Are those news sites or ad sites? It gets ugly.

Over at the Monday Note (petty much required reading here at CSJ World every Sunday night) Frédéric Filloux has performed an interesting experiment in looking at news site Web design - mask all the ads and see how much of the site really is left devoted to news.

It's pretty eye-opening. For instance, here is the French site 20 Minutes as Filloux found it the other day.

 He blocked out the ads with red.

Fascinating. There is some squishiness in this, because when I went to the site today, the big splash page and background he found were gone and there was a more subdued feel. Still, it shows how excesses have been known to pop up.

At the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, however, the ads still reign, just as he found them. Look at the mask:

U.S. sites seem a bit more restrained, but hardly without problems. Go to his post to look at the masked screenshots and judge for yourself. Consider this gauge he put together of where the typical page for various sites actually begins with news content:

So what does that say about concern for the reader given all that we have seen in eyetrack and similar studies about readers' reluctance to scroll more than about a screen and a half before they start losing interest?

Now, the scrolling dynamic is a bit different on mobile screens, where it tends to be built more into the psyche of the screens (plus it's easier to do with the flick of a finger). But as Filloux writes:

The weird thing is this: On the one hand, web designers seem to work on increasingly large monitors; on the other, the displays used by readers tend to shrink as more people browse the web on notebooks, tablets or smartphones.

The result is a appalling when you try to isolate content directly related to the news. (His emphasis.)

There are many forces pulling at online sites, not the least of which is the need to make money. But I find it fascinating how much of the real estate has been given over to ads. It seems to be the print mindset brought to the Web (you could often find, in the "good old days," inside pages with one or two short stories and a huge ad stack). But the online audience, as we know, is not "captive," and my experience anecdotally observing people's digital use is that they are not willing to be subject to the same kinds of thinking.

Mobile could change all this significantly, if it really does generate new design principles - and Filloux discusses some of the better iPad apps that have eschewed the "print" layout and "start from a blank slate in which a basic set of rules (typefaces, general structure of a page, color codes) are adapted to the digital format."

But we also know from experience that large swaths of the news industry will take the path of least resistance, which right now seems to be simply "scaling down" the cluttered website designed for the desktop and squeezing it into a smaller screen (perhaps not even with all the elements, but still with many of them including the ads).

I think his illustrations show why that won't work.

Holiday fruitcakes arrive early

I normally don't point out or comment much on political stuff because, well, there's just not much percentage in it.

But this entry on the Open Secrets blog. which tracks money in politics, just begged to be pointed out. It's about the creation of one "American Phoenix Super Pac" by a nonprofit called Florida Deep Sea Burials Inc. There are a ton of questions surrounding all the paperwork's errors, stuff that is a big yawn for most folks except wonks like me that like to track money and influence.

Then there was this graf that caught my eye:

According to American Phoenix's website, the group wants to ban cremation and replace it with "carbon-neutral" deep sea burial; ban circumcision; ban absentee voting; end pensions for all public officials; eliminate red light cameras; "end corporate rule"; declare Islam a "hostile political party, not a religion"; classify the killing of Sikhs in Pakistan in 1947 as a genocide and overturn the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), among other goals.

 Not even November, and already the holiday fruitcakes are arriving.

Given the paperwork mess, one wonders if someone isn't pulling a giant joke here. It would be funny were it not so potentially serious.

Google Maps to developers: Prepare to pay up

Google is enforcing limits on maps called through its API -- 2,500 loads a day for a styled map (available sice May 2010) or 25,000 a day for regular maps.

It doesn't affect our little corner of the world at Dateline Carolina - we just link to a "mymap" and have low usage. But it does have the development community atwitter.

When taste - and common sense - took a vacation

Yeah, call me a prude. But when I see a lede on a story like this, it makes me cringe, even if it is in the college paper:

South Carolina scores 2.21 GPA on annual Trojan report card

When it comes to safe sex, USC is not on top like it was two years ago.

 (Not to mention that there apparently was an explosion in the brackets factory and they managed to embed themselves -- many improperly -- into all those quotes.)

And then, of course, there was this editorial headline:

I know. College is a fun, frivolous time. But if they're not using common sense here, will they suddenly be able to turn it on in the "real world"?

Should journalists ID themselves when covering public events?

Journalist-turned-prof Kenna Griffin of Oklahoma City University has an interesting - and to me, disturbing - blog post recounting how another j-t-p recently said at a public event that journalists should identify themselves before live coverage of such events.

The other j-prof was none other than Jacqui Banaszynski of Missouri. The idea of tweeting, blogging or whatever else passes for live coverage of a public event these days made her "uncomfortable with this kind of stealth world."

Well, yes, it is uncomfortable. But when you appear at a public forum or other public event, c'est la guerre.

As one commenter pointed out he, as do I, usually takes some time to introduce himself to the key players in the room, if nothing else as a courtesy and as long as that's practical. And I generally don't file live - I like to digest things for a few minutes - because I have learned, sometimes painfully, during the years that it is best to engage my brain before my keyboard (and this from someone who started out doing live radio and TV reporting).

Banazynski may express those nagging misgivings that tug at many of us just from a purely human sense that it's probably not a good thing if the world becomes one big "Truman Show." But she also needs to get a dose of reality.

The world, not just journalists, is equipped with smartphones and wireless and the ability to go live from anywhere at about any time. Journalists have no more of an ethical responsibility in those situations to flag themselves than anyone else in the audience who is perfectly capable of performing an act of "journalism."

Perhaps that is the real source of her unease, that "public" events are now truly public.

Does the technology change things? In some cases, yes, but if you somehow felt more comfortable with the old paper-and-pen crowd covering things that your words and actions were not going to be taken out of context or misconstrued, think again.

As Griffin put it:

Any person can live report information from a public happening. This is a fundamental right as a citizen. Therefore, people should be careful not to say things in public that they don’t want mass disseminated, especially in today’s tech-savvy world.

Those are words of wisdom for everyone, not just those in the public eye, however fleeting.

Or, to borrow from the old carpenter's phrase: Think twice, speak once.

Why Estonia is important in the e-world

Excellent piece this week by Phil Noble about Estonia, its president and its rising place in the e-world.

Go ahead and drool over the price of an unlimited data plan for a tablet. It's OK.

Jtools: Trunk.ly to save links

I've been playing around today with trunk.ly, a new free site that will fetch your links from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and save them for you.

I'm kind of liking it as a way to stay organized and find stuff I've forgotten about. You can import a bookmark file too.

Try it and let me know what you think of it.

Recommended reading: Yelvington on meaning of 'digital first'

Steve Yelvington is out with an excellent post on what, exactly, it means to be "digital first."

It requires restructuring all your priorities. Not just when you do it, but what you do and how you do it.

It requires grasping what is different about digital media -- and leveraging those differences.

So what are those differences? There are many, but here are three worth pondering:

1. Time. It's not just about the volatility of news. Brands are volatile. Ideas are volatile. Change has accelerated. In such an environment, "the way we do things here" is probably wrong. Challenge everything. If "news" is "old" moments later, are there things you could be doing with your time that create longer-lasting value?

2. Surplus. Newspapers evolved in an era of information scarcity. As I write this, an estimated 12.51 billion Web pages are at our fingertips. In such a glut, clarity and simplicity become scarce. What are you doing that helps guide people through this clutter?

3. Control. Gatekeeping died back in the last century. Everyone is a self-publisher. Information flows around would-be barriers in a globally networked conversation. You can't manage information in this environment. But can you lead? Do you understand what is implied by that question? How can you leverage this process?

If you think about it, he's talking about the two legs of the three-legged stool (content, the third leg, is a given for this discussion) that I've said journalists still struggle with:

Utility (No. 2) and community (No. 3).

Read it all - it's well worth a couple of minutes of your time.

RIP Gannett's 'Moms Like Me'

At one time not too long ago, niche sites like Gannett's "Mom's Like Me" were being touted as one of the ways to pump needed life, and revenue, into traditional newsrooms' flagging online efforts.

Such sites, not branded to the paper or TV station, were a core part of the Newspaper Next initiative from the American Press Institute. Now, word that Moms Like Me is being shuttered shows the strong headwinds both inside the industry and outside that continue to make such initiatives difficult.

Steve Buttry, one of the people tasked by API with trying to spread the "N2" gospel (and one of those I respect for trying to effect real change), put it this way in a recent blog post:

As someone who spent most of two years trying spread the N2 message and issuing the N2 call for transformation, it pains me to look back five years later and say that we didn’t bring about any significant lasting change.

N2 was a worthy effort that delivered what the newspaper business needed. We presented tools and concepts for newspaper companies to focus more clearly on meeting the needs of their communities with multiple products doing valuable jobs for businesses and communities. We spurred development of some niche products, some of them still in operation. We guided some innovative projects. But the default settings of the newspaper industry were too strong for anyone to embrace the thorough organizational transformation that N2 championed.

It wasn't just the industry, of course. Social media, like Facebook, has moved in on at least part of the space these sites hoped to occupy.

It highlights, for me, trad news orgs' continuing struggle with the "community" part of the three-legged stool necessary for success online (content, utility and community) Many of these sites were put up more in an "if you build it, they will come" mode without significant input from the hosting newsrooms.

It's not all Facebook. It's also a lesson that it's tough to pick niches that can work on the scale that a lot of chains feel is needed to generate acceptable ROI. (And if you think about it, there's a bit of an oxymoron there - a "scalable niche"?)

High school sports appears to be viable, and for now at least Gannett is keeping its HighSchoolSports.net.

But is this best done on the national scale Gannett is trying? Or more on a local scale as the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News has done admirably with its Pigskin Review? We'll see ...

Newspapers: Some things never change

From Sean Ireland's latest column in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin:

A group of newspaper publishers came to some clear conclusions about their future as they gathered for an SNPA symposium.

They agreed that “newspapers of the coming age will be smaller, better-edited, higher-priced and able to hold their own against any kind of competition.”

The publishers predicted higher costs, decreasing revenue, rising taxes and a growing threat of punitive legislation. Perhaps most importantly, they closed with this: “Newspapers should give more thought to their public relations. We need friends.”

“The Newspaper of the Future” was the discussion topic at the SNPA meeting, and though it was held 70 years ago – in 1941 – the conclusions drawn then seem no less relevant for the newspaper industry now.

Sigh - some things never change.

Yelvington on tablets

Steve Yelvington has a 10-point list of things worth remembering about tablets and mobile.

Worth reading.

My favorite:

It's not just another distribution channel. We should have learned this from the Web, but many of us didn't. A mobile device is an intelligent device with storage and sensors and the full power of the Internet at its beck and call. It can do amazing things. If you don't take advantage of those amazing capabilities, you will have a sad phone, and sad users.

Now we understand why the headline said 'Killer Cantaloupe'

Sometimes we can use just a bit too much shorthand in trying to compress things. For instance, there was this lede on a story by the AP's Marilynn Marchionne that went out under the headline Killer cantaloupe, scary sprouts --- What to do?

MILWAUKEE -- Avoid foreign produce. Wash and peel your fruit. Keep it refrigerated. None of these common tips would have guaranteed your safety from the deadliest food outbreak in a decade, the one involving cantaloupes from Colorado.

 Oh no! A "food outbreak." Quick, man the guard towers. Shoot the melons on sight. Make sure the asparagus doesn't slip through the bars. Anyone seen the cabbage?

Yeah, readers can probably get it, but as professionals our craft should be better than that. It's an outbreak of food-borne illness, which is what the lede should say.  Another one, I fear, to chalk up to overworked editing hubs.