Monthly Archives: September 2007

Twelve things journalists can do to save journalism

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Howard Owens

Begin with this premise: Newspaper journalism is structured around the packaged goods nature of news on print.

We have developed “news judgement” (how important a story is) based on our need to order news within the confines of a certain package size and design.

We developed inverted pyramids both to fit wire service needs and because the nature of the print package sometimes required stories to jump, so we wanted to get the news up top.

We developed certain professional standards related to the content of the story because with mass production, we essentially had only one chance to get the story right. We had to put a premium on accuracy and fair mindedness.

Because we had to reproduce the same package every day at a specific time, we developed highly structured organizations full of rules and rulers.

Because our product was write once, read everywhere, it was essential for us to acquire mass appeal, meaning we had to determine what the news was with little input from individual readers. Editors made decisions based on training and experience with the goal of producing a package that appealed to as many people as possible at one time.
Digital, distributed media, of course, changes all that. The new rules of the game are:

  • The user is in control. They decided what, when, why, where and how to consume media.
  • Users aren’t interested in our deadlines and desire to make sure we have the full story before publishing what we know. They want to know what we know when we know it. They want their news now.
  • People want to participate. They want to talk back. They want to add to our stories, correct us and just spout off as need be with their own opinions.

We have decades and decades invested in doing things based on old rules. Now, the rules have changed, and newsrooms need to change as well. We need new attitudes and new cultures. This will only happen if individual journalists put forward the effort to change their minds about what their jobs are and how they do them

Here are twelve things journalist can do to help us recreate journalism for the 21st Century.

  • Become a blogger. By this, I don’t necessarily mean “start a blog,” but that is never a bad idea. More importantly, become an avid blog reader. Blogs should be a daily routine for every dedicated journalist. They should read every blog related to their beats. They should read blogs about their own interests and hobbies. They should read blogs about their profession. To get blogging is to get how things have changed.
  • Become a producer. Pick up a digital recorder, a point-and-shoot camera or a video camera and start producing content beyond text. Do this as part of your job, fine, or do it on your personal time. The goal is to understand DIY. Post stuff on YouTube, Flickr or any number of other UGC sites.
  • Participate. As you read blogs, leave comments. If your newspaper.com has comments on stories, read the comments and add your own. Become known as somebody who converses on the Internet.
  • Build a web site. It will greatly expand your mind about how the web works if you go a bit beyond just setting up an account on Blogger or WordPress. Learn a little HTML. Better yet, learn some PHP, Cold Fusion, JavaScript or other web development language. You should own your own domain, anyway.
  • Become web literate. You should know what Flash is, and how it differs from AJAX. You should know the meaning of things like HTML, RSS, XML, IP, HTTP and FTP. You should understand at least how people use applications and tools to build web sites. You should know the potential and the limitations of each.
  • Use RSS. You need an RSS reader and lots of RSS feeds to consume. This will help you better grok distributed media.
  • Shop online. Part of your goal is to become immersed in the digital lifestyle. You will learn stuff about the digital life if you shop on Amazon, Ebay and other ecommerce sites. As you do, think about how these sites work and why they’re set up as they are.
  • Buy mobile devices. Get a video iPod. Get a smart phone (an iPhone, Treo, Helio Ocean or Nokia N-series are all good places to start). Learn about distributed, take-it with-you-anywhere content. Buy a laptop and tap into some free wi-fi while you’re out and about. Learn what digital life is like when you’re not shackled to a desktop machine.
  • Become an avid consumer of digital content. Watch videos on YouTube. Download video and audio podcasts (take them with you on your iPod). Visit the best newspaper sites in the world and watch what they’re doing. Turn on your TV less and your computer more.
  • Be a learner. Technology and culture is changing fast. You can’t keep up unless you’re dedicated to learning. I love this quote from Eric Hoffer because it is so appropriate to what our industry is going through now: “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
  • Talk about what you’re learning with your co-workers. Be a change agent. Get other journalists excited about the new digital communication/media tools.
  • Finally, read Journalism 2.0 (PDF) by Mark Briggs. You’ll learn about the stuff covered above and how it is changing modern journalism. Brigg’s book is the best primer on the topic you will find.

Quality journalism, and the news organizations that finance it, needs individual journalists to become personally responsible for their own role in changing newsroom cultures and practices. The smartest publishers with the greatest strategic plans (even if they had bottomless buckets of cash to execute on all the best ideas) can’t save news organizations without the concerted support of individual journalists.

One last bit of advice: Don’t wait for a boss to tell you to become a learner and an explorer. Your job is just where you collect your paycheck. You career is what you do. Your boss isn’t responsible for your career. You are. Solely. Don’t wait on others to make changes. Start making changes now for your own benefit. It’s great if your employer benefits from your growth, but you will benefit more. Continue reading →

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Another paid content service fading away

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Howard Owens

File this under “content wants to be free:” TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! is moving away from premium services.

Nothing will be shut down; however, people and money (marketing dollars) are moving to other areas of Yahoo. The company will focus on free content over premium services, which are not performing well (music subscription sales in particular are said to be lagging).

While I applauded NYT’s dismantling of TimesSelect as a paid service, I have thought some premium services make sense, such as WSJ.com and ConsumerReports.com. The nature of the businesses lent themselves to subscription models.

However, if Yahoo! can’t make a go of it selling music online and sees little future in paid content, you have to wonder if eventually free just wins completely. Continue reading →

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Users want control over their devices and their media

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Howard Owens

The drive for users to control their personal media experience is relentless.

Consider the iPhone — despite Apple’s every efforts to control user experience, people are hacking it and customizing it. Here’s a good video from David Pogue on how to hack your iPhone.

Apple is fighting back, unfortunately, with software updates, and as TechCrunch points out, Steve Jobs needs to take his own advice and “think different” rather than aspire to a telecomm command and control model.

Because, as he has so elegantly demonstrated with the iPhone, these devices are finally becoming little computers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that consumers will expect them to act like computers. They will want to modify them to their exact, quirky predilections. They will want to use them any way they want, as a general-purpose device.

… You don’t ask Apple permission to download software off the Web for your Mac. And you would never agree to buy a laptop that only worked with only one broadband provider. Why should the iPhone be any different?

As this NYT blog post points out, Apple is fighting a losing battle against customization.

Since the iPhone is a very sleek, capable handheld computer, people are going to want to run programs on it. They are going to want to hack and see what they can build. It’s a law of nature. And Apple might as well be fighting gravity.

…

Apple essentially has two choices. Either it exposes most of the iPhone’s capabilities to developers. Or it will have to gird for an ever escalating war in which it will have to send ever more electronic brick-bombs to its best customers who don’t follow its strict rules.

It is foolish for any company to think that command and control is a long-term winning strategy.

And what does this have to do with the newspaper.com world? Go back to my posts on personal journalism and campfire media. All of the power now resides with the end user. The sooner newspaper organizations accept that fact, the quicker we will be successful.

We need to be organizing our news gathering and dissemination operations around the power of the end user, not the old command and control model of the editor. The modern news operation is participatory and open. People talk with people, not at them. Digital devices have created if not the expectation of a personal experience with media, at least end result that a personal experience resonates at a higher frequency with users. Continue reading →

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GateHouse Media adopts Drupal as secondary development platform

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Howard Owens

Steve Yelvington says “it’s not about the technology.”

He’s right, of course.

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is that to some extent, technology is a commodity.

What I mean by that if you laid out a web site strategy, chances are every piece of technology you would need — a CMS, participation tools, multimedia — already exists, and it’s available for free.

Why write code from scratch when you can download everything you need all ready to install?

At GateHouse Media, we have two online businesses to run. We have our core, enterprise business (meaning the primary newspaper.com) and we have lots of side projects that we want to pursue.

For the core, we use Zope4Media from Zope Corp. For a company the size of GHS, we simply must have enterprise level software that scales to our scope, and the world class development team that Zope Corp delivers. Zope is building great products for us and it’s a great relationship.

We keep Zope very busy developing new tools for Z4M.

That means, of course, that their developers aren’t available to chase down every wild idea we might want to let loose on the web. And for some site ideas, it just makes more sense to run those projects as an independent skunk works.

Recently, we told the handful of developers working for GateHouse that we want them to learn Drupal. This was a significant policy change for us. Our original development policy put the emphasis on developers working in whatever environment they knew best.

After further thought, that simply didn’t make sense. It would be unwieldy to support over the long term multiple and diverse projects written in an alphabet soup of languages.

And what if some project, written by one lone coder, became a big hit, and then that coder left, and nobody else in the company knew either his language or his methodology?

By centralizing on Drupal, we solve that problem. We also tap into a robust open source community, with a lot of newspaper industry support already, and our own developers can more easily share code.

In time, I believe Drupal will give us the ability to more rapidly deploy web sites. My dream is that on a Monday morning, a publisher will call us and say he’s launching a new woman’s magazine in his market and he needs a web site ASAP. And he wants all the bells and whistles, such as user blogs, video and comments. Instead of saying, “We’ll get to that in three or four months,” we’ll be able to say, “Great. We’ll have that up for your launch.” How will we do that? Because we’ll have established a standard Drupal installation for that scope of project, so we’ll make a couple of localized changes and deploy it.

Drupal, with all it’s modules, will allow us to adjust the content strategy for such sites as needed.

The other advantage is that we make better use of the development talent in the company. Only our larger newspapers — and not all of them — have local developers. Our smaller newspapers will never have developers. With everyone working on Drupal projects, we can more readily deploy and support one-off sites for the smaller publications.

If we get to where we need to be (with both Zope and Drupal), we’ll be in a place were we’re innovating around content and advertising ideas instead of trying to invent new technological solutions. We can iterate off of what already exists and move quickly to solve problems and create opportunities.

We’re then treating technology as a commodity and concentrating on what we do best — delivering content to users and results to advertisers. Continue reading →

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We only hire the best

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Howard Owens

Pop on over to Ryan Sholin’s blog. He has some big news. I’m pretty happy about it.

I’m pretty amazed at the team we’re putting together. Continue reading →

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Be local, be unique, but don’t listen to John Dvorak

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Howard Owens

I’m seeing lots of links around the blogosphere to John Dvorak’s column on the state of newspapers.

The column is full of sweeping statements, generalizations and contradictions.

For example, he complains that a search in Google for any hot topic uncovers a bounty of stories that are all the same. Of course, Mr. I’m-Going-to-Lecture-You-on-the-Web fails to provide a link to support his assertion.

If he had, you might have found coverage like this. Follow that link and you’ll find thousands of stories on the same topic, but over the first two screen fulls, you’ll find mostly stories from different writers at different news organizations, and not all from newspapers.

That might be a good thing.

It doesn’t necessarily help newspapers, but if you’re a news junkie, that’s pretty cool. But it also doesn’t support Mr. Dvorak’s claim that they’re all the same AP story.

On the other hand, he thinks newspapers have made a mistake by eliminating foreign reporting jobs. He complains that there are too few reporters these days at the scene of big, breaking stories.

Here’s the contradiction: Either we have bloated news organizations with too many people chasing the same story, or we don’t. Mr. Dvorak seems to want it both ways — don’t carry the coverage everybody else has, but be sure you’re swimming in right school of fish.

In Ventura in 2004, we started a trend by depreciating AP content, so I agree that commodity news is bad for the average newspaper.com, but the fact is, I see damn few newspaper sites trying to limp along on wire content instead of pushing unique, locally produced, original content. Mr. Dvorak states otherwise, but provides no evidence. Me, I’ll direct you to MPNNow.com, Knoxnews.com, SFGate.com … just to pick three, and there are hundreds more.

The fact is, most newspapers still have robust local staffs covering their core markets.

I doubt Mr. Dvorak looked at a single local newspaper site before blasting out his link-baiting column.

That said, he did get one thing right — too many news sites are still, still, relying on just one or two daily updates rather than publishing a continuing flow of news updates (Mr. Dvorak calls it breaking news, but if you’re doing this right — there is nothing breaking about it; it’s just what you do).

One paragraph right out of 16. That’s not a good average.

There’s no doubt our industry faces many challenges, but listening to the kind of tripe Mr. Dvorak is offering up won’t help us solve them. Continue reading →

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Free content isn’t about romanticism; it’s about business

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Howard Owens

Mark Potts seems to confuse the idea that believing paid content models are a bad idea with some sort of romanticism about journalism.

Never mind, that expecting people to pay for general news is, simply put: A bad idea.

Ironically, it’s the journalistic romantics who most often scream, “oh content is worth something! People should pay for it, damn it!”

It reminds me of the homeless man on the street corner asking passersby for spare change. He has no more leverage over their pocketbooks than the journalists whining about free content. They used to say, “You can’t get blood from a turnip.” You can’t pry open a pocketbook that is determined to stay closed, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.

Wishing has never made for good business plans.

Look, it’s a tough reality, but either we figure out how to make our online revenue through advertising or we’re screwed. Paid content is just not an alternative. Mr. Potts sites examples of seemingly successful paid content sites, but all prove how hard it is to make paid content work, because all are specialized verticals with little competition (possible exception, ESPN, and I question the level of their success). They are also sites that are national in scope.

There is no evidence that local online news drives the kind of broad based passion needed to convince substantial numbers of people to subscribe it.

Sure, people subscribe to the print edition in substantial numbers, but as we’ve discussed before, they’re really only paying for delivery, not the content. Users do pay for delivery online, just not to the newspaper company. They pay it their broadband provider.

Like Mr. Potts, journalism long ago lost it’s romantic grip on my soul. To me, this is a simple business calculation.

Previously: Reasons why paid content is a bad idea Continue reading →

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On the web, brands mean less than you might think

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Howard Owens

Steve Safran, writing about the predictable demise of TimesSelect, has this to say about news brands:

But here’s another conclusion: we think our brands are bigger than they really are.

This is a harder one to accept. But I have to tell you that nearly every news outlet believes they are the brand in their area for news. And they can’t all be. Or maybe they are — and it’s not news that people are looking for online. Does it matter if you’re the brand for news when I’m searching for reliable restaurant listings?

Times Select believed that people would pay for its writers because it is “The Times.� CNN believed people would subscribe to its video service because it’s “CNN.� This is no different from stations and newspapers believing that people will visit their sites because they are “the news channel� or they have “the brand� for trust. The fact is that the information rules.

This is something I’ve been spending a little time thinking about recently, but in a different way.

I’m starting to think that the success of brands such as Google, Amazon and Ebay really mask the weakness of online brands.

These sites are successful not only because they have cool names and cool domains, that are also exceptionally useful. In the end, the web is all about utility. People will come to your site if it suits their needs. If not, another site is a mere click away.

If a competitor ever really did manage to build a truly better search engine or a better ecommerce site, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google and Amazon started losing market share precipitously. Either of those giants getting beat at their own game is highly unlikely, but it’s a mistake to think that it is brand that sustains their advantage.

Look at how quickly AOL and Yahoo collapsed. Both in their day seemed like strong unbeatable brands. They were undone by better functionality from competitors.

On the web, it’s a mistake, I think, to rely on brand. Brand, in fact, may be absolutely meaningless. What is more important is A) utility; B) an easy to remember and type domain name. Get those things right and success is much easier to obtain.

Unfortunately for most MSM sites, they still don’t have the utility part down right. Continue reading →

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Bob Cauthorn and CityTools

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Howard Owens

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Bob Cauthorn speak twice. Both times, I learned stuff.

The first time was in 2002 or 2003 at USC and Cauthorn convinced me to think about online advertising from the small business owner perspective, which remains quite different from how most advertising sales managers think about advertising.

The second time was this past Saturday in Phoenix and Cauthorn had me looking at some industry trends in a different light — not pretty, but not without hope. What he shared has already become a part of my standard strategy presentation.

Robert Niles has an interesting Q&A with Bob. Most of it is about his new CityTools platform.

It’s an interesting concept, and I like the general thrust of creating new syndication channels, but even though he first demo’d it for me several months ago, I still don’t grok it. I think I’m still not sure it will get critical mass to be really useful, though his growing emphasis on looking outside the newspaper business for early adapters makes sense.

Bob is especially geeked out about the new multilingual aspect of CityTools. That could be a competitive advantage, but I’m still wondering if multilingual people really want to get news in all the languages they speak, especially if some of those translations are automatic (see corrective message from Bob Cauthorn below).

There’s no doubt Bob is smarter than me, so whatever I’m missing about this must be my own fault. It certainly doesn’t help that I speak only one language. I certainly want to keep an eye on his experiment and see if it really does lead to something.

UPDATE:Â Bob sends along this correction … I apologize for the false assumption:

… just to be clear, stories are posted in their native languages as written by humans (often media sources in the case of shared news– think multilingual digg).

We DO use machine translation for some one word prompts while prototyping, but the we go back and have humans refine the prompts too. NO stories are machine translated. And because we go back over the prompts eventually everything is human translated.

Continue reading →

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LR reports Google doesn’t link to local original story

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Howard Owens

If the Google-AP deal means that national and international stories favor the AP site in the Google News search, that’s OK. Those stories never meant much for local news sites anyway.

But if Google is serving up local news stories on top of the original local-market story, that’s a problem. According to this Lost Remote post, that appears to be the case.

Local news sites should raise a ruckus with AP. Continue reading →

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