, your customers will go elsewhere for what they want.

I thought it was great, and I wanted to post about it here, but it gets a bit far from the ground I usually stick to – but then the universe once again came through for me and showed me Jim Romenesko’s item about a Forbes piece that excerpts a much, much, much longer New York Times Magazine story and got a huge amount of traffic online. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED! A journalist-level parallel!

From what Forbes writer Kashmir Hill sent Romenesko about her story on the Times story:

“Charles Duhigg’s piece is a masterful look at how Target gathers information about its customers and mines it to keep them loyal and better market to them. But as a writer who has covered the privacy beat for four years, what leaped out at me as the gold mine of the piece was the anecdote about Target data-mining its way into customers’ wombs so effectively that it picked up on a teen’s pregnancy before her father did. I ran with that anecdote and the sexy privacy issue Duhigg dug up — Target’s use of predictive analytics — distilling that from the larger piece for my privacy-interested audience. This is not a new or surprising practice in the world of online journalism – what has caught people’s attention is Forbes’ transparency. Thanks to our analytics being public, you can see the avalanche of social media love it triggered and the enviable million page views it garnered.”

So essentially, buried inside a nine-page story was a juicy nugget that had the potential to draw a huge audience. But that’s the thing – it was buried. And it had a dull headline, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” It’s information people would want, if only they knew it was there. Enter Hill:

“I suspect I drove a ton of traffic to the New York Times that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten because they hadn’t sold their story quite as well as I did and didn’t create a short version of it that was easy to share and digest online. (Advice the NYT should consider is having their own bloggers tackle long pieces like this and chunk them up for the online crowd – a tactic the Wall Street Journal has effectively employed.)”

The difference between the comic strip and the Times/Forbes story is the artist knew what he wanted and the people who read the privacy story did not, but in both cases the originator of the content screwed up – in the comic strip, HBO made it impossible for the artist to find a legal source for “Game of Thrones” on DVD, limiting its audience to people willing to subscribe to the entire HBO universe; and the Times buried its best information in a story so long and dense that only its existing dedicated magazine customer base was likely to find it.

As journalists, we often don’t control a lot of business aspects of our industry, including whether our sites have paywalls or home delivery is available to everyone who wants it. But we are in charge of our own stories and photos — and making the best of it easy to find.

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Dogs, editors and other neglected species

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , on February 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »


I wasn’t going to post anything on Michael Kinsley’s post about a Felix Salmon article on the New York Observer, which (the Kinsley piece) focuses on the issue of whether the quality of writing on the Web matters. But I keep talking to people about it. At least five people in the past 24 hours. So it seems worth pausing and posing this question: Whether or not Kinsley is serious (I’m pretty sure he’s joking, but don’t ask me to put money on it), might the point of the following sentence be true?

“Never did it occur to me, until I read Felix’s blog post, that it might be possible, without seeming insane, to argue that all aspects of good writing — accuracy, logic, spelling, graceful turns of phrase, wisdom and insight, puns (only good ones), punctuation, proper grammar and syntax (and what’s the difference between those two again?) — are all overrated.” (And yes, it says “all aspects … are all overrated.” Move on.)

You can read Salmon’s piece here, which may help in the details if you don’t get exactly what is meant by this from Salmon:

“When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.”

So the question raised here — again, whether or not Kinsley is serious — is how close is this to being correct? Undoubtedly, quality control in the media universe as described in the Salmon piece is lacking, but that quality is transitory anyway, as is the audience. If you as a publication are largely reliable, does it matter if you carry writers who really stink? In the online world, the Washington Post’s columnists and Cagle’s can appear side by side under the same set of links, and how many online reader really notice — or care — that the Post’s are better edited and cleaner? I don’t have answers to that yet.

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A worthy experiment in transparency and news

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , on January 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »

U.K.’s The Guardian, which is on the forefront in many experiments with public participation and transparency in the news, recently launched a variation on opening daily story budgets to the public. Jeff Sonderman writes for Poynter.org:

“This is a noteworthy experiment in both form and function. Readers can quickly gauge the leading stories of the day, how they’re unfolding and what the public might contribute. The result is a pleasant mix of facts, analysis, process and discussion — an illustration of news as a process, not a product.”

I can easily see how this would be burdensome for a small newsroom, but it’s not an all-or-nothing idea. The interaction and transparency is what’s important, regardless of how frequent the contact is.

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The technology of storytelling

Posted in Online media, tagged , , on January 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »


I’ve been meaning to get to this very short, simple post for a week, so let me tell anyone out there who is considering administering a contest: Even if it’s only an annual contest, it’s going to suck up your time, and if you are diligent about keeping time for yourself you will find you don’t get much done on the contest.

Anyway: I found the above TED talk extremely interesting for the context it lends to the current disruption in media. It tells about the advent of pop-up books for children. If you think about it, that is the beginning of animation — someone creates drawings with parts that the users can see move in front of them. You can understand how children’s literature is forever changed by this, just as the first motion picture, the first talking motion picture, the first television program, etc., changed how people conceived of how stories could reach them. As I have pointed out often, we are in an accelerated period of evolution in the changing nature of storytelling. It’s important to remember it didn’t start when we entered the business, otherwise we would all go crazy (not that we won’t anyway).

Related to this, last week Nieman Journalism Lab highlighted some stats from Facebook about one element of the current curve in storytelling’s evolution, reporting + social media interaction. The good news: commentary and analysis — in other words, depth, produced by people who know what they are talking about — does well. The hazard: so does humor. People, if you have just one takeaway today, let it be this: Funny is hard. If you try the humor route, start soft, start slow, start very non-partisan, and pretend every member of every branch of your family not only will read it but has your cell phone number.

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DO IT (not X-rated)

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , , , on January 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

John Robinson fooled me. He started a post about the need for innovation with questions that seemed geared to curmudgeonly, 20th-century answers. For instance:

What would you do if:
* Half of your employees — including those in circulation — don’t subscribe?
* Half of your employees — including those in the newsroom — don’t read the paper (except for their own stories)?
* Half of your employees don’t subscribe to your e-newsletters?

I worked up a good, frothy dudgeon and was thinking to myself, “What has happened to John since he left newspapers that he is taking such a troglodyte approach?” — and then I got to the end of his post. So, spoiler alert, he was not writing in inverted-pyramid-style. It was more like pyramid-style. The end held the answers to my questions.

The “troglodyte” approach would be to require employees to subscribe and read (maybe quiz them, to test whether they really read), but, as John writes, a better idea is to ask your employees why: Why don’t they subscribe? Why don’t they read? If the only thing they read is the stories that carry their byline, then the only thing they care about is what was changed between writing and publishing, which means they don’t care about the content. If the reporters don’t care, why should anyone else? Ask them that. Ask what they SHOULD be writing about to make people read.

Related to this, Peter Osnos had an article in The Atlantic resurrecting the idea that aggregators should pay for the news they aggregate, which ignores the fact that no one pays the aggregators, except advertisers, which are not at current ad rates a source of revenue that would sustain news organizations. Paying for aggregation is an idea that traditional journalists love, but if most news organizations started charging with a hard paywall, almost all aggregators would stop looking and aggregating — just as most people do not subscribe.

Get to the basics: Whether or not your site has a paywall or a metered paywall, it’s important to ask what people will pay for and what will make them keep coming back. The same things that make your site worth aggregating are the things that make someone consider subscribing, so in the end whether you go the free model or the paywall model you hit the same capitalist question: Is it worth it?

And you can’t change what people want to read. Among the gathering evidence: a Washington Post story.

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News and the Underpants Gnomes’ equation

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , , , on January 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I had two thoughts as I read, belatedly, Megan Garber’s piece from last month for Nieman Journalism Lab about the new political team at Buzzfeed and how they approach reporting. First: Wow, that really sounds like exactly the right model for the online world. Second: How the hell are they going to make money from that? Which of course is the eternal Underpants Gnomes issue of online news.

But then it occurred to me that the Buzzfeed strategy may be a key part of how more traditional news organizations might survive into the digital future. More on that in a minute. First, what Buzzfeed is doing, from Garber’s article:

“The idea is to continue the type of work he’s been doing at Politico — reported blogging — and to combine that content with the social elements of Buzzfeed. So: Reporting, amplified. Reporting, viral-ized. … [The political team] will be starting from the premise … that people are now mostly (and increasingly) getting their news from social sources like Twitter, Facebook, and aggregators. Journalism is increasingly part of the social web.

“… And within the social space, Smith points out, one of the things people most like to share is news that is actually, you know, new. … [P]eople are increasingly aware of themselves not just as consumers of content, but as curators of it. They increasingly appreciate the role they play as, if not breakers of news, then disseminators of it.”

Buzzfeed’s aim is to “build the first true social news organization … the definitive social news organization.”

An early return, from Philip Bump at Mediaite, is positive – the headline is “What Buzzfeed’s New Politics Team Is Doing Right.”

It helps, of course, not to have to worry about doing all that while still producing a traditional news product such as a newspaper or TV show. But what if you started from the premise of reporters doing as Buzzfeed envisions? From there, part of the role of an editor could be pulling items out of the stream to cobble them into what is needed for the traditional product. Of necessity, that might well look very different than a traditional news story – but as I often argue and Bump’s piece at Mediaite points out, the traditional news story isn’t always needed:

“The long news story is an artificial construct, one largely predicated on filling a certain amount of printed space. Articles often don’t need to be 400-500 words with compelling intros and robust context – they certainly don’t always need to be.”

The result could be an organization with the nimbleness to operate in the online environment and build the kind of audience engagement that keeps people coming back, both to the short updates you get in social media and whatever more you produce on your main site, in the paper or on the air.

That’s where the Gnomes come in.

This morning I was reading Clay Shirky’s thoughts about the “leaky paywall” or threshold model for news sites, which lets visitors see a set number of free articles before requiring a payment for any subsequent articles. Shirky is among those who have long been skeptical that an absolute paywall – requiring a payment for any and all viewing of content – would work for news sites, but he clearly sees merit in setting a threshold. But his main purpose in the post is examining how the threshold model might end up reshaping the content of news sites. This stems from the fact that a small minority of the online users are paying the freight, so keeping that audience engaged is key:

“Threshold charges subject the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? Here are some things that won’t: More ads. More gossip. More syndicated copy. … When a paper abandons the standard paywall strategy, it gives up on selling news as a simple transaction. Instead, it must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.”

In other words, most people do not – and will never – pay for content, but some will pay for some specific content, and much more importantly that small number of people will pay to ensure that the general type of content you produce is around when they need it, because they enjoy it or they think it makes their world a better place, or they just can’t imagine their world without you around.

That last part, at least, is something that traditional journalists can identify with.

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Newsrooms must adapt

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , on December 22, 2011| 3 Comments »


If you work for a traditional newsroom, especially a newspaper, in all likelihood you are in a situation not that different than the Oakland A’s as depicted in “Moneyball.” You don’t have the money you feel you need to do the job the way you were brought up to believe it needs to be done, and that situation is never going to get better. The University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future even predicts the end of most printed newspapers in just a few years, owing not just to the economic factors hurting advertising but, more importantly, consumer habits shifting media use increasingly to digital platforms. I’m not so pessimistic myself, but I think it’s undeniable that technology is changing how people spend their time, and both reading and viewing are moving more and more to digital platforms.

News organizations face a stark choice. As expressed in “Moneyball” by Brad Pitt as the general manager of the A’s: “Adapt or die.”

That means going beyond seeing your website or social media channels as added tasks that take away from your real job. You have to think about news throughout the day in terms of people scanning for it on their phones, on their tablets, on their computers.

Steve Buttry of Digital First Media (aka Journal Register) has been posting a series on his blog this week detailing some of the practical changes of this approach, starting with how it would affect the ways a court reporter, photographer or sports reporter might do the job. (Dare I say this might be the first time anyone has written something suggesting a link in any way between Steve and Brad Pitt.)

Perhaps most important in Steve’s series is advice for editors leading a Digital First (or digital-first) newsroom. If the message doesn’t come from the top that digital-first is the new SOP, it won’t happen. If the message isn’t accompanied by evidence that those at the top are paying attention, it won’t happen.

Much of Steve’s advice echoes tips about coaching and leadership generally – there are sections on standards, listening, praise and collaboration.

One suggestion he makes that would be an important step for newroom leaders to drive the message because it would be a big change in newsroom habits:
“Focus your meetings on digital platforms. Ask what you’re covering live, who’s shooting video, what the social chatter is, what stories are getting good traffic. … Put tomorrow’s print Page One it its proper place: as an afterthought at the end of the meeting.”

Also good advice that newsroom leaders have to internalize:

“Don’t tell your staff they have to ‘do more with less’ unless you are providing tools for them to work more efficiently (in my career, a few things that have actually helped us do more with less are portable computers, spreadsheets, databases, cellphones and pagination). Usually, ‘do more with less’ is a management cliché that means we have failed to make tough decisions about priorities.

“As you focus more attention on digital platforms, you have to focus less on print. Consult with your staff and colleagues and make tough decisions about priorities. How are you going to change the newshole, design, editing process, content, staffing, etc. of the print product so you can focus more attention on digital.”

In other words, what are you really changing? You don’t have the staff you used to have, you never will again – “Newspaper companies have seen their advertising revenues drop by 58 percent from the third quarter of 2005 to the third quarter of this year (64 percent after adjusting for inflation). Any profits are achieved only by severe cuts in staff and other costs. That path is simply unsustainable.” – and you have a shifting audience.

What will adaptation look like in your newsroom?

Related: The Innovation Excellence website takes seven quotes from Moneyball and explains how they directly relate to driving innovation through an organization.

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Posting less can bring more audience

Posted in Online media, tagged , , on December 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Forbes
Lewis DVorkin at Forbes has a short case study of two Forbes writers with vastly different online styles, one with a beat that lends itself to short, punchy, frequent updates, and another with a beat tending to longer stories. It’s a fine illustration of not mindlessly applying the idea that the Web demands short and frequent updates. News sites must have those, yes, but not everything must follow that pattern. As the article points out, pharmaceutical writer Matt Herper has either — depending on your interpretation — seen no erosion of his online traffic from posting less or (even leaving aside the spike at the end of the graph above) he has seen an increase.

Notable also is that while Herper engages in exactly the depth-oriented reporting that some say the Web discourages, his online behavior seems to be a model of the ethic of engaging his audience. DVorkin quotes Herper:

“I promote pretty heavily on Twitter, where I try to stay very engaged. I think about Yahoo Finance, and I’m starting to think a lot about LinkedIn, where the point seems to be to get passed around among a group of extremely well-informed, professional readers, which then leads to even more well-informed, professional readers finding my work.”

DVorkin also writes: “He also engages with them. Using our comment moderation and filtering tools, you can always find Matt mixing it up with audience members who join the conversation.”

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What a digital-first newsroom looks like

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , on November 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

New Haven Register reorg
The headlines about the newsroom reorganization of Journal Register’s New Haven Register, including from Journal Register itself and from Jim Brady, editor-in-chief of Digital First Media, focus on the investigative and depth reporting beats. Those are certainly noteworthy, given recent debate (which I touched on here) in journalism circles about whether the emphasis on the Web is inherently a drive that dumbs down the news, and I recommend reading Brady’s post on the issue explaining that “it shows that you can address the needs of traditional journalism while still reorienting your newsroom toward the future.”

But I’m equally interested in the newsroom organization chart because it helps paint a clearer picture for people who have trouble envisioning just how a digital-first newsroom might be organized. Sometimes that can be the biggest barrier, what makes the idea cross from the land of buzzwords and hype to a plan of action. Inherent in any reorg like this is the idea that you have to reassess everything you traditionally do; if you feel you must preserve everything, then doing anything different is not just different, it’s “in addition to” and will never get done without additional staff.

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For a minute I thought it was a robot reporter

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, tagged , on November 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »


Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting report on software that can detect lies or misleading statements in a story, and for a little bit I thought this was going to be a piece on the next step toward robot reporters. (For a diversion, here’s a link to a 2009 video about robot reporters.)

It’s not. *phew*

But it’s the kind of thing that could alter the reporting process:

“His software is not designed to determine lies from truth on its own. That remains primarily the province of real humans. The software is being designed to detect words and phrases that show up in PolitiFact’s database, relying on PolitiFact’s researchers for the truth-telling.”

In other words, the intitial step of fact-checking a statement remains the same, but thereafter the software automatically speeds the process for other reporters, potentially allowing more time and effort to be devoted to things that have not already been checked.

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