Could OneTrueFan help news sites - and some R&D thoughts

Earlier this year, I did an extensive post on how Amy Webb was peering into the future of technology and how it might affect people's online interactions and journalism.

One of her trends was that aspects of gaming were being incorporated into more sites as a form of social media - think of Foursquare and its ability for users to collect location badges and become "mayor" of a location.

But how to do that on a news site? One answer might be OneTrueFan. Here is Tech Crunch's description:

OneTrueFan is a service for web publishers that allows visitors to earn badges for interacting and sharing content on the site. The startup revolves around a game-format for visitors that allows you to see who is reading content in the site, compete for the most engagement and encourages you to share content within the service and on social networks.

But - and here we go again - why haven't publishers gotten together and created something similar, especially something that can be customized locally? For years, publications have been running "Best of" lists and contests (nominate your favorite dry cleaner, restaurant, pet grooming service, etc.) - often with competing lists among publications in a market.

But isn't this really the foundation of social media in a crude, print-oriented way? In other words, the idea was there, but as we've too often seen, the digital execution eluded media managers.

Yes,  OneTrueFan is more about the entire Web, and I'm then projecting the idea onto the local market, ala Foursquare (or maybe OneTrueFan is projecting the Foursquare idea onto the entire Web - whatever). But that's actually my point - the underlying idea is the same, and media companies had the concept within reach and little to nothing to develop it.

We can all trot out the usual reasons - intransigence, lack of vision, print-centricity. And they all play a part. But I also think the fragmentation of publishing plays a role. It makes sustained innovation difficult. I still cling to the idea (however misguided) that publishing still needs a central, industry-funded R&D center, or at least a clearinghouse, that can develop white-label apps that would be easy to adapt, from the largest operation to the smallest.

Ideally, this center, or perhaps a more formalized but decentralized association of research centers, would also solicit ideas and challenges from inside publishing companies (how often have we heard the complaint that good ideas died inside recalcitrant newsrooms) and somehow publicize them to other developers. The ideal would be to avoid the potential stifling of innovation that can come from centralization, but yet:

• Give publishers (and, again, I use the term broadly, from the biggest media company to the smallest hyper-locala site) access to the best of emerging technology.
• Provide a sort of "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval that might overcome some of the skittishness I still find among many journalists and media managers about freeware, shareware, and shared services which is where much of the innovation is occuring.
• Keep it simple so that even the most time- and resource-pressed operation can reasonably hope to adopt useful innovations.
• Provide some focus, if nothing else, to enable decision-makers to have a more centralized and analytical place to understand what is happening specifically in the technology and how it may affect their operations. (Not discounting the efforts already  by Nieman's Media Lab, Media Shift,  Knight Digital Media Center and Media Info Center, among many others)

It would be refreshing to see one of the existing journalism organizations step up and take on this role in a way that embraces inclusion and openness.

Yes, I am being idealistic here. I could spend another 500 words just highlighting all the downsides and operational challenges (not the least of which is the industry's long line of failed cooperative ventures and almost pathological aversion to working together). But for now I just want to throw out the idea.

Ah, to be blissfully ignored

Much has been written on how newsrooms are hard places to change, resistant to innovation, etc. -- so much so that the best thing is just to point you to a Google search and let you graze.

But sometimes there is a moment in time when things become just a bit clearer, and it was on the way in to work this morning listening to NPR talk about, of all things, the nation's power grid.

The report contained this, from Martha Duggan, vice president for government affairs at solar energy company SunEdison.

Duggan, who began her career in the regulated utility world, likes to tell a story about a utility engineer who said the nature of his job was either to be ignored when the electricity was on, or criticized when it was off.

"And so his goal, really, was to be ignored," Duggan says. "When you apply that kind of thinking across an organization — as you might imagine — the opportunity for creativity or new ideas is not necessarily in top of mind for folks who work in that environment."

I've written here before how papers in the 1970s through 1990s, as competition fell away and staffs grew to meet "peak demand," became more and more like utility companies. But as I heard this today, it also explained so much about newsroom psychology.

For all those supposed "free spirits" among journalists, let's be honest, the real goal for most was simply to "get the paper out." Miss a deadline, you get noticed. Screw up a story or even write one that is solid as hell but draws some angry calls, you get noticed. And "getting noticed" in a newsroom in those kinds of ways was at least an invitation to take some antacid.

(At the AP, for instance at one time, even the smallest of "correctives" required an extensive packet that went to New York and ultimately the president's office.)

In other words, their real goal inside the organization and outside was to be ignored - at the same time they wanted the world to pay attention to what they were writing.

Sure, it came from the top of the organization, but, like utilities, it was so ingrained that it permeated every facet of corporate culture.

Is it any wonder journalists are a bit neurotic?

Despite all the talk about blowing up newsrooms and all the new fancy titles, I've really yet to see any news organization effectively address this ingrained problem. Or to put it another way, if the publisher got a bunch of angry calls tomorrow about something the newsroom had put out, even if it were the most solid thing in the world, what are the chances that at least some crap would not run downhill? Or what if someone said, hey, we really need to be late on that paper tonight because we really need to get it on the Web first and think of some new ways to do it in print?

I'd love to hear of some places that have figured out how not to have that happen.

Carinival: My thoughts for 2009

Sorry to have been away for a while, but grading for three lab courses is, well, a bear. (However, do have a look at what some of my students have done. Modest but promising for our pre-capstone course, I think.)

For this month's Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked us to tackle "positive new media predictions for 2009." Hey, I'm game. After all, that's part of what we do in the ivy halls, right, make predictions that are worth what you (don't) pay for them. (We also have a tendency to come up on a battlefield where everyone is dead or dying and utter such bon mots as "There's been a war," but pointing out the painfully obvious is just part of what we do.)

I have pointedly not looked at my fellow carnivalers' predictions, so you may see some duplication here. Rest assured, groupthink is as much at work in the blogland as it is in the MSM. And I don't guarantee you will find all of these positive.

1. We will begin to see an evolution in mobile that roughly approximates Moore's law. We've been saying this in one way or another at Newsplex for eight years or so, but it's only in the past year or so that people have really been listening. Restated a bit, it's that once TV converts to digital, the power and capability of that thing on your hip you now call a cell phone or iPhone or Blackberry will roughly double every 18 months. We are about to enter the age of mobile, always-on computing that's been predicted for years. Consider: Your local TV station becomes a big mother Wi-Fi antenna (it's not going to use all its bandwidth to send you pretty pictures). The cell phone system is the uplink (since upside data transfer is much smaller). People swear by (and occasionally at) their iPhones. You ain't seen nuthin' yet.
2. As a result, media without a clear mobile strategy will be left (even more) behind. Forget the 10 a.m.-4 p.m. spike in your online traffic. Some of it may still be there, but with powerful computing available at the flick of a "cell-phone" cover, the demands for information bits will extend over a much longer range. And that's going to pose continuing challenges for operations that by their very cultural and corporate DNA are tied to a few deadlines. Oh sure, you can talk information center to me all you want, but I have yet to see an operation that really has that in its bone marrow except for the wire service. And your mobile strategy is going to have to be more than just throwing up a feed of links and headlines.
1. E-paper will be more about extending the capabilities of these mobile devices than creating some Kindle on steroids. A bit of detritus still floats to the surface occasionally predicting that newsreaders are coming over the hill just like the cavalry. Yeah, yeah. Wake me when the revolution's over. I kind of like the electronic edition of my local paper, looking like the paper and all that. But you know what, I only like it for a pedagogical reason - it provides a nice current boundary for my students when it comes to those dreaded current affairs tests (wouldn't be fair, after all, to throw the entire Web open to them and say "guess what I'm going to ask.") The newspaper and its layout are wonderful studies in semiotics, but they are also of an era of limits. Somehow these e-papers never seem to find a way to let you really go explore the Web. Maybe they will, but I'm not sure they scale down as well as we might think to a portable screen.
2. Battery technology will continue to be one of the limits, but significant advances will be made in portable power. (OK, maybe not till 2010 or 2011, but it is coming.) But that's another predictions list ...
3. Community papers, which have been a tad smug in their outlook, will suddenly discover they'd better pay attention to digital, especially mobile. Look, your audience isn't getting any younger. And take a look at the youngsters in your market area. What's that hanging off their belts or in their pockets or purses? Hint: It's not your paper.
1. Same goes for college papers, which are community papers by just another name.
2. In a weird way, those community papers that have invested little or nothing in a Web site, but develop a good mobile strategy, might have an advantage. Web sites in their own way are becoming legacy media. We put so much into them, yet, if I am right and mobile is ascending, people will come to them less and less. Update: See John Duncan's well-explained take on the second-mover advantage.
   
4. One of the real problems will be the pricing system we have created for digital communications. Take all your communications bills and total them. How much are you spending a month? I mean all of it - phone, papers, Internet, cable, papers, magazines, online subscriptions (including anything for storage, etc.). Add it all up. You could probably make the monthly payments on a small car with it. Much has been written about how far behind the rest of the world the U.S. is when it comes to broadband speed and pricing. I've seen only one report on this - a Louisville group that said about a year ago that high telecommunications costs were contributing to housing foreclosures. But I'm betting it's not isolated. In 2009, I think we will see higher speeds, but not lower prices. In the mobile space, digital plans will still be too expensive. Some things, like "white space" devices will help, but that will be 2010 at the earliest.
   
5. If you're digital in any form you'd better have the kahunas to link to other folks, including your competition. This is soooo 2002, but let's repeat it: It's called the "web" for a reason. It's nice to see more places getting this message, but many still don't.
6. Out of all that laid-off brainpower will come some really smart sites/products/stories/multimedia, etc. A lot of smart people have been shown the exit door from newsrooms and media operations. And despite how it sometimes can come across when listening to the echo chamber of the digiterati, not all are luddites or curmudgeons or whiners and piners.
1. Someone will begin figuring out how to do "smart" aggregation in a digital age. In other words, something other than just the pure mechanical Google News or the human-assisted Digg or Newsvine. If a thousand (news) flowers bloom from my main prediction here, someone is going to have to help the Dougs of this world find and navigate the really good stuff. (I'm running into serious info overload these days, and I spend a whole lot more time working at it than my neighbors, for instance.) Smart aggregation combines the best of the mechanical with the public assist with the professional augmentation -- including original product, some of which may build on what the other two systems do -- that can produce smart, useful info packages. Yeah, "news you can use," but in a much different way from how the TV types have sliced and diced it. (Feel free in the comments to tell me how your site already is the latest and greatest, but I've looked at a lot of them and haven't seen it yet.)
2. Some media house is going to just blow it up and refashion itself into a social media site. (Actually, someone probably has, but I don't know about it. Toss something in the comments if you do.) I find myself more and more intrigued by how Facebook (and to some extend Linked-in) serves as an aggregator and wire service, as well as a meeting place and a sort of online 411. (I've used it, for instance, to track down contacts to get copies of academic papers or to substitute for e-mail when I needed to reach someone and had forgotten to put them in my address book.) In other words, it's become an information utility. But isn't that what the modern media house wants to be in its community? So ...
   
7. Publishers and editors will learn that online is a dynamic medium requiring constant tending and attention to what your users are telling you. Unlike that behemoth, multimillion-dollar press, it is not a turnkey system that you make everything else fit to. Ok, nah. But there's always hope.
8. Publishers will blow up the sales bullpen as much as they are blowing up the newsroom. I think this is actually the large untold story of why MSM continues to struggle like large lizards caught in a tar pit. That pit is the old-line sales mentality still prevalent at too many media - the one that grew from becoming largely order takers. I still hear a steady stream of stories about compensation structures that favor print and sales people woefully ill-equipped with the tools needed to sell online. That includes having the capability "back at the office" to produce innovative solutions quickly and flexibly (see No. 6)). Paul Conley talks a bit about this in the context of B2B publications.
   
1. The successful ones will be those that see ad agencies as their competition. Sorry, but this is business and the gloves are off. The Internet destroys middlemen, and ad agencies are middlemen. A well-structured media house will have many if not most of the same capabilities itself. Now, much of a media company can be seen as a middleman, too. But if it's a matter of survival, those convivial relations have got to go. See, that ad agency can now be a publisher too .... 'Nuf said?
2. There will be growing realization that even if you aggregate an audience, online it is not a mass audience. It's a bunch of little revenue streams. From this will come more innovation into targeted advertising instead of banners, which are an artifact of a mass mentality. (See also No. 7: If you combine the idea of flexibility and attention to audience with the idea that an audience is no longer a mass, this might become easier to understand.)
9. The Detroit newspapers' cutback on delivery experiment will falter, as did the Tampa Trib's earlier foray into a single-section paper. In Detroit, the News will be the one that comes up short without a Sunday edition, unless it is going to turn one of the other editions into a faux-Sunday. We'll see how it works out, but I think this is going to come across to many readers as being partly pregnant -- you can't be partly a newspaper. Now, this is different than, say, doing the Web all week and then putting out a kick-ass, magazine-like Sunday edition or a TMC that takes the best of the Web and wraps up the week with some probing, trenchant analysis. That's a different strategy with a different product. But what I've read so far comes across as "we'll sorta be a paper two or three days a week." If the paper does not significantly change and you force your audience to the Web, it's not likely to come back.
10. Journalism schools will become increasingly irrelevant - and important. Heck of an oxymoronic thought, huh? Bear with me. It's no longer just enough to be a whiz with a pad and pencil, a gift of gab, a good ear, and a turn of phrase. For many journalists, the future is going to be -- them. Not a job with some large, established company, but treating themselves as a brand. Or maybe with a small startup where you still are, essentially, a freelancer. It's no longer enough to know a little about a lot. You're going to have to know the business and the technology, how to make a buck, and how to harness it all to your advantage.
    
1. Journalism schools that can figure out how to package all this and stay relevant in an an ever-changing society will become more important. But there will be fewer of them. Academe is no different than newspapers in that it is under intense financial pressure. Just like newspapers, much of academe doesn't "make" anything. It advances knowledge, and for that, just like newspapers and broadcasters, it relies on third-party funding. In business we call them advertisers. In academe we call them the state, the feds and foundations handing out grants. With dwindling state support, the feds focusing more on the hard sciences, and foundation endowments taking a hit -- well, you do the math. Journalism, by its nature, needs a low faculty-teacher ratio to be taught well. It also needs, these days, the ability to create and reshape courses and curricula to stay ahead of, not just respond to, this tidal wave of change. But such things do not come quickly in the academy. Given the financial pressures, as well as those of prestige and the inexorable push toward Ph.D.s and funded research, what dean or provost in his or her right mind would not be looking at the relevance of j-schools to the future of the academy?
   
2. An increasing number of journalism schools will be j-schools in name only, and we'll start seeing this shift speed up in the economic malaise of 2009. It may say "journalism" on the building, but increasingly behind the doors will be "communications" schools. If you're going for that NSF or NIH grant, you don't put "journalism" down as one of the components. You put down "risk communications" or "science communications," "public relations" or "visual communications." Journalism - the process of finding out what is happening, why it is happening and what it means to people's lives -- doesn't get much funding. Never has. Blame the industry largely for that -- R & D have never been big in the publishers' offices. But communications schools allow for larger classes, more prestigious research, etc. In many ways, the broader perspective is a good thing in a multichannel, multimedia, always-on world. But journalism tends to get marginalized in the process. And I am remain amazed, as 2009 dawns, at the number of schools that still have "mass" communications in their name, even as the world around them atomizes.

Want a few more predictions, see Folio's list, Paul Conley's and those by Businessweek's Jon Fine. You probably can find a dozen more without much trouble.

May you all have happy holidays and a healthy and happy New Year.

Should newspapers look overseas for answers?

Forwarded to me today was an article in the Austin-American Statesman suggesting that U.S. newspapers might find their business model overseas, where the promotion is raucous and the trend has not been to cut, cut, cut and then expect people to pay more.

As I noted in my response to the kind e-mail: Europe and Asia have always been ahead on this, partly because of the more homogeneous cultures in some places and partly because of the greater penetration of broadband and similar technology. (Same in the mobile space.) I think Garcia's comment about focus groups is right on. (Mario Garcia says too many innovations are stopped by focus groups that go negative on them largely because they have not seen them before, not necessarily because they won't work.)

Of course, I note that the minute I opened the Statesman article, the top portion was covered by a popout from the neighboring home sales ad. Need I say more? ...

Another thing of note is that U.S. papers, from my experience through Newsplex, are far less active in Ifra, the international press organization that has been far ahead of U.S. newspaper organizations in all this. (Sorry NNA and NAA, but it's true.)

Ifra doesn't help itself by having confiscatory subscription rates and no reasonably priced online access or individual memberships to receive its magazine (now IFRA magazine, formerly newstechniques) that has continued to be far ahead of U.S. industry publications like Editor & Publisher on things like convergence. If your paper is a member, you should demand that it give you access to the magazine's site. If it isn't, you should ask why not. (Randy Covington of Newsplex notes that all NAA members should have access to Ifra publications.)

Update: Kerry Northrup, who I am proud to have worked with, questions my use of "confiscatory" subscription rates and clarifies that complimentary subscriptions are available to academics, etc. That's great. But let's examine for a moment how I came to the conclusion that subscriptions were "confiscatory." OK, I'll admit I intentionally put a bit of juice in that word -- but when you click on the IFRA site, this is what you see if you click on information to get a subscription. The first is the overall price notice. The second is what you get when you actually click one of the radio buttons to choose a subscription type. Neither mentions a free subsciption for academics or "pretty much anyone else who demonstrates involvement with the news publishing industry," to quote Kerry.


Checking my handy-dandy currency converter, 79 Euros for the e-edition works out to about $116 a year, or almost $10 a month, which is steep on an academic's or student's or small-newspaper journalist's salary -- and those are exactly the people who need to be reading this (not all are NAA members, and many may not know about such an offer anyway, so my original comment stands in spirit, if not de facto now that Kerry has clarified).

It's wonderful that Kerry has clarified this. Maybe Ifra could make its Web site clearer, too.

E&P special report on newspapers

You really get the sense of desperation in the newspaper business right now from today' special report in Editor and Publisher.

The report tries to look for the positive -- essentially saying that newspaper companies actually might be willing to try some truly drastic changes. But all those changes still have a common theme, cut back:

• Do away with editions
• Stop chasing nonreaders
• Redesign papers that can be produced with far fewer people

And as the article points out, many other things are tweaks or are radical only here: And yet some change that's considered radical by newspapers would be fairly ho-hum in other industries, or countries. Take advertising. Only now are U.S. newspapers beginning to move to modular advertising, which sells high-impact ads in logical portions of a page, rather than by the column inch.

When it comes to actual innovation: In its first year, Newspaper Next programs reached some 6,000 people, but since API rolled out its 2.0 version last February, the response has not been anywhere near that, says [APIs' Drew] Davis. The biggest newspaper companies, he adds, are most conspicuous in their absence.

Larger metro papers are not going to innovate - they are for the most part in pure survival mode. Innovation is going to have to come from small and mid-sized newsrooms where -- and I hate to say this -- you can blow the place up more easily and fire everyone who doesn't want to get with the program and hire new people with relatively little experience. (By the same token, the nature of those newsrooms, I think, is that you can more clearly articulate a vision to everyone, which may make it much less necessary to clear the dead wood; I've generally found people to be pretty reasonable when you provide a vision.)

I agree with the end of the article that we are focused too much on the newsrooms. Everyone I talk with says the real problems are in the ad bullpen, and not necessarily with the sales force. Salespeople are reacting highly rationally, for instance, when the compensation structure is so heavily slanted toward print.

One truly innovative thing might be go in and blow up the commission structure. Essentially, figure out a way to continually rebalance print and online so print gradually gets a lesser share of the commission structure and encourages moving customers as appropriate to online, or both. Several salespeople I know have told me horror stories about the commssission structures they now work under, especiall the online component. Is it any wonder online isn't being sold?

One interesting side note from the story is the remark that there are too many "writers" at newspapers and not enough "reporters." It's getting nasty out there, folks.

Talkinator & other stuff

• Talkinator, a no-registration chat site, has debuted from the creator of Mailinator, which has become one of the most popular sites on the Net to use to keep yourself from being overwhelmed by spam. Cringley has details and suggests that these days a 5% margin of "better" might be enough to thrive. (Personally, I've pretty much stopped using chat, what with Twitter and other things. But then again, I still use e-mail. What a dinosaur I am.)
  
• David Sullivan aptly notes that in all the hoo-ha about Tribune's/Zell's pronouncement that the ad/news ratio in the papers would be rejiggered, some basic journalism was overlooked -- so what exactly is the typical ad/news ratio. Some of the figures he has from earlier years might surprise you.
• KnoxNews's posting from this weekend's church shooting shows why every reporter should have a Flip or similar video camera.
• I've seen some broad themes develop and coalesce lately across the new media discussions. One is the realization that the business model is a tough nut to crack but one that has to be. Another is the idea that young journalists are starting to flee traditional newsrooms almost, it seems, at the same rate as the layoff notices are coming for older ones. The latest entry: Braden Nicholson leaves Indy.com. Pat Thornton has more. And this comment on the Gannett blog. Frankly, this kind of stuff worries me a lot more than whether newspapers are innovating. If you are eating your young, you are R.I.P. (Earlier from Mark Glaser's interview with Vickey Williams who studied newsrooms as part of the Learning Newsroom poject.)
  
• The Citizens Media Law Project has launched the final section of its online media guide. Sadly, it includes only the 15 largest states for now. It's a lot more than just a libel guide. There is information on freedom of information, forming a business, etc. Get the details at the Media Shift Idea Lab blog.
  

Classifieds agonistes

Bob Wyman has an excellent think piece, "Newspaper Classifieds: A franchise lost."

If you are in journalism, I suggest you read it. The ah-ha moment should come when Wyman talks about classifieds really being a separate business from news, although the two piggybacked on the same medium, the paper, for so many years.

Given that perspective, you may think anew about classifieds.

Wyman says it's time for papers to move on and forget the lost opportunity of classifieds.

I agree in the context of major metros. But here in the hustings, I still don't see mass adoption of free sites like Craiglist. And while some of the verticals, especially real estate, are probably beyond the ability of papers to recover, others, such as jobs, are still unsettled. (I base these observations on conversations I continue to have with people as I go about my business -- nothing scientific about the sampling -- and my own experiences with things such as Craigslist.)

Here's where Wyman's observation comes in handy -- where there are opportunities left, managers have to realize that they are dealing with two separate businesses. Then, maybe you wouldn't get things like this paper's classified listings - unsearchable, unattractive and just dumped online. Compare that with even a scraper service like Jobster or Indeed. Were news organization managers to think about classifieds as separate businesses, they might think harder about combining that scraping technology themselves with their own searchable databases. (Again, keep in mind I am talking about small operations where I think there still is an opening.)

CareerBuilder, of course, has been one attempt by the industry to do this. But it still tends to be a larger-paper buy in.

Having said that, we run up against the digital divide. The fractured nature of this business has always been problematic in fostering R&D. I fear it is becoming even more critical for those smaller newsrooms (> 25,000 circ) daily and weekly, especially those not part of a chain. It's one thing to say there might be an opening and another to have the resources to take advantage of it. For instance, that paper I pointed to has an IT staff of about two that has its hands full just keeping the servers up and meeting internal needs.

Smaller newsrooms are the ground troops of journalism in this country, and while there have been (relatively) rosy predictions about their prospects, things like classifieds, I think, illustrate the difficulties they face in moving to the digital age. (My assumption here, of course, is that their audience eventually moves online as well, even in the most rural areas; I don't think that's unreasonable given the explosion in mobile we are likely to see after TV goes all-digital next year.)

We need a skunkworks for these smaller newsrooms, perhaps to develop low-cost software, but just as much to identify what is available already open source or low-cost and how it can be adapted to their operations.

I've suggested press association digital development cooperatives, but maybe there are other ideas. What do you think?

---

As an aside, compounding things is the sloppy way parts of this industry continue to maintain their online sites. Time and again, I am met by dead links, outdated material, etc.

For instance, if you go to Google and search for Sumter, S.C., jobs, one of the first pages that comes up is Sciway.net (a pretty innovative data site for a small state - but that's another post). And, indeed, there is a link to the classified site of the local newspaper. But take a close look - scroll down to that "storm water manager" ad. When is that resume due? May 2007!?

What happened, of course, is that the paper changed how it generates page calls. But the old link still works. The page has never been cleaned up or a redirect inserted. That's evidence of the "static" and not the dynamic mentality too many news sites still have.

Then there is The State in nearby Columbia. Click on its classifieds link and you go here:



Where would you click to head to the job ads? (Put another way, you have just clicked through to this page. Where did your eyes land first?)

I'm betting a substantial number would click on the Careerbuilder area on the right. The big orange box on the left might seem attractive, but its position is on the left rail, where some people may discount it as general navigation/internal search. (Having clicked on one left-rail item to get here, they would not necessarily expect to have to click on another. Instead, the tendency would be to scan the main part of the page first, which is consistent with eyetrack and usability studies.)

There's a second link, under that picture next to the orange box. Did you even see it? (Three links to the same thing but with three separate styles on the same page. The usability experts must be going nuts.)

While I think as many as half the visitors to this page would click on that rightmost link, let's make it just a conservative one in five, 20%. What will they get?
That's a way to build traffic, huh? (The problem with door No. 3, Monty, is that the link now should be thestate.com/jobs instead of /employment.)

I've said it before and will again - the Web is a dynamic thing, far more than the traditional newspaper business. Those who want to play effectively in this sandbox, must find systems., staffing and work flows that allow for the constant tending and monitoring that requires. So far, I see far too many examples of post it and forget it. (And maybe it's just me, but if the "404" notice comes up like above, wouldn't it be nice to have a way to tell the Web folks about the broken link? Sigh.)

The land of free

Brian B.'s comment on an earlier post I thought deserved a post of its own:

Doug: Following up on our discussion some time back on free vs. pay models for news Web sites, I wonder if you've seen this article in Wired magazine. It's Chris "long tail" Anderson on how and why some things become available for free. Apparently he's working on a book about the phenomenon.

First, go read the article. Make sure everyone in your newsroom reads it -- especially the publisher.

Now, consider again the reality of the modern news business:

• The "news" as we do it has little intrinsic value.
• The value came from the "wrapper" -- the newspaper. It is this part of the equation the Internet is destroying.
  
• We are not going to solely "write" our way out of this, nor will we do it simply by increasing the number of photos of people with their pets or receiving the latest charity check (although it's probably a good start if, for no other reason, to get back to the roots of why we exist anyhow).
• This is a two-part problem, and unless we think about and attack both parts ...

OK, let's again tackle these in order:

The news has little intrinsic value
If you don't understand why after reading Chris Anderson's article, go read it again. Yes, the news has value, but it is so fleeting and close to zero that it is economically impractical to extract it. I know it's hard telling a generation of journalists that what you're doing has no (or little) value, but until they have that catharsis, it's going to be tough to move on.

This, of course, is a blanket statement that will have variances. For instance, in a smaller area with less media, the "news" is likely to have more intrinsic value. Even these areas, however, are unlikely to be bypassed by the digital revolution, which means, eventually, there will be more sources for that local news. Whether they will suffer the same dilution that metro areas have or whether dilution will not get to the point where an economic model -- think small community newspaper, etc. -- can be maintained remains to be seen. This, of course, is the backbone of the faith in "hyperlocal" -- that somehow if we carve it up enough the resulting news product builds intrinsic value because there are likely to be fewer competitors in each sliver ( in other words we keep grasping for the monopoly or oligopoly straw that allowed 30 percent profit without any real innovation for 50 years or more). This, however, may be offset by the resources needed to produce enough material for each of these hyperlocal markets, plus the reality that it also takes fewer competitors to make a smaller segment unprofitable.

The value is in the wrapper
Until now, we have wrapped the various parts, each with minimal value, in the newspaper (or into channels on the airwaves). The very aggregation provided some value, as it made it convenient for readers to get most of what they wanted in one place. However, that "place" had limited space, and as their interests broadened and diverged, this wrapper became less relevant, long before online. It was prolonged by its monopoly position. Online destroyed that, and the economic model is rapidly collapsing (whether it will find equilibrium at a much-contracted level remains to be seen).

However, Google and Yahoo and Digg and Reddit, etc., are all just wrappers, too. They bring a new kind of convenience in the digital age. More on that in a moment ...

We are not going to "write" our way out of it
Go back to point one -- the inherent value of the "news." Again, not all stories nor pieces of information will have the same value. Thus we have "refrigerator journalism" in which those items, hung on the refrigerator door, have greater value to one or more people, as does the picture of someone's son or daughter, etc. And maybe a "big picture" article occasionally falls into this category.

But the reality is:

• Such items, the things people probably are willing to pay for, generally have a micro audience. If you amortized the cost of production across the willing payers, it would be a serious mismatch. Advertising helps fill the gap, but we have not developed systems to match advertisers with buyers at this granular level, and even were we to, it's still not clear it would be cost-effective.
• The cost of producing "must-read" pieces with a wider base of potential readership climbs rather quickly to the point where there is no marginal benefit. This becomes especially acute if you try to increase the frequency. (Think of one grabber investigative or other type of piece once a month versus one every day or two.) Plus, frankly, there's no guarantee that any local area has that many compelling stories. (This is another conundrum for local media -- a New York Times can amortize not only its expenses but its newsgathering over a much broader area, making it more likely it will find a steady stream of compelling reads.)
  

We have to attack both parts
If you have that catharsis I talked about, you realize this is a problem that has to be dealt with on two levels.

1. Yes, we have to try to improve the "news" so that we increase its intrinsic value. How do we do that? Is it possible to do with economic effectiveness? (An honest assessment tells you that you absolutely have to get your audience involved to help with the production.) What are the elements of photos, stories, headlines that work for audiences? (When you begin to get into this you find lots of shibboleths and assumptions, but really very little reproducible research.) We can't write our way out of it in the sense that we are unlikely to produce a journalism in which every part has measurable, recoverable value. But we are likely to be able to increase the value of some parts.
2. Develop new "wrappers." The industry track record on this is shameful at best. R&D has best been referred to in this industry as "rounding error," and now it is coming home. Cooperation has been hard to come by, too (anyone remember New Century Network). But if journalists expect to be more than just bit players, they are going to have to coalesce and crack this nut, as well as get a better idea of how readers/users interact with the material they are putting out. Read Anderson's article again closely. What he describes is a universe in which the digital product is largely free, but it's the wrapper that costs (if you elect to choose the more expensive wrapper).

The challenge for journalists is to figure out what new digital wrappers provide the convenience, credibility, portability, etc., that can add value to their product. So far, this industry has abdicated that to the Googles of the world -- and then it likes to whine that Google et al. are "stealing" its product.

So we, as journalists, have a choice: Do we want to be just "content" providers? If so, then admit you are going to rely on someone else to distribute your product and you are going to be one - small - dot on the map with relatively low value. Like any artist, you 'll be able to do what you are doing for its intrinsic beauty. A few will become superstars. Most will need a second job to eat.

If not, then somehow this industry is going to have to discover a way to break more than a century of independence, cantankerousness and anti-intellectualism. Whether it backs such efforts at universities, think-tanks, corporate R&D centers or all three, there is a small window developing. It starts next February when TV goes digital, freeing up tremendous bandwidth and starting a push that I predict within a decade will pretty much bring an end to the desktop computer. New devices, programs and ways of interacting with online media will all result.

News organizations -- and most journalists and j-schools -- missed the first window after the dot-com bubble burst. Now that they know this "Internet thingy" is real, maybe they won't miss the second.

But I'm not putting any money on it.

AP's Curley speaks, Blodget explains

I was going to do a detailed post about AP CEO Tom Curley's speech last night at the Knight-Bagehot dinner.

But the definition of foolishness is to duplicate what someone else has done -- and probably done better than you could have. So head to Silicon Alley Insider and Henry Blodgett's deconstructed (in more polite terms, annotated) version of Curley's speech.

I did find this glancing reference high in the speech to be fascinating (Curley is talking about the news habits of a young Indian man):

Madi’s story was captured by anthropologists hired by AP to study news consumption patterns of young adults. Madiwas by far the biggest news junkie of the bunch, but he was not unique.

AP could do the industry, and academia, a heck of a service by allowing -- no, encouraging -- those anthropologists to publish their work and then linking to it. Maybe it will; I don't know, given AP's reputation for not being the most forthcoming of corporate PR operations. I don't see anything on AP's PR site mentioning it. (Note to world's largest news service: How cool would it be, and how much would it help your street cred, to have an RSS feed and search capability on that page?)

Despite all of Curley's good words, of course, he still has to deal with a board dominated by "old" media, and more than a few "old" media aren't necessarily thrilled by AP's initiatives. As several have written me after recent posts: What do you do when your supplier becomes your competitor? (Wrong question, of course. The right one is: How do we take advantage of all the inputs the digital age has opened to us so that we don't depend on AP for the same news as the folks running the newspaper/TV station/Web site the next town over?)

So what's next?

Don't be surprised if, before Curley leaves the building on 10th Avenue, that he moves to try to loosen that yoke. Wait for it ...

Quick hits

From Reason magazine, "Amusing Ourselves to Depth," an interesting look and rumination at The Onion and what lessons it might hold for newsrooms trying to find an audience. This snippet ought to give you some idea:

At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.

Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in their print circulation during the last three years? Yet as traditional newspapers fail to draw readers, only industry mavericks like The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and USA Today’s Jack Kelley have looked to The Onion for inspiration.

Hmmm ... but read it, because it should get you thinking. Does good journalism have to be dull? Where is the line?

---

Earlier this week, of course, came the news (more from E&P) that Paul Steiger, soon-to-be former Wall Street journal managing editor, was creating a nonprofit investigative journalism center, Pro Publica. Bravo, but ...

I've been chewing on this all week, and not to be the downer at this party, but I'm just troubled by what it signals. Yes, private, nonprofit groups have been helping newsrooms do investigative projects for years (think of Chicago's Better Government Association and all the projects it was involved in with media outlets there, such as the famous Mirage Bar). But this is different. This is doing almost all the heavy lifting and then just handing a project over, turnkey, to a media outlet.

News organizations by and large already have handed their training functions over to nonprofits like press associations and Poynter. Their R&D, such as it is, is largely done by industry nonprofits. Now, the watchdog function. On one hand, of course, it's good to see the commitment and craft flourish somewhere. On the other, it's deeply troubling for what it says.

So, good luck, but pardon if there's a touch of melancholy in the "best wishes."

---

If you haven't read it, read Howard Owens' "Twelve things journalists can do to save journalism." Make sure you read the comments, too. Owens rips the scab off some deep-seated feelings about journalism, but it should get you thinking.

Caspio dustup

Some of the latest chatter on various blogs and boards is about Caspio, which bills itself as an easy way to get your database output to the 'Net. (OK, that's simplistic, but it'll do for now.)

That's touched off a wider round of posts dealing with database journalism and how it's lagging in the eyes of its beholders and (sometimes not so subtle subtext) how news organizations are too cheap to hire the journalist/programmers needed to make it work.

Adrian Holovaty, of course, juiced this discussion way back in 2006 when he proposed that all newsrooms needed to stop thinking of story as a river of text and start thinking of it as creating and intertwining databases of the information they gathered (more on that from an interview he did with Online Journalism Review).

Lately, Derek Wills of the Washington Post has taken a couple of swipes at Caspio. And as you can see from the comments in that first post, the system has lots of defenders (I noted particularly Peter Zicari's comment. I know Peter, who works for the Plain Dealer, from the American Copy Editors Society and put a fair amount of trust in what he says).

Jacob Kaplan-Moss fleshes out the debate a little more with his recent post.

Looking at this with a programming background that goes back to Fortran 4 and my days in astrophysics (don't ask) ... but whose skills have rusted with lack of use (rough translation: I understand the lingo, know the questions and issues, and couldn't write current code if my life depended on it) ... and who knows the journalism end of it, some thoughts:

• Yep, Derek & Co. are right. We should be training database journalist programmers
• We should have development tools that enable those DJPs to do natively what can be done as quickly as with Caspio
• Ain't gonna happen soon
  

Read Zicari's comment again, and you'll find a lot of wisdom in there. And that's a "large" newsroom. It's always a balance between speed, ease and completeness/flexibility. And all of that balanced against cost. Right now, so much of this industry is searching for something, anything, that the cost factor (as Jacob outlines it), I think, pales in comparison for executives. They want it quick and, if necessary, slightly dirty. It's about eyeballs, pure and simple, and if two tin cans and a string would attract a crowd, well, guess what ...

Now, to the two other parts of the debate: 1) We need more programmer/journalists and 2) we need easier tools.

As to 1: With due respect to Matt Waite, Adrian, Derek, Jacob and dozens of others I deeply respect, it isn't likely to happen soon. In many cases (and let me stress, not all) the university system isn't really equipped to handle this. First, it requires cross-department and, perhaps, cross-school cooperation. That's a mouthful alone if you know anything about the way most schools operate. And then it can take from one to three years to get a course approved (one does not just create courses in most schools; there are curriculum committees and university committees and other departments that must weigh in).

(For now, let's not get off on a debate about whether higher ed is set up to deal with the new world order -- let's just stipulate.)

There are other structural challenges, too. Our school, for instance, has a "visual communications" track as well as the traditional "journalism," broadcast, ad and PR tracks. Right now, viscom would seem the natural place to put something like this, but it pretty much ends with Dreamweaver. Viscom is annoyed at broadcast because broadcast's curriculum is so tight that it doesn't have spaces for viscom students who want those skills (so if it's this difficult within a department ... and we're not the first. Go research Kansas, for instance, or BYU). We've been struggling with how to fit this all in (if you want to see the report and a pretty good compilation of resources and links, go to our wiki).

Second, accreditation standards add to the complexity. Accredited journalism programs are under some fairly tight strictures as to how many hours can be taken in the major -- to put something new in, something generally has to be bumped out at the same time we're also getting complaints that students don't get enough writing and reporting (again, stipulated). And, sure, you can say ditch the accreditation. Certainly some large and well-known programs don't have it. But that again ignores reality in most schools whose faculty depend on faculty from other "accredited" departments to grant promotion and tenure (disclosure: I am a lowly untenured instructor, so I get to watch the fun and games from the cheap seats).

Third, university finances and financial systems pose challenges. Pump "value centered management" into Google and start reading. (Or you can get a broad range of perspectives here.) Now, certainly not every campus is using VCM, but there plenty of variations of it floating around and the bottom line is, in general, that they discourage cross-department "sharing" of students unless the revenue you lose is offset by the revenue you project to gain by bringing in students from outside your department. As anyone who's ever done financial projections for business knows, that can be dicey.

Fourth, there's the idea that many state schools, with declining state support, are focusing their efforts on areas that can get federal grants (because those grants pay substantial overhead) or major private foundation mney. So far, Knight has provided some juice in this area, but let me suggest that even at its level of total funding, the response from most of those in the physical sciences would be "that's nice; I think we have that over here in loose change." Is the industry willing to step up and fund this kind of research? (Hey, I love rhetorical questions.)

The second part of the challenge -- developing tools that allow journalists to do this well, and on their own servers -- may be the more achievable. And I would urge those who have the skills to consider it. But when was the last time you saw this industry cooperate on any kind of software (or much else, for that matter)? (That could take awhile, so let's move on.) I've been urging press associations recently to take up the challenge using the cooperative model. Much as they have formed advertising cooperatives, I think it's time they considered IT cooperatives to share the cost of such development, especially for smaller papers.

It's clear from the exchanges over Caspio that the old vein of journalistic independence (why would you want to put your data on their servers) remains strong, even in the digital age. But then again, isn't that the same mentality that said you had to own your printing press, which is how, in my opinion, lots of news organizations got into trouble to start with?

If nothing else, once you strip the tech talk away, all the words written about Caspio once again highlight the deep and difficult issues this industry (and the schools that feed it) faces.

Curley gives an inside look at WaPo.com

Rob Curley provides an inside look at how it works inside the two top floors of the Virginia office tower that are dedicated to washingtonpost.com.

His last two grafs:

“Nearly all of those ideas are from non-newspaper sites. They’re from other websites that had a kernel of an idea that they had used on their website that this person on our team recognized as being something that, if modified and used in the news industry, might work really well.

“So these people (the members of his team) are of the Internet. It is in their DNA. That’s what makes a lot of these newspaper sites completely suck is because so many of them are run by people who don’t have the Internet in their DNA.”

Curley says he's being quoted in a Northwestern University report coming out later this week on innovation in the news media. I haven't seen it yet, but if you do, throw a link in the comments, will ya?

J-school education: Confused and concerned

I just spent a week at the annual confab for we journalism educators, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and I came away with as many questions as answers. The conference tended to spark other blog posts, such as this one: J-schools must teach multimedia and a good post on Inside Higher Education (pay special attention to the comments)

Some quick observations:

• Good to see the education establishment finally embrace the wide range of questions and issues raised by the digital shift. Previous meetings have kind of stuck a toe in the water, but found it a little chilly. This conference was studded with good panels and papers.
• Having said that, I detect the first signs of panic among some of my colleagues, akin to the panic that has hit may newspaper newsrooms. In short: We know we have to do something, but we aren't sure what to do. So let's throw a bunch of Jell-o against the wall and see what sticks. If you listened closely in the sessions and the halls (and exclude the evangelists), there is a begrudging acceptance but still some serious doubt.
• That doubt is aggravated by some serious traditional and institutional factors that work against any quick transition. Not the least of these are the lead times needed for course changes and technology purchases. And then there are tenure and promotion guidelines, often at odds with the quick morphing that appear necessary to survive and thrive in this phase of things. Especially of note: The insistence on Ph.D.'s when many of the cutting-edge skills are not being learned in graduate school but in the school of hard knocks. Add to that:
  
• The too-often (but not always, please) disconnect between the demands of research and those of teaching.
  
• And the industry's anti-intellectual bent that helps to devalue the research it says it wants and needs inside academic institutions in favor of the esoterica the industry then uses to say j-school education can irrelevant, etc.

(That entire last thread on institutional and industry factors could be a lengthy series of posts on its own, so please allow me the short but admittedly inadequate treatment here.)

One of the things that struck me as I came away from the conference and a session at API going over the Newspaper Next report was an uneasiness that our standard is shifting in the journalism business to "good enough."

Sure, we're always known we were doing good enough -- you don't get a paper out the door if you do only perfection. But I get this sense that before, while we shot for perfection and settled for good enough, now we are willing to shoot for good enough and settle for ...

I fear we are taking Clayton Christensen's explication of "good enough" as disruptive technology and using it as a de facto standard, instead of understanding what he really means.

And when I view all the newspapers' separate online sites for entertainment, and busy mommies and sports teams, I come away going, "So what is the connection to the ideal of a free press in promoting democracy?" (When I asked that question at API, I got the verbal equivalent of a blank stare.) On none of those sites I saw do you find, say, a small box that might point users, for instance, to recent stories about child-care tax credits, etc. -- the kinds of policy things that if they are not talked about tend to make people wake up one day and go "why didn't you tell us?"

In the process, of course, those things might get people to click back to the main news site where they might find some other stuff of interest (you know,that old serendipity thing). Instead, we seem to be running away from the "newspaper" (a term I use because we don't have a better one right now for the evolving large newsroom). I think there has to be a happy medium somewhere.

Lots to think about and work through. Will probably turn it into a column down the road soon and cross-post here. Meantime, input appreciated.

An inability to change?

A lot has been written about print and broadcast newsrooms' resistance and inability to change (go to Readership.org and scroll down to The Newspaper Organization, for instance).

Now, Paul Conley suggests that perhaps Web organizations, along with the business-to-business publishing industry that he covers, may be structurally incapable of reacting to "the next big thing" as well.

From his post:

In the past few months I've noticed a problem. It's the same problem that Christensen has studied. It's the same problem that plagued us as we moved from the print world to the Web:
Our companies aren't structured to respond to the next big thing.
I've met with dozens of people from dozens of content companies. Some of these companies are newly Web-focused. Others are Web-only companies and email newsletter companies born in recent years.
And I'm seeing the exact same attitudes, beliefs, work rules, chains of command and silos that I saw in the print-only companies that failed to respond to the Web. I meet email newsletter folks who don't know what RSS is, because "that's not our business." I meet Web journalists who don't think about widgets "because our customers aren't asking for them." I meet managers of online companies who laugh at mobile content ("our readers want more detailed analysis than you can get on a Blackberry,") roll their eyes at online communities ("those are for teenagers") and won't visit a virtual world ("our audience are high-end serious people. None of them play computer games.)

Go read the rest. It will make you think -- or it should, at least.