The Editorialiste

The squishiness of digital reader satisfaction.

2012-01-19T14:13:00.004-05:00

For some reason, when a product goes digital, we quickly forget that real people use it.

We become focused instead on traffic metrics: how many pageviews did we get? Did we increase our unique users? What's our average duration?

And then we use these as a proxy for how satisfied our readers are.

Instead of running the numbers, two questions we should ask ourselves:

1.) Would I be happy with this publication? (What would I fix?)

2.) Are my readers happy with this publication? (What would they change?)

Don't try to read the data tea leaves for emotion. Just ask.

On building a publication from scratch.

2012-01-18T11:11:00.000-05:00

Building a publication from scratch -- scaling it so that there's regular content, and then regular good content, and then regular original content, and then increasingly new and different kinds of regular original content, is very much like a game of Jenga in reverse.

Add a piece. Add another. And another. Ever higher you go.

Don't topple the tower.

On (finally, incredibly) paying for news online.

2011-12-31T17:26:00.003-05:00

I just subscribed to a newspaper for the first time in my life. I'm a journalist, but a young one, and so have until now been able to get my news for free, on the web. (Fun fact: I have paid for exactly two copies of a newspaper in my life: one for each journalism degree, as required by a professor for class.) As paywalls are slowly but finally erected, my hand is forced. In this case, for the New York Times.

A few thoughts as I offer my credit card number to the news gods:

1.) This is an especially difficult transition for anyone who could be called a "Millennial," since we've never paid for news.

2.) The value proposition is also challenging because advertisements remain all over the site. Online users have been taught that payment for a website often allows for a tradeoff in the amount of ads. This is not the case here.

3.) In the New York Times' case, the payment structure is, in a word, ridiculous. (If you're unfamiliar: $15 per month [$195 per year] for website + smartphone app, $20 per month [$240 per year] for website + tablet app, $35 per month [$455 per year] for website + tablet + smartphone apps.) Make no mistake: I'm not harping on the sticker price, I'm complaining about how these products are packaged. How much does high-quality journalism actually cost? How much does app development for each platform really cost? Bundle pricing understandably masks this, but the NYT's particular structure takes the representative costs way out of proportion to the end user. (Do apps really cost more than high-quality journalism? They do according to the structure outlined above. To the reader, it's an a la carte menu devised by Tim Burton, as perplexing as a medical insurance bill.) Even without comparing these prices to those of other newspapers -- let's assume, for argument's sake, that the NYT is unique and irreplaceable, kind of like The New Yorker -- it just doesn't add up to the consumer. Yes, it's reasonable to charge extra for multiple ways to view the content, since each platform costs money to maintain. But this pricing structure makes it appear as though NYT is trying to penalize the reader for being technologically savvy. It's unbecoming.

4.) Another thing with regard to the NYT: all but the "all access" digital subscriptions don't allow a family member access. This is malarkey. If I subscribe to the print newspaper, I can share it with everyone in my household. Call it the "kitchen table" concept. This should be the same digitally. There's no reason my wife should pay full price for the NYT if I subscribe, and every method I could use to get around this (having her use my computer; sharing my login information) creates a road that NYT can't monetize. NYT bean counters: get smart and adjust the prices to align with actual use cases, or risk losing money like record companies did in the Napster era when they moved to block, instead of reasonably monetize, the ways users were using their content.

5.) Paywalls spell trouble for many newspapers, and I expect to see consolidation in the industry accelerate. I no longer live in New York, but I'm more willing to pay for NYT than the Philadelphia Inquirer online. I wish I could get both. Most people will only have the time to read, and be willing to pay for, one daily newspaper. How will the cards fall? To survive, regional papers will need to wrestle potential digital readers in their region away from national brands like NYT, WSJ, etc. with quality content and products -- good enough to be an alternative to the above marquee brands -- or face apathy. (A point for further exploration: regional daily papers who pursued the "local only" strategy, such as the Inquirer, will be forced to price themselves to complement a daily national news subscription, e.g. the New York Times, to survive -- or rebuild their diminished national and foreign desks to be good enough to compete for a single daily subscription.) Similarly, the NYT will, as most have predicted, lose its occasional readers. The era of "filter failure" is rapidly coming to a close as paywalls go up. Which news brands will readers choose when they are forced to pay for just one?

6.) Corollary to the above: the wild card here is the always-free websites, from the reblog-happy Huffington Post to other sites like TheAtlantic.com or those for which I work. Do those sites benefit from paywalls going up? In a sense, yes, because occasional readers of NYT et. al. will find their news elsewhere, where it's free. On the other hand, the affinity of those readers is low -- not a good foundation on which to build a readership against which to sell ads, from a publication's perspective.

Online journalism needs '20 percent time.'

2011-12-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I ask myself if there's really any creativity left in online journalism.

Let's face it: innovation in online publishing is awfully hard to come by these days. It may be because we're so busy looking at everyone else's work 24/7 that we can't wall the assault off and think for ourselves. But it may also be because we are, in this endless and boundless news cycle, without the structure that forces us to think.

In the magazine world, the format dictates idea incubation. A lead time and a firm publication date helps drive hard but reasonable deadlines. The inability to publish sooner insulates the a person's ideas from escaping unbaked. The structure forces them to think; the same applies to broadcast television and radio.

But online, the beta culture that persistently urges to get-it-up-right-now-and-move-on reinforces a reactive, not proactive, stance. Investigative journalism, pensive features and other hallmarks of quality content are, like the process of drug withdrawal, difficult to confront when the easy way out presents itself at every turn, every second.

The "hair of the dog" would not exist without the hangover; shoddy -- OK, perhaps just superficial -- journalism would not be so pervasive if it were more difficult to publish it. The burden then rests entirely on an editor's shoulders to build this structure, often in direct opposition to the data-driven interests of his superiors.

Google made headlines early in its corporate life by publicizing that it gave engineers "20 percent time" -- that is, one day a week to work on whatever the hell they wanted, so long as it would benefit the company in some abstract way.

Why don't we have this at media companies?

For an industry that must reinvent itself constantly, I'm kind of baffled by this. Sure, editorial meetings serve as a sort of forced innovation, but they only provide narrow results: find a new story for this, a surprising source, a new theme for a forthcoming issue. Ideas about coverage get bounced around, but no one's rethinking how the business works.

Online, where editorial people need to find a new feature and product people need to rethink how they present content and engineers need to rethink how they build the systems that lie beneath, this matters. Media companies can't just give their engineers a day to daydream; they need to do the same with marketing, editorial, communications, product and sales teams.

Because if you're not innovating, you're dying. And too many publications are already dead.

The death of learning in journalism.

2011-12-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

I wish I had a mentor. Several of them, really.

Sure, I've got an editor, and he's swell. But he's only one guy, with one career's worth of insights. In our 21st century-style distributed workforce, built largely upon the backs of freelancers around the globe, there's one key thing that's missing: a heirarchy of learning.

I'm not alone. The problem also manifests itself during the hiring process: leaning ever more heavily on freelancers, media outlets -- and editors, specifically -- find themselves facing a chicken-or-egg scenario where they need talented writers but can't find them.

How is this, you ask? There are a ton of freelancers out there ready and willing to work; that's true. But quality -- in writing technique, in work ethic, in creativity -- is rarer than you might think, and no modern editor seems to have the time to teach the freelancer, cultivate that quality and grow a talent pool. Meanwhile, there are a ton of already-talented journalists in the industry, but no editor wants to take the headcount lump to hire them away from another publication.

From a writer's point of view, journalism schools have become a near-requirement. "You can learn on the job," a seasoned journalist might crow when met with the suggestion that a young journalist seeks to attend j-school. But the truth is, you can't. Media companies are willingly outsourcing training to journalism schools, and the bill is footed by the eventual employee his- or herself. (I would know; I have the staggering loan bills to prove it.)

Do we really think all those bloggers are increasing their knowledge with each passing year, or merely refining what they've already got on tap? We are all stuck moving sideways. Few are climbing, mentally speaking.

The problem persists in the editor's chair. I've always been an eager learner, and I devour information wherever I can find it. But I often feel as though I can't devour it fast enough.

In the online world, at least, all outlets are on the same level. Magazines compete with newspapers compete with startups. But the smaller the outlet, the less knowledge that's accessible. You can watch competing publications' work from afar, but you can't really know how things tick unless you sit down and ask them to lunch. (Which, of course, they don't have time to do. Because we're all overworked in this new paradigm.) This was something that media companies used to provide internally. Now the chain of knowledge has been broken in so many places that there's barely enough there to grab.

The old joke is that you should put a line in for "media consulting" when you're an unemployed journalist. The truth is, each working editor and freelancer could really benefit from tapping that knowledge. Perhaps consultants should consult individuals, not corporations.

Disclosure: this is a cop-out.

2011-12-22T09:40:00.001-05:00

I spotted the following disclaimer on Mashable this morning:

"Mashable Op-Ed: This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication."

A fine warning, if the author was a contributor who had nothing to do with Mashable. Except the post I saw it used on was written by none other than Mashable's editor-in-chief, Lance Ulanoff. In other words, the guy who is hired to speak for the publication.

If Lance's opinions aren't Mashable's -- which is fine, Lance is an individual -- then who, exactly, speaks for the publication? Corporate communications?

(This reminds me of all those Twitter accounts with the disclosure, "The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer." Clearly! Does any reasonable person really believe that one small cog in the machine really speaks for the 25,000-employee-strong organization?)

In an age where it's acceptable to speak for oneself and not one's publication, does the publication still have a viewpoint?

Letting the cables sleep.

2011-12-21T09:16:00.001-05:00

If you've been wondering why I've been so lax in updating this blog, here are my reasons. (See also, from August: "Jobs you'll have as an editor.") I promise I'll get back on the horse with haste.

The Internet's Valley of Death: Expectation

2011-11-30T16:48:00.001-05:00

We all say that the Internet is full of poor journalism, bad (or none!) copy editing and churnalism at every turn. Yet few of us as consumers are willing to change that. In fact, we indulge it.

Yet when there's a terribly short or sensational or just plain wrong news article or blog post or the like, we wrinkle our nose. Some of us even leave nasty comments about the lack of quality of the work.

And yet this product -- this website, this blog -- was free to consume. Sure, it has ads, but it's pretty clear that a bunch of MPUs aren't going to pay the full-time salaries of all the writers, editors, product managers and developers to meet this expectation of quality. And too often, it results in a hostile user experience to maximize the profits, which irritated readers are all too willing to point out.

I hear you, reader. But it's akin to seeking Hermes levels of customer service in a Wal-Mart. Good luck, honey. You get what you pay for.

There is a tremendous disconnect in consumers between what they get and what they pay for. The dots don't connect. It's not their fault; this is what I'd call a B2B problem that ought not involve the C -- something a business needs to figure out for itself, and not blame the customer for acting naturally.

Still, the rift exists. We consume a bunch of low-quality news, and we dislike or hate it. But we keep doing it. And we don't visit the websites of those who practice high-quality news -- even if a paywall hasn't been implemented. Publishers with print editions use them as an anchor; their high-dollar advertisements and lead sales drum up enough revenue to shore up the online edition's inadequacies, even if the latter is in the black. The margins on the former are high enough to guarantee more than the minimum amount of quality for the latter.

But if you're only an online publisher, and your products are all free (albeit ad-supported, and any other business model you've rigged), well, good luck. You can't afford high quality content because your users aren't paying enough.

This isn't the consumer's problem; as with any product, companies must meet their customers halfway. But I'm not sure I have an answer.

When algorithms go wrong.

2011-11-01T16:54:00.002-04:00

I like to use Philly.com as an occasional product punching bag, it's true.

But sometimes mistakes can be comical.

I give you this right rail module promoting photo galleries of historic Philadelphia:

I know we only have a month left in 2011, guys, but jeez.

The problem with Silicon Valley 'scoops.'

2011-10-20T13:47:00.001-04:00

Foster Kamer demonstrates, as he's wont to do, how scattershot and blind tech blogging in pursuit of pageviews can have a very real impact on the financial markets.

Related: MG Siegler defends the practice while disparaging competitors for doing the same.

Everything that is wrong with online publications.

2011-10-17T12:23:00.002-04:00

OK, not everything. But something that is rampant and unchecked on many esteemed online outlets.

Done right, cross-promotion can be a service to the reader: you're surfacing content that they would also be interested in.

Done wrong, and it's just like those students standing on the sidewalk with clipboards hawking some cause: it makes you cross the street to avoid them, going out of your way to go where you want to go.

I usually use the Huffington Post as the hood ornament on which to hang my criticism, and it would be an appropriate reference here. But they're not alone.

So this time, I highlight the Hollywood Reporter:

This is ridiculous. Every paragraph of this otherwise nice report has a cross-promotional link shouting at me. It's in the same size and typeface as the original article, only screaming at me, bolded and bright red. Worse, only two of the four really has anything to do with the article at hand, about a prominent movie executive's memories of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The rest are just shameless Apple-related plugs for content you already know isn't worth reading. (Because really, would you have run a sidebar to this story in print about Apple products in TV & movies? Really?)

Reading content on the Internet is different than print publications; that much is true. But too many publications embrace the worst habits of the medium.

How To Lose Colleagues And Alienate Employers

2011-09-17T19:47:00.001-04:00

(Background: AOL buys popular tech site TechCrunch for $25 million. Site's founder and mascot Michael Arrington violates ethics rules by starting a venture capital fund to invest in companies the site would cover. Corporate communications snafu ensues. Ends with Arrington fired and staff outraged at his superior, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, for floundering on policy enforcement. Some quit.)

Exhibit A: In a public letter of resignation, columnist Paul Carr throws Arrington's replacement and right-hand man, Erick Schonfeld, under the bus.

What I knew last week, but can only write now, is that while Heather, Mike and other senior editorial staffers were making a stand for the site’s editorial independence from The Huffington Post, Erick cut a side deal with Huffington to guarantee him the top job once Mike was gone. [...]

One of these two men is your new ethical champion, Arianna. The other one is the guy you fired.

Exhibit B: Newly-installed editor-in-chief Erick Schonfeld posts a bitter public retort to Carr's post.

Paul Carr, one of our columnists who was hired for his grandstanding ways, has decided to fall on his own sword and quit very publicly on TechCrunch. I believe this is the second or third time he’s quit in public in the past couple weeks. I keep losing count. He thinks he is somehow being loyal to Mike and standing up for the editorial independence of the site. But he is not. He is just grandstanding.

Exhibit C: Staff writer MG Siegler (publicly) laments the public dispute, takes a shot at his current employer and takes another at a potential one.

I’m just sincerely worried about the state of AOL that they seem to have a total disregard for the actual situation. TechCrunch is a key property and one of the few bright spots in their portfolio. But to them, it’s apparently just numbers.That’s a losing stance. TechCrunch may survive with that stance, but it will not thrive as it has. That’s the CNET stance. Complacency is poison.

(In full disclosure, CNET is owned by the same company I work for.)

Three posts, three journalists, and given enough time, zero with jobs. Not a terribly good way to demonstrate professionalism to industry observers in the face of uncertainty.

How to write like a journalist.

2011-09-07T09:58:00.002-04:00

Want to know how to write like a journalist? Read journalism.

Sounds obvious, but there's really no better way. You don't need to know what a "lede" or a "nut graph" or a "dek" or a "narrative arc" or a "kicker" are if you can internalize the flow of a good news story. Spot news or feature, op/ed or news analysis, the best way to be a better writer is to surround yourself with good writing -- then read it.

Read Associated Press stories each day to internalize hard news. Read stories in a magazine's feature well to internalize a good (or bad!) lede, a narrative arc and how to string together 3,000 words to make them feel like a more fleeting 300. Read weekly columnists to see how they support an argument without venturing off on a book-length tangent.

A good editor can hold your hand on a tour through these examples by breaking down what makes them tick. But he or she can't help you absorb the steps, pivots and leaps that make good prose memorable.

It only comes with practice. And it starts with reading.

Why journalists shouldn't join Twitter.

2011-09-02T09:15:00.008-04:00

Well, some of them.

Fox 29 Philadelphia chief meteorologist John Bolaris reports:

(Click to enlarge.)

I doubt this is in compliance with News Corporation's social media policy.

Update: Philly.com's Dave Merrell makes a sound suggestion urging for pre-tweet troll education. I agree; many news types aren't used to managing their own reader mailbag, much less in real time.

Jobs you'll have as an editor.

2011-08-31T20:08:00.004-04:00

The job title and role of "editor" often means much more than its literal definition.

A list of jobs you might have while you're editing a publication:

Intern
Writer
Reporter
Copy Editor
Assignment Editor
Photo Editor
Special Projects Editor
Researcher
Administrative assistant
Sales account executive
Product manager
UX designer
Creative director
Customer support specialist
"Evangelist"
Marketer
Communications director
Audience acquisition specialist
Social media coordinator
Event planner

Call it a different kind of journalism (perhaps publishing) education. But when you're responsible for keeping your ad pages (or pageviews, or unique users) up, you'll find yourself wearing more and more caps in an effort to meet your goals.

How Much Money Does An Editor Make? (2011 Edition)

2011-08-12T09:50:00.002-04:00

Folio Magazine has released its 2011 salary report for editorial folk, from editorial directors to editors-in-chief to senior editors and managing editors.

It breaks down salary by position as well as geography.

Some highlights:

Averages in New York City: EIC $109,000; Executive Ed $102,000; Managing Ed. $82,000.
There's a huge gender disparity: $14K for managing, $8K for executive and a whopping $22K for EIC.
If you're not in NYC, you're looking at more than $20,000 less for the above roles.
You can work 25% more during the week, but it won't bring in much more at the lower levels. If you're EIC, it's all the difference.
The bigger the company, the better the salary.
A graduate degree (of any kind, not just journalism) nets you an additional $5-8K per year. It's unclear whether these people just ask for more (loan pressure!) in the first place, though.

Plus some qualitative feedback:

EIC: Feelings of 'over-worked, under-appreciated' and under-compensated.
Exec. Ed: Strain of fewer staffers, more work. Assignments going on uncompleted. Acting as their own HR departments.
Managing Ed: Changing technology is screwing up copy flow. Small teams mean change is unavoidably disruptive. And, above all, pressure to publish "redundant" and "dumb" content.

Why You Didn't Get That Freelance Writing Gig.

2011-08-09T14:22:00.008-04:00

This year, I've put up (and filled) several job postings looking for freelance writers.

Aside from drive-by applications -- you know, the kind that didn't even refer to the job at hand, and just basically throw their name into the ring without any justification -- the most frustrating responses I've received were those who in so many words said, "I can write whatever you want!"

This is not a reassuring statement.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean what you might think.

Coming up in the editorial ranks, I was told that a journalist should specialize. "You have a better chance at a job," my elders said.

This frustrated me, because I have the curiosity of a journalist -- meaning I don't see the world divided into "Things I won't write about" and "Things I will." Couture, computers or cloture, I'll write about it. Because I like learning. (This is probably why I ended up being an editor; I prefer to be a generalist.)

I suspect many journalists carry the same sentiment. But to get a specific gig, you need to show proof that you can write about a specific topic. Catch-22: so what's an intrepid writer to do?

First: recognize that showing specific proof doesn't preclude those who have no experience in that area. It's OK to be a generalist -- I repeat, it's OK to be a generalist --but you need to show me, the editor, that you can handle it.

Too many applicants over the years offered what amounted to "writing services" -- that is, whether its press releases or physics, they can handle it. And that may be the case, but it requires a tremendous leap of faith from the part of the editor, because there's no way for me to connect the dots.

Worse: inevitably, given a large enough volume of applicants, you'll get washed away by those who have better demonstrated that they're a good fit.

It's nothing personal. It's merely the quickest way to cut down the noise and get the slot filled.

It is surprising that so many professional storytellers fail to tell their own story adequately -- or for that matter, recognize that gap and attempt to bridge it.

Don't have any relevant clips to show? Write something up as an example. (This is why editors occasionally prompt applicants for example/test clips for the site in question; they don't want free work, they want reassurance.)

My worry as an editor is not that you can't put sentences together; I can figure that out pretty quick. It's that you can't approach a topic with enough rigor to do it justice. That's why showing me clips on a completely unrelated subject are only 50 percent useful: they help me determine competency, but they don't help me ascertain relevancy.

So if you're a generalist, don't fret. There's nothing wrong with it, and I'm firmly in the camp that you're better off in the long run because your potential client base is far wider.

On the other hand, you need to work harder than a specialist during that crucial application period to show you've got the right stuff. To do so, you need to frame your talents in a way that can be digested for the job in question. (It's what a cover letter is supposed to do, but I don't know anyone who bothers with such formalities anymore.)

And if you're unclear on the job in question -- I've seen some pretty slapdash job postings in my day, let me tell you -- ask more questions.

It's not that you're not up to the gig. You're just not telling the right story.

Five things I learned from Brian Lam.

2011-06-22T18:38:00.008-04:00

Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam left his post today after five years. I think he gets a lot of attention because he helms the web's most distinct tech site, but the chatter about his role over the years overshadows his talents in shaping a publication's voice.

Five things I learned, or relearned, watching him as a contemporary working in the same space:

Hustle. He'll try new editorial features, give his writers room to cover topics they love, go for the mainstream jugular and not apologize. And he'll never spend an ounce of Arringtonesque energy hyping it.
Public relations reps are not there to help you. There's a reason Brian always flipped over his badge at the Consumer Electronics Show: he was working.
Upend conventional wisdom. He hires nobodies and molds them instead of blows cash on big names. Buy low, sell high. He's bold, but he's not reckless.
Don't lose your soul. Brian always had my respect because he never appeared chained to his laptop. He knew when to unplug and head to the water's edge. Work to live, don't live to work. It's a West Coast lesson some of us East Coasters ought to learn.
The brand matters more than its parts. He's easily accessible, but he shuns the spotlight. (See CES anecdote, above.) He keeps his life private, but his opinions widely available. He puts his writers in front of him, prioritizes a narrative where necessary, defends his employer's efforts, doesn't hedge around the truth, and treats everyone equally regardless of title. It's a very old school way of working, but he's managed to demonstrate it in a very new school setting.

Break away from the news cycle.

2011-06-14T18:55:00.004-04:00

The news cycle is a drug.

It's what every journalist pines for, to some degree. We're all addicted to it a little -- it's why we're in this business. But when we all end up running the same race, like hamsters in a massive wheel, the cold hard fact is this: only one person wins a race. The rest lose, exhausted.

Do readers a favor: ask yourself -- really, ask yourself -- if you're in the business of breaking news.

If you are, best of luck (and a double espresso).

If you're not, stop trying to be. You're doing a disservice to readers by trying to break news and failing -- either by speed or quality.

Zig instead of zag. Rediscover your publication's mission. (Ask yourself if it even has one.) Do what you, not others, do best.

Win hearts. Win minds. (And maybe profits.)

P.S. I realize I haven't been keeping up this blog; its mission remains relevant. I plan to spend more time on it.

Why Hamilton Nolan is wrong.

2011-02-23T08:41:00.007-05:00

I love Hamilton Nolan's work. It's always incisive commentary on the media world, and more often than not, I find myself nodding along in agreement as I read one of his acute -- and accurate -- digs against mainstream media, whatever that means today.

Today, I rarely, but respectfully, disagree.

Nolan writes today that, simply, "Honorifics should be banned." You know, the "Mr." and "Mrs." and all those titles that are used most frequently in national newspapers of record, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

He writes:

We're the first to stand up and say that the honorifics-using NYT and WSJ are much, much better newspapers than the plainspoken masses that don't use honorifics.

But they would be better newspapers if they stopped the honorifics, and with the other outdated tropes of journalism that do nothing but throw up an unnecessary wall of language between the reader and what the newspaper is trying to communicate.

Reporters know damn well that all of the little tricks they use to make their stories sound authoritative are exactly that—tricks, which make the news look pleasing to editors but which obscure from the reader exactly how much of reporting is guesswork and summation and inference.

While I agree with the sentiment here -- journalists often try to obfuscate thin reporting with time-honored traditions such as "sources say," and generally attempt to create an air of authority through the tone of their reports -- I disagree with the proposal.

The way I see it, honorifics are indeed used to separate the publication from the readership to create an air of authority. But for those publications that still use them, that "air" -- call it "style" or "tone" or whatever you like -- is essential to the publication's brand.

The brand, of course, trumps everything.

You see, the use of honorifics by local daily tabloid newspapers would indeed be an awkward juxtaposition.

Imagine the following beneath a New York Post headline that read, "AMERICA'S NEXT TOP SEX PERV":

Mr. Jon, a recent guest designer on the reality show "America's Next Top Model," is already serving 59 years to life in prison in California for assaults on seven victims.

A bit passive-aggressive, no?

But the Times and Journal and other similar publications position themselves as papers of record. The official and final say on world events. The kind of proof-read, deliberate document you place into a time capsule -- even though these publications must co-exist and compete with more ephemeral online publications for eyeballs on a day-to-day basis.

My point here is that honorifics in these publications are used to convey the overall publication's tone. They are among an array of tools not to keep a reader at arm's length for the sake of it but to offer a sense of authority consistent with the publication's brand. This is why these publications exist -- for the long-term play.

This is also why Gawker, Nolan's publication, does not use them. Gawker isn't the official on stage -- it's the loud-spoken audience member throwing tomatoes. As with any publication with that kind of tone, using honorifics would create dissonance on the page (well, screen) -- and in this case, would be taken with a dash of sarcasm.

My take? I don't care whether a publication uses honorifics so long as usage is consistent -- even in the sports pages.

So when Nolan says it would be silly to use honorifics in the following sentence -- "Mr. Griffin then dunked on Mr. Mozgov, balls dangling harshly on Mr. Mozgov's chin" -- I'd agree.

But I'd also say the Journal or Times should never print a sentence like that in the first place. It's a conflict of style.

(By the way, the actual Journal wording about this event: "Then, of course, came the dunk—when Clippers rookie Blake Griffin took to the air in Los Angeles with Mr. Mozgov standing near the basket and slammed the ball as if he wasn't there." Sounds about right to me.)

The battle against press release-based news.

2011-02-06T12:08:00.008-05:00

The Atlantic Wire, demonstrating its own growing ability to offer valuable original content, recently ran a piece about Gawker Media founder Nick Denton's reading habits.

While the piece is itself interesting in a voyeuristic, what-does-the-gossip-merchant-read kind of way, what's most notable is Denton's ability to portray his reading habits as a reflection of the publishing business at large.

He says to John Hudson:

I learned the news business in the UK, in which newspaper political coverage is much like cable TV news in the US. Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted -- until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning. You really might as well wait for a weekly like the Economist to tell you what the net position is at the end of the week.

To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it's frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I'd much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you're going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don't pretend you're providing news. That's not news.

Immediately before this excerpt, Denton says, "Journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news."

That might sound surprising from the fellow who publishes Gizmodo and Gawker, both which post endless streams of spokesperson-originated news. But consider that Denton has been pushing for original content since the very beginning. (Exhibit A: Elizabeth Spiers' "Coke - The Perfect Dealer" on a very young Gawker site.)

The difference, in my opinion: he recognizes that limited resources and a 24/7 news cycle require some of this pandering. (One major difficulty of a website: there's no "next issue" on which to wait. Denton can't afford to have everyone off crafting an opus when there are 40 posts to manufacture for eyeballs that are already waiting for them.)

On the other hand, now that Denton's company is growing in size, success and reputation, that's precisely why you see exclusive news scoops and a healthy dose of assigned -- yes, assigned -- feature writing.

Mainstream news organizations got it wrong. It wasn't the aspect of blogs repurposing their original reports that was the threat. It was blogs creating a voice around them, a style, and then building an audience from it.

What big news organizations didn't see coming was that some blogs would gain enough success (and resources, and reputation) to eventually challenge their ability to provide content with value.

Required Reading.

2010-12-29T16:52:00.000-05:00

"The Best Magazine Articles Ever."

Modern reporters read too much news.

2010-04-26T19:39:00.012-04:00

The problem with reporters in the 21st century is that they read too much news.

A big story -- about how California law enforcement officials used a warrant to search the home of a Gizmodo editor for clues about a leaked Apple iPhone prototype -- is making its way around the Internet today.

It's great fodder for many things: First Amendment rights, shield laws, journalistic ethics (paying for scoops), and so forth.

(A small aside: whether you agree with him or not, we ought to thank Gawker Media founder Nick Denton for his attitude and cunning when it comes to operating a media business and showing that "the rules" are just a mirage. Like him or not, the spirit of his efforts should be commended.)

But the constant recycling of watercooler chatter visible from my Twitter perch has reminded me that good ideas are hard to come by.

So very many publications reposted the Gizmodo-iPhone news as soon as it hit.

They did this because:

They want to demonstrate that they're covering a beat thoroughly.
They want to show that they're a source of breaking news.
They want a monopoly on as many readers' eyeballs as possible.
They want to fuel as many clicks as possible, which they believe (wrongly in some cases) will help please advertisers, build brand value and pad paychecks

But very few added any real value to the discussion, and most just did a good job of obscuring the real source of the news: Gizmodo itself.

I wish online publishers could figure out a technological solution to reposting others' content and giving them monetizable credit for it, for both byline and clicks.

(In fact, Gawker Media used to practice an in-house way of doing this: you'd see a story from, say, Lifehacker in the Gizmodo feed, and clicking it would take you right to the Giz story -- no reblogging or content swapping necessary.)

If every publication in the online ecosystem stopped spending valuable resources reblogging each others' content, perhaps they could actually utilize those resources to produce original stories.

Of course, that changes the playing field a bit: outlets such as the New York Times rarely need to "reblog" another publication's content because they have a wealth of reporters at their disposal to ensure readers get their fill on their website; conversely, tiny outlets such as The Business Insider would lose regular attention because they don't have the staff to produce enough original news to sustain a reader on a regular basis.

I understand the value of information exchange on the Internet. I believe it is the web's defining characteristic, and limiting it (such as not linking off to external sites) would be of little use to the greater ecosystem.

But I believe there is too much recycling of information going on -- so much so that the original source doesn't get enough credit, and rebloggers get just enough to continue doing it endlessly.

In other words: it's just too hard to navigate the news.

But I'm not approaching this from a high-horse journalism point of view. I'm simply looking at it from a reader's. It's massively perplexing to suddenly see an endless parade of brief, shallow stories about the same crumb of news.

It fosters no loyalty, as far as I can experience -- only loyalty to who can break news first, which, in the age of Twitter, is a tenuous goal.

Which brings me, long-windedly, to my main point: modern reporters simply read too much news. Their coverage is often clouded -- rather than informed -- by previous coverage of the same topic by other publications.

They fail to approach topics by a new angle.

They fail to ask questions.

They fail to offer value to the reader.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. It has allowed us to be more informed than ever before. (Surely I'm not the only one who has spent hours reading obscure Wikipedia entries for my own edification.)

But it has, in a way, served to stunt a reporter's effectiveness. It's too easy to keep an eye -- two, even -- on rival reporters on the same beat. It's too easy to pursue self-fulfilling scoops that dovetail on previously published scoops.

It's too easy to internalize the way others write.

The way others think.

The way others report.

This kind of thing can veer off into plagiarism, which I believe is easier than ever in the age of copy-and-paste -- no malicious intent necessary.

It can also quickly become inside baseball, with reporters reporting on reporters' reporting. (The press release-fueled gadget beat? Full of this.)

But I also believe it makes for a fairly useless reporter.

I want my reporters to be somewhat aloof. I want them to read up on previous coverage and basic facts about a topic, sure, but I also want them to ignore who wrote it, and when, and who else may be covering the topic.

There's a bit of value in having an informed reporter operate in a vacuum, working disconnected from the news cycle.

Let the editor be their tether to it.

The truth about the price of investigative journalism online

2010-03-05T13:17:00.009-05:00

The folks at The Business Insider went and practiced some true investigative journalism in a story about Facebook.

What they found out: in the current online-only business model, true investigative journalism is unsustainable.

Here are their tweets about the project, via editor-in-chief Henry Blodget:

All right, look, here's the truth about this investigative reporting thing...

Everyone says they want more of it. No more aggregation, please. No more links. No more slideshows. No more picture of Erin Burnett.

Just more good old shoe-leather reporting, like they did in the good old days.

And so we do it!

A good old fashioned shoe-leather investigation. On and off for two years. Wheedling, Cajoling. Secret meetings. Documents. Hush hush.

And we find out some cool stuff! Not Pentagon Papers or Watergate, mind you. But good, secret stuff about the founding of Facebook

And then we have to chat with lawyers: What happens if Facebook sues our asses off? Will we get tossed in Big House for protecting sources?

And then the fact-checking. And the "hey, guys, sorry, we've got this story you're not going to like" call with Facebook. (First of many)

And we have to write and edit the darn thing, which takes, literally, all night (I sh** you not)

And we have to make sure it's correct and fair, because who doesn't want to be fair? I mean, these are just people. And who's perfect?

And because we don't have some massive staff of 8 editors per writer or something (no wonder NYT going bust), this is a tag team effort

So, anyway, we do the investigative reporting thing. And we produce a good story! Interesting, fair, fun (IMHO). Breaks new ground. Etc.

And people like it! (Except for one guy, who says he'd rather watch ice melt than read about Mark Zuckerberg). Kudos. Sense of pride.

And of course we'd love to do three of these a day -- figure out all the bad sh** in the world, get it out there, help people know beans

But the truth is, if we tried to do 3 a day, with our staff, we would DROP DEAD. We'd also go bust. Neither being a happy outcome.

So that means...

We're going to try to give you one of these once in a while. You like reading 'em. And we like making 'em. So it's smiles all around.

AND...

We're ALSO going to keep giving you the great stuff that OTHER sites are doing (hopefully with some helpful commentary attached).

And we're going to give you house porn, and features, and pictures of Erin Burnett. Because, truth be told, you GROOVE on that sh*t!

(And so do we, by the way--we've taken our fearless moral inventory, and we're ready to admit it)

And because, thanks to the Internet, there are THOUSANDS of smart people publishing great stuff. And it would be SILLY not to link to it.

So that's the truth about investigative journalism. It's important. It's great. But it is also fantastically expensive and time-consuming

So there you have it. Online, it's impossible to sustain such investigative journalism, because the budgets just aren't large enough (probably because print is still taking quite a chunk of advertising dollars -- the split isn't helping either side) and thus neither is the staff.

That's the thing about online -- pages need to be made every day. Who's going to turn over pageviews while all your reporters are off doing stories that -- while immensely helpful to your publication's reputation and brand -- eventually don't pay off in terms of pageviews?

Say you get 200,000 pageviews on a great investigative story, but it takes you a solid two weeks (not very long in investigative journalism land) of work to do.

You've given up whatever pageviews you would have made during those two weeks -- and even if you break even, your site has been silent for two weeks. (Unless, of course, you have a big enough staff to do so. Most online-only publications do not.)

See the problem? Investigative journalism is extremely expensive no matter which way you cut it, but it's impossibly expensive for an online publication. When you can get 100,000 pageviews on a photo gallery of Miley Cyrus, and another 100,000 on a post about the Apple iPad -- in the space of two to three days -- why bother with investigative reporting?

Like the newspaper industry as a whole, it's a "public service" that must be subsidized by more profitable, but less glamorous, content.

(Ergo, why Blodget decided to publish a photo gallery with 22 -- yes, twenty-two! -- screenshots of his already-published tweets that can easily be read in chronological order from his Twitter page. Because publishing is a business, and online, pageviews rule.)

A recent Columbia Journalism Review survey noted that magazine websites' editing practices were "slack" and not up to par with their print counterparts.

It's the same problem here: without budget and staff, you simply can't guarantee the same quality.

This is not an online versus print culture clash. This is as simple as balancing your checkbook. If editorial oversight comes at a premium, investigative journalism is simply out of reach for most publications.

To aggregate, or report? On successful online publishing

2009-12-30T10:27:00.023-05:00

If there's one issue online publications have really battled with, it's the teeter-tottering relationship between the creation of original work and the aggregation of third-party content.

For years, most news organizations have operated under the guise that everything in their (newspaper, magazine, website) was original. But hawk-eyed readers would notice the "Associated Press" (or "Hearst" or "Cox" or "AFP" or...) bylines in the newspaper, and note that such content was republished from somewhere else.

The reasons for doing so are many: sometimes it's to fill space in a regional paper without resources; other times it's to ensure broad (Washington, D.C.) or acute (New Haven, Conn.) local coverage without committing costly resources.

The same thing is occurring online, and that's no surprise as the digital medium matures. The problem now is that stories break online, which means they can be republished very, very quickly without clear insight (or regard) as to who originally reported the story.

Online, the struggle remains over how to properly attribute content. (It certainly doesn't help that publications don't establish style rules for this.) But what's really interesting is how websites -- particularly smaller ones -- are filling the gaps.

In an interesting dicussion via Twitter yesterday, Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam and AllThingsD senior editor Peter Kafka exchanged a few questions about building a digital publication around the (expensive, time-consuming, valuable) creation of original content versus the aggregation of (free, quick, with little lasting value) third-party content.

Here's the exchange:

Brian Lam: the net's greatest threat to journalism is not old vs new, its that reporters no longer get as much exposure to new sources in real life.

Peter Kafka: @blam biz problem, not tech. Encourage reporters to walk around, make calls, they will. Reward them for reblogging, they'll do that.

Brian Lam: @pkafka true. but remember, in old media, they rereported stories from scratch that were already written by comp., instead of links. worse!

Peter Kafka: @blam true dat. plenty of old-media was (and is) essentially reblogging. that's my point - not tech, but biz model.

The Editorialiste: @pkafka @blam so how to solve biz model incentive problem? what's the answer?

Brian Lam: @editorialiste I think its a judgement call between aggregation and reporting. and a resource thing. reporting is expensive if done old way.

The very reason this exchange can occur is because of the Internet's link-based economy: now, you can legally, through fair use, reproduce a paragraph or so of someone else's content, so long as you attribute it to them and include a link back to the original work.

Never before was that possible in such a dynamic way: often, newspapers would cite reportage by other papers, but in newsprint, there was no link to help you find it. Similar but worse, broadcast organizations often based their own coverage on original newspaper reports without citing the original source at all.

The exchange also shows that online players -- my peers, since both write for competing publications about technology -- are constantly thinking about the online business model.

Both AllThingsD and Gizmodo stay afloat with some level of reposting third-party content -- sometimes it's a copied quote, link and original analysis; other times it's a rewrite of a scoop first published by another publication. It's a particularly popular thing to do in technology coverage, since so much of it is based on products, and therefore based on nonexclusive press releases.

However, both sites regularly offer original content. In the Wall Street Journal tradition, Kafka often reports on the inner dealings of tech companies. Lam's team publishes tips/scoops on unreleased gadgets with some regularity.

Both offer a mix of original and aggregated content. At the time of writing, Gizmodo counts 15 names on its editorial masthead (plus a regular columnist, plus two interns); AllThingsD counts five names on its editorial team (plus a columnist, plus an intern).

Not all of Gizmodo's 15 are full-time, and many AllThingsD's staff double as full-time reporters for the Wall Street Journal. For both, aggregation is important -- there's simply no way either publication can cover everything quickly and originally.

The problem, of course, is to what degree. Both Brian and Peter make valid points in the conversation above:

How do you stay on top of breaking news if you're always doing original reporting?
How do you become more than a regurgitation mill if you're always rewriting or rereporting third-party content?
And is online reporting really the same as what mainstream media used to do, just more transparent?

As Brian notes above, it's a matter of resources. Online media garnered eyeballs by reposting everything it possibly could -- that's how it got its popularity. With popularity came some degree of money, which allowed for more staffing, which in turn allowed for more original content.

Gizmodo is a great example of this: it first made its name finding everything it could on the web about tech and transformed itself into a portal for the topic. Once it achieved a large audience (and money), it hired more editors to handle the aggregation, while its original team moved into original content.

Now, Gizmodo's become more of a magazine: it's got a cadre of low-level editors working on the day's quick-hit breaking news; it's got several regular columnists offering value through analysis; it's got a couple of high-level editors who work on what magazines call "special projects": regular features, or one-off special runs of coordinated content.

Unlike tech rival Engadget -- which has surpassed Gizmodo in absolute pageviews -- Gizmodo is now trying to differentiate by offering value through original ideas. (Engadget's done a measure of this too, but not nearly as much.)

And wouldn't you know it, Gizmodo has been making content-sharing deals with several popular tech websites. Gizmodo has become, if I may be so bold, its own wire service. (And other publications indeed find it cheaper to repost Gizmodo's content. But is that such a smart idea on the web, where you can always easily access the original version? That's for another blog post.)

(AllThingsD I'm leaving out of this, since so much of its content derives from the Wall Street Journal's regular reportage. However, the site has established a separate "Voices" section for outside, reposted coverage.)

Kafka's point above is that the business model forces trained reporters to work on unoriginal content, which I agree with. But it's Lam's point about budget that's really central to the situation. With a growing budget, more popular publications can afford to hire staff to work on original content: new features, marquee columns, event coverage.

With a modest budget, even the most bootstrap of reporters must resort to reposting or opining to keep the content flowing in between bouts of original reporting. (Unless a larger parent company is willing to subsidize this costly original reporting; see: Condé Nast and The New Yorker.)

So what's a publication to do? How do you leap the hurdle to move from repurposed content to original reporting? After all, you don't want to hire a full staff of reporters if you don't yet have the popularity to draw the eyeballs -- and thus earnings -- to support it.

Similarly, you don't want to hit a traffic ceiling in which you've got each one of your few reporters pushing content at full-tilt -- so much so that it's to the detriment of their work. That's also unsustainable.

(A side note, by the way: it remains unclear whether aggregation itself is sustainable. Can publications become news portals, or will that be the exclusive territory of Google, Yahoo and Comcast? Will we then begin an arms race for original reporting, or does non-automated republished news still have enough ROI to make it worth the effort?)

Aggregate, or report? On its face, it seems you don't really have a choice. Your popularity dictates the answer to that.

The challenge, then, is how to graduate from one sphere to the next.