How to annoy your readers, McClatchy style

McClatchy has apparently found a new way to torture readers who go to at least some of its websites -- the ad intercept screen that has no ad on it and asks you if you want to read a story that's not the one you clicked through.

Is it any wonder that McClatchy's stock (MNI) is in the tank?

McClatchy keeps talking about how digital is its future (PDF). But I've yet to see this company really show that it understands how online works -- except to annoy readers with websites that don't display or print correctly, or have so much underlying crap code they slow down browsers.

For a while, I thought MNI was sort of getting it with its redesign (though the design still is about five years behind where forward-looking operations like The Guardian are going). And then this stuff crops up.

Here are a few screenshots from Myrtle Beach and Rock Hill. (I already had tripped The State's cookie by the time I decided to see if this was at other MNI sites, so I'm not getting the screen there right now -- but I will as soon as I sign out and clear session cookies.)

Rock Hill and Myrtle Beach screens that appear when you try to click through a story. Notice "skip this ad" in upper right - but there's no ad. So why annoy readers? Upper left is a suggestion to read a story -- one that's different from the one you clicked through to read.

Update 11/14
Matt Derienzo expounds on the Nieman blog about how newspapers in general are ditching the idea of customer service.

You think Food Network would get this Web thing

Food Network has one of the more sophisticated Web operations, but it's also an example of how even the good can go bad.

Case in point, "Restaurant Impossible." Yeah, I admit I tune in every week. I spent a few years over a hot stove in the restaurant biz, so I identify.

Usually at the end of an episode, they tell you how a restaurant is doing a few months down the road. But tonight, at the end of one on the Valley View restaurant, the message was to to go http://foodnetwork.com/ri to find out how the restaurant did.

OK, I'm game and have the laptop open, so I head online to the Valley View episode. Nada. Oh, there's the usual marketing copy, a couple of recipes, but nothing else.

So I click around. Lo and behold, none of the episodes tells you how things turned out. But that's a key part of the show, to my mind. What worked and what didn't?

First rule of marketing: If you promise customers something, it probably should be there when they get there. You'd think FN could do better.

Update: Found a March 14 update to an old FN blog post saying the restaurant had closed. Still nothing, however, at the actual episode site. Now, if someone wanted information, where do you think they'd go, the blog or the show's episode site?

Update: I see that on March 14, Robert Irvine, the show's chef/host tweeted: Hey guys going to the website at food http://network.com/RI is a new food network directive not mine sorry folks. So, Food Network, if you are going to direct people there, maybe you'd better keep the site updated, eh?

Update: The network now seems to have it together and is producing regular updates on the FN blog and bringing them over onto the Restaurant Impossible site.

Community newspapers and online

Some new research by Mike Jenner at the University of Missouri presented at the industry "Mega-conference" this past week finds that publishers of weeklies see a long future for print, but they are moving -- slowly -- into the digital realm as well.

From the write-up in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin:

The absence of ubiquitous broadband Internet access across weekly markets and the competition for readers and advertisers are behind some of the decisions to implement paid content and mobile platforms and products.

Thirty-six percent of weekly publishers say their market is not saturated with broadband Internet coverage. Another 33 percent say their markets are saturated; while 31 percent are neutral.

Publishers see greater competition in their markets for ad dollars than for news coverage. Only 24 percent say they’re in a competitive news market. But the perception of competition for advertising is a different story: 47 percent of publishers say they’re in competitive advertising markets. One quarter say their markets are not competitive for advertising; another 28 percent are neutral.

Ninety-five percent of weeklies with more than 5,000 circulation have websites, compared to 77 percent of those with less than 5,000 circulation.

60 seconds in the digital age

These two infographics about what happens online in 60 seconds are pretty interesting.

I always tend to take such things that average numbers with a little grain of salt, but even so, some of the numbers are impressive:

• 370,000 Skype voice calls
• 695,000 Facebook updates
• 600 YouTube videos
• 1,820 terabytes of data created

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.

Bleacher Report U - a great resource

Yep, it's brutal. It's pointed.

And Bleacher Report's new training site, Bleacher Report U, and its other editing resources really should be part of your tool box if you are teaching journalism in a digital age.

Bleacher Report U is designed to help train all those "content contributors" on which it relies for cheap/free labor. (There, I said it.)

The sports site makes no bones about it - it's out to get eyeballs and clicks. Which, of course, includes the inevitable clickwhore slide shows.

But if you aren't exposing your students to this brutal reality of 21st century journalism, you're shortchanging them. You have to sign up for the training, but just copying the module descriptions and goals into a Word doc and handing it out ought to be enough for a good conversation starter.

More valuable, however, are the other writing and editing resources available outside of the B/R-U structure. I'd encourage you to look at a few of these and check out the internal links that will open up even more (some have been around for a couple of years and I am just finding them):

• The art of the headline - Ryan Alberti's plain-spoken guide. 
• If you find the copy-editing cheat sheet, you will also find an invaluable link to a Google doc that shows "before" and "after" versions of headlines. Lots of grist there.
• There is a full editing case study centered on one article and its revisions. Lots of good stuff (a few minor things I don't agree with, but darn few).
• The B/R blog entry on prose style with this good opening sentence: On the Internet, form IS content. HOW you write changes the very substance of WHAT you write, because it changes the way readers process and understand your work. 

There are lots of sites out there with plenty of helpful tips on Internet writing, SEO, etc., but this is one of the best at integrating it all and not pulling punches.

One thing I especially like is how it reinforces the idea that copy has to be "centered" not only rhetorically but "spatially":

Rhetorical centeredness speaks for itself. A piece should have a coherent overall structure, with an attention-grabbing introduction and a point-making conclusion. Tangents are okay in small doses, but your job as an editor is to keep a piece progressing at a steady pace. This is delicate work, obviously. The only way to master the craft is to practice it.

As for “spatial” centeredness: It’s important to maintain visual and structural balance in the text. Most pointedly, this means (a) breaking long paragraphs into shorter ones and (b) creating single-sentence “anchor” paragraphs where appropriate. 

Yeah, nothing really new here,  but nicely put and emphasized. This is something that needs to be emphasized much more in print, too. I've always called it "visual grammar." It's one of the reasons that even when we went to computers, editors often printed off longer stories - they could "see" where there might be problems.

Newsrooms in general could learn a lot from this stuff. Read it closely, and, whether you agree, disagree or detest some of the dog-eat-dog tone, for me it highlights many of the reasons traditional newsrooms still struggle online. If they adopted some of these ideas for "print" as well, not only would those pages be friendlier, but shoveling the print version online might work better too.

I recall listening in on a state press association teleconference a while back as editors and publishers debated what training to offer. At one point, it was suggested I do a seminar on online writing.

Fine, I said. "How many of you are rewriting your copy for online?"

Dead silence.

OK, I said after about 10 seconds, "You don't need an online writing course."

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(Thanks to the Community Journalism Interest Group blog for the pointer.)

Worth reading: Why NewsTilt failed

Paul Biggar's lengthy dissection of why his NewsTilt failed is worth reading for journalists to become familiar with some of the issues of online news-tech startups. (If you need some background, here is the original Tech Cruunch story on NT's launch.)

Certainly, NewsTilt had its own problems unique to its idea, but Biggar points out larger issues too:

• Tech must be rolled out and updated quickly
• You have to know your audience, both externally and internally (The fact that we didn’t know anything about our readers’ demographics underscores another problem: I don’t understand news readers. I certainly wasn’t one, and I didn’t know many people who really were. My customer development had largely consisted of talking to journalists and figuring out what they wanted. I never really–despite good intentions on lots of occasions–talked to people who loved news about why they loved it. So I was unable to say what was going wrong and why people weren’t sticking around.)
• Spend lots of time thinking about your staff and contributors. (He says NT hired journalists that were too good and not motivated enough to continue supplying content: All the problems the journalists faced, not writing enough, their distrust of Facebook, their unwillingness to socially promote their work, were really problems of motivation. If they had been the sort of people who gave up everything to succeed at their dreams, these could have been blown past. But as established successes in their field, expecting them to make large changes like that is unreasonable.)
• Be brutally honest about the challenges (We never made it clear how hard it was going to be to create an online presence, and so when articles went nowhere, there was little motivation to continue. Building a brand online is akin to doing a startup – it’ll take five years.)
•  Design is important - one of the things I've been trying to get across to an MSM partner on one of the original J-lab funded sites we run that still limps along after a crash wiped out the original design. (Journalists felt that they were writing for us, instead of writing for themselves, for their own brands. How could they feel anything else, since that’s the impression we gave them by the design of newstilt.com),

Come to think of it, those are the same problems many startups and experiments in the mainstream media have suffered from over the years. As I said, well worth reading and thinking about.

The real history of the Internet

Al Tompkins gave some publicity to this last week, but you really should watch it.

It's video of former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt speaking at the Columbia Business School explaining all the government actions taken to favor the Internet, including the decision that it, not broadcasting, should become the nation's common medium:

• "Stole" revenue from the phone network by giving Internet users and service providers free access to it.
• Declared the Internet to be a local service, thus avoiding the 3-cent-per-minute tariff for traffic across state lines.
• Decided online purchases should be tax free.
• Delayed HDTV
• Decided broadcasting "had become a threat to democracy."
  

And he says the government is contracting broadcasting spectrum to favor broadband.

Hundt isn't hurling some conservative broadside at this. He's explaining how he was deep in the thicket of it.

Papers and Twitter: When all you have is a hammer ...

Everything is a nail, is how the old saying goes. That pretty much sums up a lot of what I still see in newsrooms.

The hammer here is the hard-to-shed orientation that news is still something to be "produced" and "delivered" as mostly a one-way affair, instead of being a conversation. That's probably understandable; organizations really aren't all that good at conversations. They're not set up for it. Conversations are a granular things, and organizations are all about homogenization.

Which is why watching what many news organizations have done with Twitter has annoyed but not surprised me. They've created another dumping ground for shovelware.

Having not learned from earlier escapades online (and still doing the shovelware thing on their Web sites in way too many cases), too many news organizations have turned their Twitter feeds also into a shovelware wasteland. The feeds stick out like a sore, one-way thumb on a two-way medium.

And now someone has called them on it. At the Future of Journalism conference in Britain, researchers said they found that "although 91% had Twitter accounts, only two thirds of those studied actually tweeted and that 98.5% of the hyperlinks tweeted, simply pointed to existing website content."

One of the researchers, Marcus Messner, said: "We found that more attention needs to be paid to community building. It needs to go beyond shovelware. "

Having said that -- and having bashed The (Columbia, S.C.) State around recently for not getting it in one area online -- let me now say that this is one thing that newsroom does right. The State's Twitter feed is clearly produced by human, not machine. It's readable, it reacts and it's generally got the idea.

More newsrooms could follow that lead.

Another exhibit of not getting it

No, this is not another rant about a newsroom not getting the 'Net - although that's part of it. It's about a newsroom not getting it, period. And as news staffs continue to get cut, as they have at The State, you begin to wonder if anyone really is minding the store.

The case for the prosecution:

• On Monday, the paper ran a nice advance story on PBS' "The History Detectives" having come to Columbia at the request of a history buff who thought the historical marker noting the bridge that Union Gen. William T. Sherman used to reach Columbia was out of place. The bridge is long gone, of course, but there appear to be remnants in the Broad River.
• The story strongly hinted the history buff was right, but noted, "Everyone involved has been sworn to secrecy until the episode is shown." Fair enough.
• Episode airs Monday night. History buff is proved correct.
• Does The State update its story or do a follow-up story? Dare you to find one. Do a search on The State's Web site and you come up with a link that reads 'History Detectives' to Columbia Man: 'You were correct." Go ahead - click on that link. You will be almost instantly redirected back to the original, un-updated story! Hello? Anyone home?

Forget the intertubes. Forget that it's 2009. This is simply about getting it as journalists, period.

Having put the advance story in a prominent position one day, no city editor in his or her right mind in years past would not have done at least a short follow-up. But you won't find one in the paper. (And you've already gotten online whiplash if you clicked on that link.)

Sure, the paper put up a nice link to the video story on its Web site. I'd give kudos, but that should be routine these days. But what about folks who don't want to sit through 15 minutes of video, who have busy lives but who were left wondering from Monday's paper and may just want to know quickly "Did they ever prove it?"

Instead, this paper has gone from essentially owning the story and setting itself up to be "the answerer of questions," thus helping its follow-up audience, time on site and all that stuff, to potentially being major clueless irritant. (Not to mention there was additional info to be reported from Monday's show - that the history buff apparently has in process an application to move the marker. This involves Civil War history, folks, and such things are not taken lightly in these parts.)

I've seen this play out more and more. And it's not just papers. There was the recent disappearing act by TVs when it came to the early stages of the L.A. fires.

Let's hope "not getting it," a bad-enough ailment in the digital realm, doesn't turn out to be the creeping crud.

Still, the complaints about content

At the Media Post blogs today, Derek Gordon is "Mourning the state of content."

It caught my eye because it involves other than newspapers and media properties. I do some consulting for small businesses, too (starting with my sister-in-law's catering biz and erstwhile restaurant), and one of the things I find myself harping on lately is content.

Too many people see the Internet as one big shopping mall and think if you just throw up a store front people will come - and stay. The Google analytics on too many sites show differently - high skip rates, little foraging into the depth of sites, etc. (Sounds a lot like some newspapers, too, doesn't it?)

But on the Internet, everyone is a publisher and the ethos is different: Give me some good content and I'll drop by and maybe set a spell -- maybe even buy something. "Engaging" is the new watchword. I've told my sister-in-law, for instance, that just once a week she needs to take 20 minutes and put up a little tidbit. Maybe a recipe, maybe just something simple like how to core and apple easily or squeeze a lemon without getting the seeds everywhere. Pretty soon that stuff turns up in search engines, and that's when the action starts.

Gordon also laments some basic tech skills, but I'd just settle for some content. He writes:

But I must confess to one overriding concern that grows with each new Web site I encounter: Too many business owners have built sites that are to some degree unprepared to conduct business on the Web.

Whether this is a commentary on our fast-changing times or the failure of our education system to adequately prepare our citizens for work in the 21st century, one thing is clear: There is a widespread lack of basic writing abilities and an equal lack of even the most basic technical skill. ...

But the thing is, from my experience, the problem seems to be widespread. Folks from many socioeconomic backgrounds and from every corner of our country seem to suffer from the same limitations.

Web sites are undermined by basic composition problems. Where there is copy, it's often unfocused, with grammatical problems and, often, misspelled words. Even when it's well-written, it's left to grow stale or fails to be interesting enough to be link-worthy. In terms of technical ability, too many Web site owners are unable to install the Google Analytics tracking code in their site's footer on their own. Even those who use a good content management system such as WordPress will have very often failed to employ the standard SEO pack. Mention HTML, and they break into a cold sweat.

Check out the rest of it. Food for thought.

The SEC's new media (and new-media) rules

I had not heard or read much about the SEC's new media rules (Update: see revised rules and comment at the end of this) until I saw a little squib on the newspaper video group pointing to this short story from Birmingham via AP via Biloxi (ain't the Web great?).

Ah, leave it to college and professional sports (there's a difference?) to put the hammer down and nicely spotlight some really persnickety issues and realities that are staring a lot of TV and newspaper sports departments in the face.

According to the AP, "It only allows TV stations to show highlights for 72 hours after a game ends. The policy also prohibits the media from posting video from practices and news conferences online." And reporters have to sign the contract - or no look-see.

So let's see, at a time when newsrooms seemingly everywhere are rushing to create destination sites for various teams' fans, and when video is a major part of those efforts - the SEC just said, in essence, "screw you."

The SEC is open in what it wants -- to drive traffic to SEC and affiliate sites. And it has every right to be as draconian as it can get away with.*

Spare the anguished freedom of the press cries. So far, at least, the law seems to generally side with the idea that when teams or other groups form private associations, they get wide latitude to control the goods, even if the games, concerts, etc., are on public property or use other public facilities -- and even when government is spending questionable amounts of money providing traffic control and security.

So if we are to believe the memes that the Web is becoming more and more telegenic, and the SEC intends to strangle the video baby for all but its own and affiliated sites, what does that tell us?

• Well, first, of course, it opens the debate on priorities. Is pro (and that includes most major college) sports really worth covering in a time of shrinking resources? Or should we put the resources into those sports (or other) areas that,for many reporters are not especially glamorous but are truly woven into the community's fabric (high school, rec leagues, club leagues, non-traditional sports). Yes, yes. I know lots of places do lots of good things with high schools, for instance (though take a look around -- that generally applies only to the "major" sports), but this is still a baseline question that needs discussion. Oh, you'll never answer it to everyone's satisfaction, but it gives an excuse to quaff a few beers to get lubricated for some of the tougher stuff ahead.
• Should we launch an all-out assault on the legality of private or quasi-private associations being able to use public facilities but restrict access? OK, if they can, should we seek to require that they effectively "rent" the facility and pay the cost of all government-funded support services?
• So if you can't use video, can you use stills and audio? (You'll probably be busted on that, too, if the sponsoring organization decides you're sucking traffic from its site.)
• Which leaves us with what? The intrepid scribe (a general term for all reporters, please)? But where does that leave the scribes. All due respect, but much of sports reporting, like the staged events it leads up to, is staged itself. The obligatory and lightly revealing after-game or midweek news conferences, the after-practice sessions, the precleared meetings with players.
  
• Look, I did it from time to time for AP. No, I don't claim to be a veteran sports reporter, but I did it enough and supervised others who had to do it that I know the trenches. Yes, there is good stuff being done out there, but even more so on sports (and lord knows, it can get bad on the "government" side too) we tend to suck the teat of the hand that feeds us (no letters, please; I meant to write it that way).

So the intrepid sports editor facing that nest of fanlings he or she desperately wants to attract away from the more established fan sites (ones that tend to have gotten the idea of online social communities early) is left with what? Reporting? OMG.

Because now, no matter how good your reporter is, in fact the better she is, the more she's likely to piss off someone in the home office. Go find a DVD of "The Paper," for instance, and watch how Penn State's sports department ostracizes a reporter who takes it on her own initiative to actually go get a story instead of waiting to have it handed to her or have it "cleared." ("We don't do things that way" (not an exact quote, but close) is the pompous pronouncement she says she got from the SID's sports information director's office.)

So, at a time when staffs have been cut sharply -- even in sports -- and now that you don't have the eye candy, do you leave your staffing as is and hope he, she or they come up with the occasional nugget and can outwrite the hell out of the competition? (The Don Quixote approach.)

Do you assign another staffer as the sacrificial lamb, throwing caution (and deference to the SID) to the wind and use that person to go track the stories and those players and coaches down outside their protective cocoons? The reporter doing this is likely to have limited shelf life before he or she is effectively cut off, so you'll probably have to rotate people through -- and of course, there's always the chance the offended parties could cut your whole organization off.

In short, in an era when there is all this talk about pay for content, we have here a budding petri dish in which to examine this idea of value. How do you react and what really is your value proposition when your main source politely tells you to get lost and take your tinsel with you? Oh, and when what's left is being done in decent measure by many of your competitors?

Sports, and the legal ability to take control of the event-related news, just highlights these challenges in an online world. Don't get too smug, Mr. or Ms. City Hall or Statehouse reporter. Yeah, the pols can't throw you out or keep you from recording. But they can ignore you, and they increasingly are with blogs, Facebook, digital governance initiatives, etc. But we're the only ones who can go beyond that surface feed of the City Council meeting and make it make sense, put it in some context, you say? OK, do it, but just like on the sports beat, too often we remain tightly tied to the hands that feed us. (Go tally up sometime the amount coming from press releases, government reports, police blotters, etc.)

"But no one loves us anymore, and they should, because we do this vital public service," goes the cry. Reality check -- most of them, and that includes the public, never loved us. They tolerated us because we were the only or one of the few games in town. But now, in the digital age, when everyone is a publisher and getting that eye candy and finding that other "unique" content is more important than ever, your suppliers are cutting you off. How will you respond?

Leave it to sports - and the SEC, it's greed on full display - to nicely frame things.

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*The AP reports that SEC spokesman Charles Bloom "said changes could be made to the 72-hour window, the ban of online video and the definition of an event that currently includes practices and news conferences. He said the league had received complaints from 35-40 news outlets."

UPDATE: The Greenville News' take on all this. Legislators are dismayed. Discussion at the GamecockCentral site.

Further: Came across this wonderful speech by the editor-in-chief at Reuters basically telling the Olympic folks in June that it's a new-media world for them and their rights deals, too. The SEC might want to pass this around HQ.

The Tampa Trib also weighs in with thoughts that fans with their multimedia cell phones might be the biggest threat. Prediction on my part: Before long we will see "leave your cell phone at the door" policies attempted. That should be fun.

The Tuscaloosa News had one of the first stories and has a PDF (6 Mb) of the draft policy.

Here is the SEC's revised policy (PDF). One of its main points appears to be allowing media outlets to have a video player fed from the SEC.
Some other points:

• The new policy defines an "event" only as a game, instead of including practices and news conferences, as the original did.
• No longer restricts access to full-time employees (recognizing that many operations use stringers, freelancers, etc.)
• Media must use the broadcast feed for video, if one is provided. Clips from that feed, limited to three minutes can be used up to seven days, instead of the previous 72 hours. There is no time restriction on video the media outlet shoots itself. The video also can be used for one online simulcast.
  
• However, here's the kicker: None of the simulcasts may be archived. And the video can be used only for "television" newscasts. Everyone else - papers, fan sites, etc., has to make a separate agreement with the SEC for Internet use, using that player mentioned above. That goes for any digital device. The feed is free, but let's just say I'm uneasy when any one entity controls everything. What about that disputed call for which the broadcast feed might have been out of position, but the TV station's (or these days, newspaper's) videographer had the perfect view? I suppose the outlet could sell the video to the SEC, but it still loses control.
• Here's the odd wording of the day: "Still photographs of the Event (including Bearer Generated Photographs) may be posted on the internet only in connection with and as part of regular print news coverage, including internet print news coverage." Ineternet print news coverage? What the heck is that?
• There's also wording that makes clear local news shops can distribute photos to "accredited media agencies" - a big plus for the AP and other services.

The revised policy does not include the ticket wording that may cause heartburn for many cell phone-equipped fans. I assume that's proceeding as it was in the original. On the Buzz Manager blog, Associate Commissioner for Media Relations Charles Bloom says that when it comes to social media, video is the primary thing the conference will crack down on -- that it doesn't intend to hinder Twitter, Facebook entries or photos. (Thanks Bryan Murley for the outpoint.)