OJR

Time for newspapers choose between the DEC or IBM model

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:12:00 MST

By Dave Chase: It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable.

Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen.

Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies.

The "good news" for newspapers is their stocks are so far in the tank that there's relatively little risk (easy for me to say!) in them taking some calculated risks. I didn't work for IBM but my impression is they allowed the services group to have true independence from the legacy businesses IBM had. I was closer to a couple similar situations -- how Microsoft handled Xbox and Expedia -- so I will expand on those examples. I would argue that Microsoft's only had two real new, stand-alone successes in the last 10 years - Xbox and Expedia.

While Microsoft has yet to fully recoup its investment, few would argue that Xbox hasn't been a commercial success. In the meantime, it is generating a year by year profit and more importantly from Microsoft's vantage point is having a coveted spot in millions of consumers' living rooms.

In roughly a parallel timeframe, Expedia was incubated inside Microsoft but was running into some issues being inside of Microsoft. Rich Barton was trying to run Expedia as a company 100% focused on achieving success within the travel sector, however periodically would run into stumbling blocks. For example, organizations like United Airlines, Hilton Hotels, and countless other travel companies didn't like what Expedia was doing to the travel market. The problem for Microsoft was that these companies were big customers of Microsoft's software and it created internal conflict. Eventually, Rich made a compelling case why Expedia should spin out of the company and they did so. Microsoft made a nice return by selling its stock in Expedia in the public market. Unfortunately, there have been virtually no Rich Bartons in the newspaper industry.

How did they do it and what can newspaper companies learn from this?

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were smart enough to accede to the request of the leaders of Xbox and Expedia to have separation from the main company. That had three main dimensions:

Physical separation. Both the Xbox and Expedia teams were located several miles from Microsoft's main campus.
Brand separation. Other than very light branding (e.g., in the footer of their website in a subtle gray font), you see little or no mention of Microsoft in Xbox. Expedia became a fully independent brand.
Technology separation. A pivotal early decision was to not tie Xbox to the Windows platform which is a general purpose operating system rather than something that is focused purely on gaming. I wasn't privy to Expedia's development details but I don't think the technology platform was a big factor one way or another.

Smartly, both organizations did leverage at least three things from the parent.

They hired in great talent in to their teams. Just as important, they weren't forced to bring people on to their teams.
They utilized the company's capital to build big new businesses.
They leveraged the distribution capability of the parent. In Xbox's case, they didn't have to establish all new channels of distribution. In Expedia's case, they had a carriage agreement with MSN that gave them a huge infusion of traffic to build their business.

Is it too late for newspapers? No more than it was for IBM in the early 90's when many wrote them off. Will their leadership and investors have the guts to do it? I'm hearing rumblings from a few. Most are half-hearted attempts. Fortunately, there are some capital efficient ways of doing this. For example, with as many as 20,000 hyperlocal sites having formed in the last few years, a smart partnering strategy, limited capital and a distribution partnership would be a way to start.

TwitterTim.es: Personalized news done right?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:05:00 MST

By Eric Ulken: I'm not ashamed to admit it: The first time I saw Twitter, I thought, "What's the point?" Maybe you did too, or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am. Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it. (Biz Stone: "If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time.")

For every Twitter enthusiast, there was, I suspect, a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful. Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha! moment. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding. I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items -- both big international stories and news of a more personal nature -- through Twitter.

I began following like-minded people for the interesting links they would post. Before long, information overload took hold. I tried to cull my follow list so I could read everything. I worried I would miss something. Finally, I learned to embrace the firehose and not try to process the whole stream.

But still I thought there must be a better way to separate signal from noise. And then I noticed that the most interesting and important items were appearing maybe three or four times in my Twitter feed. Since then, I've wished for a way to mine my feed for those links.

Last week I heard about TwitterTim.es and was thrilled to find it does exactly what I wanted. I spoke with Maxim Grinev, the project's technical lead, about TwitterTim.es and where it's headed.

How does TwitterTim.es work?

We look at the tweets that your friends send, and also tweets that friends of your friends send. So, first circle and second circle. And then we extract links from those tweets. Usually links are shortened, so we get the long versions. Then we group by links and calculate how many times each link is posted by your friends and friends of friends to built your personalized "newspaper". (NB: Links posted by friends get more weight than links posted by friends of friends.) Right now, every "newspaper" is updated about every half an hour. It can be updated more frequently, but we don't want to stress Twitter.

How did the project start?

As usual, it was a side project. We had been working on some semantic search technology. It's about using semantic relationships extracted from Wikipedia to organize other data (blogs, news, etc.). As we were working on this, we started using Twitter. We didn't have any idea in advance of what we wanted to build. We just analyzed how people used Twitter, what information could be detected. We understood that Twitter is not only good for spreading news, but it's also a good voting system. So we can collect and analyze how many times links are voted on in Twitter. Analyzing this data, we can understand how important this link or this event is.

Who is working on the project, and what's your business model?

We have 5 people working on this project: 4 developers located in Moscow, and one business guy in San Francisco. We are computer scientists, and we specialize in data management. We are self-funded; there are no external investors. As concerns the business model, we are considering various partnership schemes and selling advertising on TwitterTim.es but we have not decided on anything yet. Now we are mainly focusing on attracting users.

Will TwitterTim.es take advantage of Twitter's new lists feature?

Right now we don't do anything with lists. We are thinking about how to incorporate this. One of the options could be to generate newspapers based on some list. So if you have a list of people, you can collect the second-circle friend-of-friend information and build a newspaper for a list.

What other things are in the offing for TwitterTim.es?

We are currently collecting feedback from users. Usually our users request relatively small features -- for example, they want to improve the retweet feature. We are going to handle this feedback and add features. In addition to that, we are planning to extend the system in two ways: First, we want to extend the sources that are processed -- so, in addition to Twitter, we are thinking about collecting posts and links from Facebook, mainly, and maybe Friendfeed. Second, we are going to allow ranking of news by global popularity. So you would have two different tabs: The first tab is personal news. The second tab is global news. In this sense we will compete with Tweetmeme.

What are your thoughts on the future of news?

I can't say how it will be. I can just share my own experience, and I think it's typical: Since I started using Twitter, I've nearly stopped collecting news from other sources. Before, for example, I watched news on TV and read more magazines. Now I get nearly all my news from Twitter. I'm quite confident that if I read Twitter, I will not miss some important piece of news. So if a war has started, or there's some disaster, it will be mentioned at least once in my Twitter timeline.
I have heard a lot of discussion about media sources dying -- The New York Times has problems, etcetera. Of course, I think that all these major newspapers and magazines are very important, because journalists have the ability to travel places and work at this full-time. But with regard to selecting what I will read, I'm not going to visit The New York Times website, for example. If there's some interesting and important article posted there, I will find it in my Twitter timeline.
Also, by the way, there's an interesting idea we're looking at: When you visit The New York Times website, for example, you might be interested in getting all the links published there, but ranked according to the judgment of your friends and friends of friends. So it's the same as TwitterTim.es, but restricted to a single source -- The New York Times, in this case. We are talking to one major newspaper about this.

Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:54:00 MST

By Robert Niles: My post today is intended for students, mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site, but without the faintest idea of how to start.

Here is your guide and checklist.

Now, I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write. I'm not covering that. Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors, freelancers and employees. Those are topics for other days. Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web, to lay a foundation for future expansion and success.

A domain

Before you do anything else, establish your brand. The Internet domain you select and register will be the brand of your website, so it should be something that:

Accurately describes or echoes the site's content
Is easy to remember, and to spell

If this is going to be a one-person website, or a website driven by you and your personality, make it yourname.com. Or, if you want a little extra flexibility, something like, oh, yourlastnamepost.com.

The most popular domain name registrar is GoDaddy.com. I've used them, without problems. Register the domain, but don't opt for any extras, such as hosting or an e-mail account. You can find sources for those later.

A blogging tool

Start with a blog. Not an online newspaper, or a discussion forum, or a wiki or any other potential form of online content. Go with the blog. It's the easiest way to start, and requires the least amount of tech knowledge, as well as minimal change to your writing style.

(At least initially. Over time, you'll find that you use a very different voice for blogging than for traditional newsroom writing. But I will address that topic in a couple weeks. Let's leave it aside, for now.)

The comments that readers submit to your blog will provide your first steps toward building an all-important community of readers. But, at first, you must be their leader, eliciting their input through the posts of your blog.

Here is your first choice: I'm giving two free, and fine, blogging tools to choose from: Blogger and WordPress.com. For what it's worth, WordPress also offers a more powerful publishing platform, a piece of software that would need to be installed on the server that hosts your website. You're not at that level yet, but if you're looking toward the future, that WordPress tool provides one option for developing a more robust website than a simple blog.

Blogger, on the other hand, is part of Google, and hooked into the many services and widgets that the search engine giant now provides.

Again, I've used both. I like the simplicity of Blogger, but appreciate many of WordPress' features as well.

One important point. The account name that you select for your blog on either of these services must be the same as your domain name (without the .com part). If you can't get that account name on one service, you need to go with the other. If you can't get it on either, you should select a different domain name. (As soon as you can, you will need to arrange to have your blog publish to your domain name, but that's not necessary to start. You just need to have control of the domain name.)

A promotional channel

Now that you have a brand and a blog, you'll need a way to promote them, and to start connecting with your emerging community of readers. Create a Twitter account for your website (ideally, using that same brand name), then a Facebook "fan page" for the site. You'll use the Twitter account and posts to the Facebook page's wall to let followers and fans know about new posts to your blog.

But don't limit yourself to only posting when you have something new on the blog. Use these services to engage in thoughtful banter and conversation with your readers, and for short observations that don't merit a complete blog post. Twitter's also a great service to use when breaking news or covering a live news event.

A way to track promotional clicks

When posting URLs to Twitter and Facebook, first convert them to shorter URLs using the bit.ly service. First, it will save you valuable characters in trying to stay under Twitter's 140-character limit. Even more importantly, bit.ly provides data on how many people clicked your link, and what other Twitter users "retweeted" it. You'll find that information wonderfully valuable in evaluating how well individual posts resonated (or didn't) with your readers.

Readership metrics

You will need to know how many people are reading your blog, as well as where they are coming from and how they are using your site. Readership metrics are essential. Blogger can hook you up with Google Analytics and WordPress.com includes its own traffic-tracking tool. But I would sign up for Google Analytics using either service, and for Quantcast's tool as well. You'll post a tracking code into your site's template which will allow these services to count your readers, and gather a bunch of other useful information that will help you gauge the power of the content on your site.

Quantcast provides somewhat simplistic demographic data to publishers using its tracking code that, when combined with Google Analytics data, can give you a helpful first look at the makeup of your audience.

An advertising network

Now that you have a place to publish, a way to reach people, and a method of tracking them, it's time to think about money.

Join an ad network so that someone else can sell ads into designated spaces on your website, so that you won't have to worry about this important step initially. In the future, ad networks will fill space that you (or an ad rep) do not sell directly to advertisers.

Your options here are Google AdSense and Microsoft's pubCenter. AdSense should come as an easy plug-in option if you are running a Blogger blog. Otherwise, you'll need to sign up and add the code yourself. Microsoft's stirring up the market with its new Bing search engine and might yet develop some lucrative market share.

You'll need to watch your analytics with a sharp eye to optimize your content for these services, if you want to make any significant amount of money from them. But it can be done. (Full disclosure: I make about mid-five figures annually from AdSense income. I stopped using pubCenter before Microsoft introduced Bing, but am keeping my eye on trying it again in the future. Still, I did make several hundred dollars a month from Microsoft when I used its network.)

Business cards

Now, we go offline. You'll need a handful of business cards - with your name, brand, e-mail address, phone number and URL - to hand out to sources, readers and potential advertisers. (You won't necessarily know which of those categories the folks you meet will fit in, by the way.) You can go with a freebie or low-cost online service such as VistaPrint (beware of its attempts to sign you up for extras and subscription services you don't want or need), but if you're starting a local news website, you'll do far better for building your community relationships if you go with a local printer.

Ideally, with one who might want to advertise with you at some point in the future. ;-)

Bookmarked production widgets

Your site, and your business, is up and publishing now. So let's start adding some functionality to the site. Here are some handy services and widgets to bookmark, which will help you produce more engaging content for your website.

Photo editing: Picnik or Photoshop.com
Photo hosting: Picasa
Video hosting: YouTube
Quick reader vote polls: Twiigs

An ad server

An ad network will get you started, but if you want long-term viability (and you are not going the non-profit route), you'll need to sell ads directly to advertisers. And when you sell an ad, you'll need a way to display it on your site, tracks its impressions and its click-throughs.

Google AdManager is a free ad server that runs on Google's servers, so there's little tech work involved in set-up. You can even use it to have AdSense sell your remnant inventory, so you can replace the AdSense code in your site's templates with AdManager's.

A rate card

Of course, to sell ads, you need to know how much to charge. A simple rate card is a PDF or .doc file that lists the ad sizes your site's design supports and how much you charge for each 1,000 impressions (called a "CPM") in those slots. Make it easy on your advertisers my offering simple packages in round dollar amounts (e.g. 10,000 impressions for $50, 20,000 impressions for $100, etc.)

What to charge? Take a look at the CPM you are earning from AdSense or pubCenter (the "eCPM"). Go with the higher figure. Then assume that Google or Microsoft is taking about a third of what they charged the advertisers for those ads. So multiply your eCPM by 1.5, then round up to the next dollar. That's a solid starting point for how much you should charge. Many publishers charge more on the rate card, then discount down to whatever level then need to to make the sale.

Your first rate card sheet also should include a few nuggets of positive information about your website, such as its monthly readership, whatever demographics you have and a testimonial or two. That information can help sell potential advertisers on the value of running ads on your site.

For the future: A more advanced development platform

If all goes well, the quality of your reporting, your writing and your engagement with your readers will result in traffic swelling and readers clamoring for new ways to interact with you, and with each other, on the website.

At that point, you'll need a more sophisticated publishing system than a simple blog. You'll need to move your site off Blogger's or WordPress.com's servers, onto another Web host, where you can run a more advanced content management system ("CMS") such as Drupal or the more newsroom-specific Django.

Nothing to worry about now, but something to keep in mind.

For the future: An advisory board

Ultimately, your success as an online publish will be measured by your success as a community organizer and leader. Great community leaders do not try to go it alone. When you've made some loyal friends on the site, it's time to start thinking about formalizing those relationships by asking a select few to become an advisory board.

Lean on those board members for feedback on your vision for the site, as well as for leadership within the site's community, by posting to the site, setting an example for other readers and referring you to potential story sources and advertisers.

You might start this effort on your own, but if it is to succeed, you will need the help of many others. Plan for that day, so that you will be ready when it comes.

Does your site really need to be in Google News?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:23:11 MST

By Robert Niles: With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy's family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.

Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page.

But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I'm going to argue... no. (Well, at least it's not worth making a fuss over.)

Why on Earth wouldn't a news site want the higher public profile and increased traffic that inclusion in Google News could bring? Look, if your site's goal is to appeal to a global audience, especially ones looking for news related to specific keywords and phrases, you need to be in Google News and should do everything you can to get included. If you are CNN, or the New York Times, you need to be in Google News and optimizing your pages to perform well within it.

But what if you aren't looking to reach a global audience? What if your site's focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers?

"Drive-by" visitors from search engines inflate your site's traffic stats, but they don't help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website's health and viability.

Many newspaper executives might take some comfort in the large number of readers visiting their newsrooms' websites. But let's look at how engaged those visitors are with these websites.

Or, more accurately, how they are not.

An Editor & Publisher report on September 2009's Nielsen Online report on the United States' top 30 online newspaper websites (by most most unique visitors) showed that the mean amount of time spent for that month on one of those websites was just nine minutes and 22 seconds.

That's a tick under 19 seconds per day on average, if you considered each website visitor the equivalent of a daily subscriber. I doubt that even the speediest reader can get through many articles - much less any advertisements - in under 19 seconds.

So, clearly, online visitors are not as valuable to today's news websites as daily subscribers to the local newspaper were a generation ago. Diminishing engagement with their audiences, whether reflected in lower print circulation numbers or by less time spent on the website, is what's driving legacy news businesses' failure to hold on to their once-lucrative advertising market share. No one's going to pay top dollar to reach an audience which isn't there.

Start-up local news publishers must act smarter. Work to build your website by developing local community contacts, not fattening the visitor logs with out-of-market visitors driven in by search engines. Use social media to encourage current readers to invite new ones. Build content and report stories that local readers will want to recommend.

Looking over the metrics for the websites I manage, I see a clear pecking order in the amount of time spent on the site versus the way a visitor accessed the site. Here's that list, from most time to least:

People referred to the site via an e-mail forwarded by a friend or colleague
People searching for the site's name in a search engine
People accessing the site via bookmark or direct-typed URL
People accessing the site via a link in its e-mail newsletter
People accessing the site via its Facebook page or Twitter feed
People accessing the site via a direct link from another, non-search website
People accessing the site via a link on another social bookmarking site (i.e. Digg or StumbleUpon)
People clicking from Google News
People searching for a term in a search engine

For what it is worth, there's a cliff-like drop-off in time spent between the social bookmark links and the Google News and search engine referrals. In my experience with my websites, people whose initial visit to the site is driven by a referral from a friend or colleague, or from searching for the site's name in a search engine, spend far more time on the site and are far more likely to return than those referred by a search engine.

As an industry, we've got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I've seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages.

Okay, so traffic from search engines isn't helping build a loyal audience for community-focused publications. But it can't hurt, right?

Maybe it can. Forgive me while I drift into speculation here, but I'll do this as an appeal to readers who might be more connected with the "dark arts" of Internet marketing than I am. Of the sites I've run over the years, the ones included in the Google News index have encountered a far, far greater incident of spam attempts in comments and other UGC features than those not included in the index.

And that's not explained simply by site popularity, either. My two biggest family-owned websites are not in the Google News index, but OJR is. And OJR elicits exponentially more comment spam submissions than the other two sites, despite the fact that those sites receive around five to 10 times the daily traffic of OJR. (It's gotten so bad that we now hold all comments not from site authors for approval before posting on OJR.)

If you're ready to dismiss that observation as a single data point (and you should be), allow to me suggest that others may be experiencing the same. Speaking with other Web publishers, I've heard those whose sites are in the Google News index report getting hit with platform-independent comment spam at a far higher rate than those whose sites are not. (This isn't to say that sites not in Google News don't suffer spam attacks. The highly popular sites not in the Google News index tend to be blogs and forums running off-the-shelf publishing software, which from time to time attract spam attacks targeted specifically at those publishing systems. But those attacks are aimed at the publishing platform more than at the individual websites.) These submissions are typically human-generated, and include link spam either in the comment itself, or on the reader's site profile page.

Are spammers targeting sites in the Google News index? I haven't spent enough time with the black hats of the 'net to know, despite my suspicion. Consider this my appeal to those who have to provide an answer.

In the meantime, from a system administration stand-point, I want my website to be well-known to people in its target community... and completely off the radar of spammers and search engine black hats. To me, that means:

selecting a publishing system with an enthusiastic support community that's aggressive about security,
making sure that my site's home page uses sound search engine optimization techniques to appear at the top of results pages for my site's name and its community name,
and spending my energy to cultivate connections within my target community, offline and on, staying clear of link swaps, black hat SEO and becoming a spammer myself.

Getting into Google News? (Or Yahoo! News or Bing's news page?) Meh. Put that at the bottom of your priority list. As an online news publisher, you have better ways of building your readership community. Focus on those, instead.

Wanted: Less rhetoric, more critical thinking about 'The Reconstruction of American Journalism'

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:27:00 MST

By Tom Grubisich: The new report "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson is one more example of what what's wrong with the debate about the future of journalism. The Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report shovels out overviews, conclusions and recommendations by the pound, but with barely a few grams' worth of critical thinking. Jan Schaffer, in her reaction to Downie and Schudson, said it best: "Darts for the mile-high, inch-deep reportage." Schaffer, who is executive director of American University's J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, zeroes in on the report's fatal weakness:

"If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those 'breadcrumbs.' What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of 'us,' the news suppliers, and not 'them,' the news consumers? I don't hear from any of those consumers in this report."

Alan D. Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, provides a good share of the small amount of rigorous, economic-centered thinking that's gone into the journalism crisis, also gave a mostly scathing review to "The Reconstruction of American Journalism."

Downie and Schudson come to their drastic recommendation of a "National Fund for Local News" using the kind of sleeves-rolled-up but shallow analysis that typically informs newspaper editorials on big issues (e.g., health care reform and the U.S. role in Afghanistan) A typical sentence from the report: "With appropriate safeguards, a Fund for Local News would play a significant role in the reconstruction of American journalism." What are "appropriate" safeguards? What are the con's as well as the pro's of letting the federal government, through funding decisions that are made by appointed "national boards" and "state councils," "play a significant role in the reconstruction of American journalism"?

Downie and Schudson focus, appropriately, on the threat of continued editorial staff downsizing to journalism's "'accountability reporting that often comes out of beat coverage and targets those who have power and influence in our lives�not only governmental bodies, but businesses and educational and cultural institutions.'" But creating a spider-web-like network of grant-dispensing boards sets the stage for all kinds of abuses that, ironically, would provide fodder for accountability reporting.

Missing from the Downie-Schudson report are the basic elements of critical thinking:

Digging for causes instead of reacting to symptoms.
Measuring as well as marshaling evidence.
Recognizing all the stakeholders.
Asking "why" questions.
Testing conclusions and recommendations.

Perhaps it's unfair to hammer the Downie-Schudson report too hard. It's symptomatic of what passes for analysis of the crisis in American journalism. We get too much rhetoric. The rhetoric is often well phrased � after all, it's usually written by journalists � but we don't need more rhetoric, however polished it may be. What we need is more case-method and other critical examination. Journalist/teacher/consultant Jane Stevens pointed the way with her studies of three community sites � CapitolSeattle.com, QuincyNews.org and WestSeattleBlog.com. Stevens and her co-author Mark Poepsel, a University of Missouri School of Journalism PhD candidate, take a close look at what the sites are doing on the journalistic, community and revenue fronts. The studies, if they are expanded to other websites, may lead to a flexible business model that can be tailored to work in a variety of communities � without federal money being doled out by national and state boards packed with patronage appointees.

(Stevens, by the way, gives Newsweek a well-deserved whack for its recent superficial take on the future of community journalism, which came to optimistic conclusions, but for the wrong reasons.)

Maybe the Downie-Schudson report will provoke enough tough reactions � on top of Schaffer's and Mutter's � that, cumulatively, will prod journalism's practitioners and thinkers finally to start thinking critically about a crisis that won't be solved with rhetoric, no matter how elegantly and urgently it's framed.

Where does news come from?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:19:00 MST

By Nikki Usher: Time after time again, people who want to save newspapers claim that newspapers are the primary source of news. But is their claim actually founded on anything other than self-importance?

I love newspapers. I want them to survive, in some form, but it's important to investigate where the truth in one of the linchpins of the "newspapers need to survive argument" comes from.

Tom Rosenstiel explained this before the Joint Economic Committee hearing on "The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy," on September 24, 2009:

In every community in America I have studied in 26 years as a press critic, the newspaper in town has more boots on the ground--more reporters and editors--than anyone else--usually than all others combined. A good deal of what is carried on radio, television, cable and wire services comes from newspaper newsrooms. These media then disseminate it to broader audiences.
When we imagine the news ecosystem in the 21st century, the newspaper is still the largest originating, gathering source.

Rosenstiel's not the only one to make the claim. It's a common one. John Carroll used to say that 80 percent of news came from newspapers. Len Downie and Robert Kaiser similarly claimed that newspapers were the originators of most content for most broadcast and cable news. And many studies of online blogs show that much of the linking originates from mainstream media, often newspapers.

But are newspapers where it all begins? In an online world, that's only sort of true.

A study coming out of USC Annenberg of 250 news websites looks at where these sites are bringing information from � whether they are citing the AP or citing their own journalists. Though the analysis isn't complete yet, initial results seem to suggest that wire services are providing the bulk of news online.

The study, as explained by Annenberg doctoral candidate and researcher Matthew Weber, takes a systems approach. This means that the researchers were taking a look at who was providing information for the network of news organizations, who was doing the filtering for the news organizations, who was collecting the information and from where � and how it was being passed on.

"If you take a systems approach to the news industry, the people who are providing the raw material are predominantly wire services," he said.

Weber did find that newspapers still are where consumers make their first stop. And while they add their own content, newspapers are also acting as filters - were also bringing in articles from the AP, Reuters, AFP and the like.

"The 'system' start with the wires, and ends with the aggregators. Newspapers are jammed in the middle, competing for air," Weber explained via e-mail.

But when it comes down to who is creating the content for news sites, the organizations providing information were "almost exclusively wire services," according to Weber.

So wires, in this case, seem to be increasing importance in the news architecture of the online world � and newspapers aren't the first stop that they used to be, though they do help sort information.

But in some sense, wires have always played an important role that has often been ignored by those who like to say that newspapers have set the news agenda and uncovered the most important stories.

When I was an intern covering cops at the Chicago Tribune in 2003, often my assignment came not from the scanners but from the now-defunct City News Service, a wire service owned by Tribune Co. that sold breaking news to the highest bidder in the local market. The City News Service in Los Angeles, not owned by Tribune, still serves a similar purpose.

Even if we disregard these pre-Internet wires that only operated in a handful of cities, it's still unfair to say that newspapers set the agenda for the rest of the media in a city. Certainly newspapers often did the rigorous work of providing a detailed account which was then recycled on local news, but television news has never aspired to be anything but a recycling of newspaper headlines even in its golden era.

Cronkite saw his viewers still reading a paper, and today, local news also doesn't kid itself about being entertainment. The two mediums work more complementary than as leader and follower than we might hope to suggest in our case for news survival.

But there's a whole other element to where news comes from that has also been ignored in an online context � the world of blogs and online communities � and how this then sets an agenda for newspapers to follow.

Chris W. Anderson, a Nieman blogger and assistant professor at the College of Staten Island � CUNY, has research that suggests that it's important to look not just at newspapers but at the whole news ecosystem- which includes everything from news to activist communities.

Anderson doesn't question the macro-level assumption that journalists report and bloggers comment. But he notes that it's a little more complicated when you look more closely at specific news instances.

Calling them news "blips," Anderson said, "You'll have an early period that most journalists wouldn't call reporting where information will be released in niche spheres of the blogosphere."

One example he gave was of reports of activists arrests. But it wasn't that reporters were reading these activist blogs that this news happened to make it into the mainstream newspaper or news media. Instead, journalists got their tips from "being good reporters," taking cues in the traditional way, perhaps from police or press releases or shoe-leather reporting.

From his observations at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, Anderson said, "It's a misnomer to think journalists are just sitting around reading blogs."

But once journalists did report on these news blips, these blips were then circulated into the larger blogosphere. But the blips required a certain level of bubbling up to the surface from the niche level of social media, something that happened in traditional ways.

Twitter might make a good case of how newspapers aren't the first and only source of news, especially on a hyperlocal level. Newspapers may be hoping to compete on the hyperlocal, but this strategy may be questionable especially in cities with actively wired bloggers and tweeters who may have the first claim on news.

My old neighborhood in LA is a Twitter neighborhood. Local stores and restaurants were on Twitter, as are many residents and more active bloggers. We all routinely kept the neighborhood hashtag #DTLA in our posts when commenting about our home. Sure, the bars marketed drink specials to us, but the #DTLA hashtag was the first source of news when the 2009 Lakers celebration got out of hand, then followed by TV and the LA Times. Twitter users provided great on-sight reportage of the Michael Jackson funeral at the Staples Center, often going beyond what mainstream media had to offer.

Did these events wind up back in the newspapers? Sure. But the most active concentration of rumors and new bits of information were coming from a niche community � in this case, the #DTLA one, and in Anderson's case, the activist community.

Perhaps, instead of staking the claim for newspaper survival on the fact that newspapers provide the first stop of news and set our agenda for what it is we care to talk about, those making the case might start to make a more nuanced argument.

Maybe it's not as compelling to say that newspapers are the great facilitators of democratic dialogue and discourse instead of the source of all that is news, but it seems to reflect the burgeoning reality of our digital era.

This headline not written for Google

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:42:00 MST

By Eric Ulken: I'm amused by a discussion on SEO and headline-writing taking place at the Nieman Journalism Lab site and on the Canadian blog MediaStyle. It seems a seminar on SEO for editors at The Globe and Mail offended the Canadian paper's online books editor, who interpreted it as a charge to dumb down headlines.

Most commentary has focused on the question of why his post was removed from the Globe and Mail's books blog, In Other Words. I'll let others tackle that angle. What I'm interested in is whether the writer, Peter Scowen, has a point. I believe he does, even if it's poorly expressed:

Last week, our headline on the review for Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist was one of those sweetly goofy and slightly shopworn plays on words that newspapers are rightly famous and infamous for. The book is about a self-doubting poet in midlife crisis mulling (and procrastinating) over an essay about rhyme; the headline was "The marinating of the ancient rhymer."
...
Our merriment came to a screeching halt on Tuesday after I went to a seminar on search engine optimization and discovered that it was actually a really really crappy headline. I learned that this kind of badinage, so peculiar to newspapers, has no place on the Internet. The reason is both simple and deranged: The most important reader of Internet news headlines is not you, the sentient, curious human being, but the robots at Google that scan headlines and return search results based on what their cold, lifeless eyes tell them.
...
Above all, we were taught that Internet headlines have to be written with a certain kind of hipster doofus in mind. This person was embodied by the groovy, ever-pacing journalism professor who led the class on writing for robots (he didn't call it that), and who whipped out his iPhone and boasted that he will not click on anything whose headline doesn't hand the story to him on a digital platter.

I happen to know the journalism professor in question. His name is Alfred Hermida, and he is anything but a "hipster doofus". He's a keen observer of the changes taking place in the practice of journalism, and I'm happy to be joining him on the faculty of the University of British Columbia in January.

I have taught on the subject of headlines and findability, both at the L.A. Times and for Poynter's NewsU, and I have always stressed this point: It's not about writing for Google. It's about writing for humans, with search engines in mind -- a theme Alf says he raised in his seminar. But if we're going to write with an eye toward findability, we have to understand how search engines work and how people use them, and I presume that's why The Globe and Mail invited Alf to speak.

I wasn't there, but I suspect there may have been some nuance in Alf's presentation that was lost on Scowen. In any case, there are ways -- both technical and editorial -- to publish great headlines without killing search relevance:

At the very least, most content management systems these days will allow editors to write a literal, search-friendly headline for the story and put a more creative, punny headline on their homepage and section fronts, where keywords don't matter as much.
Better yet, if your CMS supports it, you could put your literal headline in a story's & lt;title & gt; tag and on RSS feeds, and get more abstract in the display headline that readers see when they pull up the story. The New York Times has been doing this a bit, I've noticed.
Finally, if you have control over the words in a post's URL -- and with many blogging tools you do -- you can put full names and keywords there instead of in the headline and still get them seen by search engines. Mashable, a popular blog on social media, seems to be optimizing the URLs on its posts in that way.

Scowen raises an important topic, but he cheapens his argument by suggesting that readers who arrive at news content via search -- about a third of the audience of many news sites -- are intellectually incurious and that journalists who cater to them are dumbing down the craft.

(For what it's worth, I think his post does kind of fit in a blog about books, because it captures an important difference between online and print writing. And readers' reactions could have been illuminating for the Globe and Mail staff. It's a shame that this conversation wasn't allowed to take place on the G & M site and had to happen elsewhere instead.)

Freedom of the press ought to belong to all... not just to approved 'journalists'

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:39:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Can you do journalism and not be a "journalist"?

Do people declared "journalists" get special speech and press rights that other American citizens do not enjoy?

Can anyone enjoy the right to free speech and free publication, even if that individual is not a full-time professional reporter?

These are some of the important legal questions that American politicians and bureaucrats must confront now that the Internet has made possible for people other than employees of major media companies to reach large and widespread audiences.

In recent weeks, federal officials seems to be favoring a view that certain individuals enjoy more speech and publication rights than others. New regulations from the Federal Trade Commission and a proposed federal shield law create legal double standards for individuals creating information for the public - one for employees and contractors of media companies and another for everyone else, including self-employed publishers.

This split calls into question what the First Amendment means, and whom it was intended to protect. Henry Mencken famously said that "freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." [*Update: Jay Rosen tweets that the correct source of the quote, "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" is A. J. Liebling. Citation here.] But with the Internet making a "press" available to anyone for free, does that "press" have to be of a certain type, or reach a certain number of people, to qualify for First Amendment protection?

The FTC this month published new regulations on the disclosure of advertiser-sponsored messages which could force bloggers and other independent publisher to publicly disclose every book, CD or sporting event admission that they receive in the course of their work, or face thousands of dollars in fines. Yet the FTC explicitly exempted offline, established media publishers from the new regulations.

Book blogger Edward Champion interviewed Richard Cleland of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection last week, prompting an evisceration of Cleland's remarks by DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas. Mark Cuban also publicly mocked the FTC rules.

Personally, I would love to see a strong crackdown on deceptive advertising. Businesses should not have the right to mislead the public by paying other parties to republish specific advertising messages, without disclosing that they are paid ads.

But the Supreme Court has granted First Amendment free-speech protection to quite a bit of commercial speech. And there's a huge difference between paying a blogger to republish a specific commercial message and sending another blogger a free MP3 of a new music track to review.

The FTC should recognize that difference. Cleland's remarks and its own guidelines (see page 47), however, suggest that the commission's leadership remains oblivious. The concept that bloggers can cover their beats critically, and not merely as shills, seems lost upon the FTC.

I do not believe that the purposed of the First Amendment was to provide legal protection to specific class of corporations, namely, newspaper companies. The intent was, and should continue to be, to empower the people of the country, collectively and as individuals, to keep a watchful eye on their government and communities, and to speak in advocacy of their beliefs.

The Internet has fulfills the Founders' promise of a free press to the people. No longer is "freedom of the press" limited to an elite few, as was the case in ~~Mencken~~ Liebling's day. People who have devoted their careers to reporting and publishing news should welcome this functional expansion of the First Amendment, providing us millions of new potential allies, engaged in our communities. A handful of clueless bureaucrats in the FTC should not be empowered to stand in their way.

Nor should established news organizations welcome what the FTC is trying to do. Unfortunately, the New York Times has, writing in an recent editorial:

"This is a matter of principle, not medium, and the new rules are not an excessive burden. The guidelines state that endorsers must disclose payments in cash or in kind from companies whose products they endorse. Telling a commentator flogging a product online to disclose commercial ties does not constitute a challenge to free speech."

I welcome reading the Times' movie critics noting in each of their reviews how they saw that film for free. And for the Times' book critics doing the same for the books that they review. I suspect, however, that will never happen. Why? Because the new rules are a matter of medium, and are not an excessive burden only to those, like the New York Times, who have been exempted from following them.

Here's hoping that Congress strikes down the FTC rules before they take effect. Or that a deep-pocketed blogger, such as Cuban or Kos, takes on the FTC in court, not leaving that task to middle-class online journalists who lacks the bank account to challenge the feds.

There ought to be no special class of citizen called a "journalist." Anyone who does journalism, even if for just a moment in their lives, ought to enjoy the protections of the First Amendment when they choose to speak or to publish. Otherwise, we are ceding to unelected corporate employers the power to determine who gets First Amendment rights, or not.

Freedom of the press belongs to all Americans, and not just to the newspaper industry - despite what the FTC and the New York Times would have you believe.

Developing an Effective User Experience

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:36:00 MST

By Cindy Royal: A few months ago, I wrote an article entitled & ldquo;Making Media Social: News as User Experience & rdquo;. I talked about the online trend, driven by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, of users having the growing expectation of participation on the Web. Users want to be able to upload photos, comment on posts or videos and interact with graphics. They want to make connections with others who share the same interests. Some news organizations are experimenting in developing unique and meaningful user experiences that can satisfy these new user requirements, while others are just beginning to consider a foray into this area. While innovation is key, and there are no firm rules, I thought it might be helpful to discuss some considerations and questions that may help guide the process of developing user experiences that will be perceived as valuable by your users.

Know your audience. Gather data about online users, local issues and concerns, and pay attention to comments on articles or blogs. Is there an issue of local interest or of broader significance that has a specific local angle? Read other local online publications and pay attention to trends on social media sites. Engage your Twitter followers with questions about potential projects.

Play to your competencies/expertise. Focus on the types of projects in which your organization has excelled in the past. Do you have a reporting competency in local politics or crime? Are you in a geography in which entertainment or sports coverage (like Los Angeles or Las Vegas) has become part of your core operation. Do you have access to unique data sources or archived material, and do you have the resources to maintain and update that data, if necessary?

Leverage existing tools. Have other parts of your organization or external organizations developed a similar project? What can you learn, borrow or purchase from that organization? Can you leverage an external platform, like Twitter, and engage existing applications or develop new ones with their open-source application programming interface (API)? Or do you need to develop the platform in house?

Acquire or develop programming expertise. An organization must consider the skills necessary to accomplish an interactive project. Do those skills exist in-house? Can they be developed or will your organization need to hire or contract with new resources? Research in the types of technologies used to host will be necessary (for example, is there a platform like Pluck, used by USA Today that adds social media features to their publishing system, available for purchase?) Will employees need to be trained or hired in Web framework technologies like Django or Ruby on Rails in order to develop online interactives? What other perspectives will these employees need to understand in order to develop projects that are both compelling stories and technology tools?

Consider how will the user interact with the project. Navigation, design and usability will be key to the success of any online presentation. Will it be simple, like The New York Times WordTrain, that requires the user to input a limited number of items, or will it be more a immersive experience that might require more complex instructions, step-by-step guides or special media players? Are these requirements appropriate to your audience and topic? Use design techniques that will improve the use of the site, including meaningful layout, usage of white space, complementary and contrasting colors and branding, if appropriate. Finally, how will users with sense impairments have access to the materials? An appreciation of accessibility standards will be necessary in engaging as wide an audience as possible. Usability testing should be a standard part of any online project.

Be creative. Encourage creativity amongst your ranks. Have brainstorming sessions or allow employees to peruse the Web seeking ideas and inspiration. Look at competitors sites to see the types of projects they are developing, and broaden your definition of competitor to include relevant social media sites, blogs and other technology services. Consider projects that might not initially seem standard on a news Web site, like the Washington Post project & ldquo;On Being & rdquo;, a video project that provides a quirky, yet poignant take on the fascinating and diverse individuals in their market. Give employees the license to experiment but be ready to accept failure, as long as it is done quickly and cheaply. An experiment using Twitter to crowdsource a story that is unsuccessful may only cost the time of one or few employees, and the learning that comes from such an experience can easily offset the investment. But, a several thousand dollar expenditure in new equipment and resources that spans several months or years and ultimately fails is not acceptable or is rarely necessary, given the proliferation of free or relatively inexpensive tools and services available online.

News organizations need to understand that an active user is a desirable user and can create significant value for the organization. Social networking trends not only create a sense of urgency for news media to adopt these features, but provides an indication of where competitive endeavors might be emerging. As the news industry struggles to remain relevant and profitable in an online society, it may find solutions and avoid pitfalls by looking at innovative social media companies and the activities of their users. At the heart is a user base that remains engaged and interested in participation. How news organizations interpret this phenomenon may be the salvation of the journalism.

Old Media vs. New Media: Let's call this one off

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:13:00 MST

By David Westphal: It's been a lot of fun, this long-running sniper's war between Old Media and New Media. We've all enjoyed some hilarious slap-downs, all marveled at the sheer idiocy of the morons on the other side. (Oh, and let's not forget their over-the-top mean-spiritedness.) But all fun things must end. It's time to put the Old vs. New Media war to rest.

This framework, old vs. new, hasn't been wholly wrong. For a long time it has mostly reflected facts on the ground. Old media was in the money-making driver's seat and spent long hours scoffing and chortling at the new-media prophets. New media would not be outdone on the scoffing front, convinced that the digital revolution would change everything, if only old media would get out of the way. The battle lines were drawn and fixed. And there they would stay.

I was thinking about this last week on the drive up to San Francisco and the Online News Association. I wanted to write about the anniversary of my leaving the old (McClatchy's Washington Bureau) and entering the new (USC Annenberg, writing and teaching about new media). What struck me is how this old framework was in the process of busting up, but also how much more dismantling was required. As many people have noted -- Jay Rosen and Robert Niles among them -- these shifting fault lines were much in evidence during ONA's fabulous program. The old battles were somehow... fading away.

What happened? The war ended. The prophets turned out to be correct. The Internet has changed, is changing, everything -- or close enough to everything that they get full credit. What else is happening? The crowd previously known as the money makers get it, too. The consensus now is overwhelming. Armistice is at hand.

Of course, not everyone gets it. Old ways die hard. And, in fact, there are still some real disputes. New-media veterans still see flare-ups of denialism that must be countered. The old-media crowd sometimes sees a presumption that everything old has now been discredited.

But these things now lie at the margins. The ground has shifted. There's no longer a need to maintain a standing army. And, in fact, it gets in the way of progress.

To my friends in old media, I'd say: If you haven't already, admit that the new-media thinkers were right -- because they were. The Internet would change everything, it would revolutionize and devastate the business you came to love, and there are people who saw this much earlier than you did. (Let me say: Earlier than I did as well.) To my friends in the new media, I'd say: Kudos. You deserve acknowledgment for your vision and smart thinking. But now: Lower the barriers to entry in what used to be your world and yours alone. Newcomers are blessings to embrace, not Johnny-Come-Latelys to be mocked.

We journalists are back together again, or sure as heck should be,and the enemy now isn't the other side but the challenge of finding new ways and new models that will sustain the information needs of democracy. This work needs everyone's good thinking, and will be accomplished much more easily if it's not weighed down by old grudges and tribal loyalties. What a richer world this will be when new-media thinkers critique new media with the same vigor they bring to old media, when old-media veterans feel free to say that old ways don't work and may not have been the greatest anyway.

Tina Brown, also observing a one-year anniversary this week (the Daily Beast), declared the battle between print and Internet a "phony war." I wouldn't say the war was phony, exactly. I'd just say: it's over.