saila.com: Journalism Feed

Accessible Web video

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:10:00 -0500

For a medium that was designed to share scientific papers, the Web does a good job at delivering video to mass audiences. For the past months, msnbc.com has been building an entirely new way to share that video to its audiences.

Released at the start of December 2009, the first of the new msnbc.com players allows anyone to embed NBC news related video clips into a site. While msnbc.com has been began making a concerted effort to improve the video experience online for more than two years, this new player is the result of a complete rethinking of what is possible.

Along with the numerous performance improvements, there was dedicated design effort to create an interface that was simple, intuitive, and able to integrate unobtrusively with almost any Web design style.

More importantly, the player was conceived to allow it to easily scale to include new features. One of the first tests was to offer something few mainstream player do: accessibility.

Every clip can be controlled by some de facto video keyboard controls:

Space: Play or pause
→ (right arrow): Skip ahead 5 seconds
← (left arrow): Skip back 5 seconds
↑ (up arrow): Increase the volume
↓ (down arrow): Decrease the volumne
m: Mute the volume

In the coming months, you can expect to see subtitles with almost every video clip drawn from closed captioning information, and where available, show transcripts. As these new features come to be, they will include universally consistent keyboard commands.

All this is a part of the goal to make msnbc.com content easily available to anyone who wants to access it, and to do so by offering the best designed news products online.

Open letter to the CBC about the news relaunch

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:53:00 -0400

This letter was sent in response to CBC’s relaunch of its news offerings and relates directly to the changes to The National. Although I do work for the online division of NBC News, this is my personal opinion. And, despite my preference for a more global news picture, the Nightly News has, coincidentally, now become the household’s primary TV newscast.

For past three decades, I’ve watched The National and have relied on it to provide in-depth stories about Canada as well as the world from a Canadian perspective. The show has provided much needed analysis when too many other news broadcasts are about the hype of the now. The National could be trusted to follow-up on stories when the others were chasing the next shiny balloon.

Two years ago, I moved to the United States for work and began watching the American networks’ various news broadcasts. The lack of context and sense of doom baked into every brief news hit literally drove me back to The National (which I watched online) within weeks. The U.S. broadcasts seem to thrive on the fear of the unknown. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they are intently focussed on the events occurring within the American border.

This Monday, I watched The National, anticipating the ways the CBC would improve The National.

With the exception of the faces, I wouldn’t have recognized it. Nor would it be something I would want to watch again.

And I want to watch CBC news.

The National now feels like the worst of the American news broadcasts I sought refuge from. The National's lighter stories mix and visual pizazz seemingly designed to keep viewers engaged has elicited the exact opposite reaction from me.

The old National was a pocket of sanity in the storm of the 24-hour news cycle, and now it seems I must find new shelter.

For the record: I'm in my mid-thirties and typically communicate in 140-characters or less.

I also work at the website of one of those American news networks.

Your thoughts are welcome here, although if you have thoughts on CBC’s relaunch, let the Mother Corp. know, too.

Repositioning the news

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:48:00 -0400

Something is in the air on the second day of National Newspaper Week, as two major Canadian media sites redesigned along with one American blog. Meanwhile, the Economist thickened its pay-wall and Canwest is seeking bankruptcy protection.

Bankrupt CanWest

Last things first: CanWest seeking protection is not much of a surprise as the company has been gorging on newspapers and local TV stations while not taking care of the debt. Unfortunately for Canadians, the restructuring of the company will lead to an even thinner coverage about the cities and towns where they live.

Gating The Economist

The Economist, meanwhile, knows its audience is willing to pay for its content in magazine form, but sees many of its online readers aren’t print subscribers. By tightening its paywall and making its content available for free for a shorter period of time, the plan is to make its online readers more valuable to its business. The logic is the same as has been used by many newspapers in the past to the determinate of their bottom line, and The Economist, despite being an elite publication, will need to commit to a five-plus plan if they hope to convert their revenue stream.

Redesigning a round Boing Boing

BoingBoing, after nearly ten years online, has done a fairly dramatic overhaul of its site, with two of the most notable changes being the logo update and the use of a rounded, sans-serif as its headline typeface. Once a loyal reader, but no longer one now, the design strikes me as being an good match to the tone while managing to balance the business needs of one of the most popular online-only publications out there.

Reinvigorating Radio 3

Shortly after Boing Boing began publishing online, CBC Radio 3 launched its first sites. These award-winning efforts were some the most innovative experiments in online content and rich-media design. Unfortunately, they were also about five years ahead of the curve. Now, after languishing with an awkwardly framed site, the Radio 3 site has redesigned to emphasize the social aspect of music. Additionally, it better caters to the splintering genres the make-up Radio 3’s playlist. The player seems much better although it wasn’t working for me (likely either a firewall or geolocation thing), but it still is strangely difficult to link to particular pages on the site.

Reimaginging the Star

Finally, the Toronto Star. When I hear smart, seasoned, and savvy people across my social networks literally raving about the redesign, it’s always worth a look. Especially when its about a site I have never been impressed by (and this goes back a long time, my first critique was in 1996). Things are different this time with this latest version of TheStar.com as designed by Teehan & Lax.

The result is a successful attempt to break the news design ghetto, even if the visual design is cautious. TheStar.com now was four distinct ways to view the homepage content: the standard view, a pictorial grid, a text grid, and a timeline view reminiscent of feed readers. In fact, may of these design conventions draw from feed reader UIs which suggests the Star is looking to grow its audience by acting as a news buffet for audience sourced, in part, by links shared on Facebook. Glad to see TheStar.com make the effort to push news design conventions in interesting directions, and it will be interesting to see how these play out over the coming months.

Ready to pay the price

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:39:00 -0400

We’re at a turning point. The collapse of the American newspaper industry and the broader economic recession have, ironically, created the conditions online content needed to make money.

Publishers are actively working with advertisers to experiment with models that respect the integrity of the content. The consumers, in turn, have become more understanding, and more willing to sacrifice elements of their privacy in exchange for useful services (see Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, geo-location tools).

Further evidence of the former will be seen on msnbc.com in the coming months as we evolve our story pages design to better respond to both the content of the articles and the advertising inventory available. More immediately, you can see well-designed placement for brand campaigns in the OPA proposals, as well as Federated Media’s “Ad Stamp” format which offers half of a page to one advertiser.

Mass media has succeeded financially because it offers, for a high premium, companies a means to reach a broad audience with a carefully curated message (see the TV commercial, full-page magazine ads). Having adapted classifieds to suit its format (search ads, like AdSense), the Web is now ready to do the same for brand advertising. And with those quality ads, designers have the ability to dramatically improve the entire experience users have while viewing online content.

The other side of the revenue equation is encouraging those same people to actually pay for what they consume. Various micropayment schemes and subscription plans have bloomed and withered during the past decade-and-a-half largely because they failed to accomplish what credit cards and cold cash could: ubiquity.

Now Google is trying to do just that. As is Amazon (so the rumours say). And so is a media-originated attempt. Of the three, Google has the best shot because it’s international and has already solved the micropayment problem with its AdSense platform. Like the book-scanning project, Google could see a revolt by the very industry its trying to solve a problem for.

Whether it be micropayments, one-time purchase, subscriptions, or a combination; the public at large will undoubtably be paying for higher quality content online on a regular basis in the coming years.

No more newspapers

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:51:00 -0400

At the start of my journalism career I wrote, in a magazine, about how newspapers are adapting to the online world. The article concluded with this statement: newspapers must revolutionize themselves online, or watch the risk-taking new media companies attract their readers and their advertisers.

Twelve years, to the month, later Clay Shirky published an astute article suggesting there is something more to newspapers’ failure to adapt:

When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

…Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

One of those papers he implicitly refers to is the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

That newspaper published its last print edition today.

As my colleague Mike Davidson noted, it’s been strange, literally watching this collapse happen before one’s eyes, especially given we’re working in the field newspapers are hoping to reinvent themselves in.

And it's not that they're not trying, the P-I will be going online-only with a greatly reduced staff trying in many ways to emualte Huffington Post. The New York Times continues to innovate, but is still stumped on how to make money to fund these experiments and quality reportage.

The problem, though, as Shriky and others suggest, is that what really needs inventing is the business model behind the distribution of news, not the particular medium it is reported in. Newspapers are closing, local television news shows are going off-air, magazines are cutting back, and as a result journalists are losing their jobs.

Interest in news, though, has never been higher, and as a result this ecosystem is thriving, and with it, a chance to evolve a better way to tell the news.

Ten days later, things are worse…and better. The P-I is now an online-only publication that looks, for all intents and purposes the same as the newspaper’s site; newspaper ad revenue has dropped 16.6 percent, online was down 1.8 percent in 2008 (although Canadian newspaper readership seems stable); and the CBC, The New York Times, and even Google announced nearly one-thousand layoffs one the same day. But…people are seriously evaluating what is important about journalism and innovation in the online journalism category is finally starting to reach the potential many of us had hoped would be the de facto way online news was presented by now.

5 steps to CBC success

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:43:00 -0500

How to program a national public broadcasting corporation:

Operate a respected international cable news channel.
Create an innovative, ground-breaking television program using all the techniques of social media Web sites more than five years before it becomes cliched.
Get praise for the former, and inspire a former vice-president to copy the model outright.
Stop producing content for the respected news outlet so said ex-vice-president can use the channel to host the aforementioned copy.
Wait about four years, and strike a deal to create a Canadian version of the groundbreaking news channel that resulted from those deals.

Just the facts (and more)

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:27:00 -0400

Embracing online can be seen as, depending on one’s viewpoint, either a desperate last gasp of a dying business model or bold and visionary move.

Both views can be applied, for example, to Microsoft’s preview of its Web-based Office Live product. Likewise, the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to abandon a printed newspaper and focus its news operations online is either too late or leading edge.

The same can be said when company get the “open source” religion.

Netscape did it when its browser was dying, and the move, literally, resulted in a phoenix rising from the flames.

Sun is doing it with Java with less dramatic effect.

After consuming so many Web 2.0 companies, the bulk of Yahoo’s interesting efforts have been to produce a public means to access many of the tools and data that makes Yahoo Yahoo.

More radical, though, are The New York Times’ efforts to free the information contained within its storied archives. Within the past two weeks, the Gray Lady has given Web access to its campaign finance information and its movie reviews. Bloggers can now associate related New York Times articles with each of their posts. Designers are invited to comment on the news by creating new visualizations from the Times’ archive.

Late last week, another leading international newspaper, The Guardian (and its sibling, The Observer), has taken the Times’ move to its logical conclusion and have made the full-text of (and the meta data about) nearly every article it publishes available through RSS.

News long ago became a commodity, and to compete, news organizations must focus on how best to present the gathered facts. This is, in essence, what differentiates my employer, msnbc.com, from nytimes.com from huffingtonpost.com from an anonymous blogger.

The last time and economic bubble burst, the Web went on to create tools, like Blogger and MovableType, enabling anyone to easily post a story online. Just under ten years later, and in the shadows of another economic collapse, the Web is developing the tools for anyone to crunch data and present their findings in visually compelling ways.

The traditional news industry barely made it through the last wave of change. This time, though, some finally seem to be learning those lessons and discovering how to make themselves an indispensable resource.

CBC: near- or farsighted?

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:23:00 -0400

Recently Canada’s public broadcaster urged the CRTC to “reject old assumptions about new media” and claimed that the consumption of broadcast media is not being negatively effected by the Internet.

This defies the observable evidence yet manages to be based in some careful shaped facts. For example, CBC’s paper claims that:

Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool. … These are the types of activities that are driving Canadians to spend time using the Internet. They are not activities that are substitutable with TV and radio usage: these activities are completely different than the time spent with traditional media.

Additionally, it claims one percent of Canadians watch television online. While the claims may be technically true, the arguments are on very weak ground.

True, the government’s research arm found almost everyone emails or searches for information online; but it also determined 65 percent “view news or sports” online and 28 percent listen to online radio.

In fact, in the past three years, there was a 60 percent increase in the number of people watching TV or movies online (20 percent in 2007). Seeing how people consume TV online in the U.S., I will confidently conclude there will be a similar increase in Canada after another three years.

Similar narrow-sightedness can be found in its discussion around online revenue opportunities (which is too broad for me to discuss in detail, but I will mention online ad spending continues to increase and is predicated to surpass radio advertising).

Everyone likes to shape facts to support their own perception of reality, and the CBC, like many media institutions, could be seen to be struggling to maintain its default top-down organization structure. (As evidence: people in the trenches have continually been doing some incredible things at the CBC as it relates to the online world, but the upper management seems oblivious to the realities.)

My hope is, like the Canadian newspapers before, the CBC has merely crafted a report to discourage the CRTC from regulating the Internet (or at least the Canadian media companies online) and is not merely a result of a lack of vision.

The False Idol: Technology

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:42:00 -0400

The journalism industry, in all its worry over its place in the digital age, seems too willing to “commit suicide out of a fear of dying” and seemingly latches onto anything it thinks might increase user engagement and/or page views.

At the recent Online News Association conference, the entire place was filled with “MSM”-types buzzing about “UGC.”

Those implementing it were eagerly doling out advice; “It’s wonderful,” they seemed to preach. “It’s revolutionary!” (Ironically, there was also a session explaining how to keep the annoying people from participating).

Job postings for Site UGC Editors abounded.

The sense was as though the industry thought it finally has this “Web” thing figured out.

But, as the IHT’s Mike Oreskes said in his keynote to the conference, journalists need to help audiences with information overload and not just become conveyor belts.

The online news industry needs to realize mainstream media has always about aggregation. The New York Times prides itself by claiming that it only publishes the “news that’s fit to print.” Online news needs to confidently embrace this role by filtering out, again as Oreskes said, the wheat from the chaff.

If a news site can present its readers, alongside the pure news, a distillation of the best of the rest of the Web by properly using the tools of the new Web surprising things could happen: news outlets might once again been viewed with the kind of authority they once had.

But first the industry needs to remember, technology won’t save the day.

During his presentation at the recent conference, Adrian Holovaty was asked repeatedly about what tools a news organization can use to collect and refine data for features like “Faces of the Fallen.” His answer?

“Hire a reporter.”

Online journalism still needs to learn

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:57:00 -0400

Day two of the Online News Association’s conference has had, at least for me a much more engaging set of panels and conversations, starting with Holovaty’s through to integrating interactives into the site (which featured a tremendously strong panel). The day closes with what is dubbed the “Superpanel;” after is the ONA awards.

What has become increasingly clear is that, despite the long-standing trend, some news organizations in Canada (I’m looking at you globeandmail.com), are in fact ahead of many U.S. sites. The lessons we have learned are now being discovered by many major sites, including USA Today. In fact, my general sense, is that the online news industry is ignoring the entire blog/Web 2.0 world (except to look at in fear), and, as a result, are missing a lot of the lessons and user experience conventions many Web users have learned over the past few years.

Holovaty at the ONA conference

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:14:00 -0400

Adrian Holovaty started the day with his session on evangelizing reporting and making data in news articles available for machine parsing (as evidenced in ChicagoCrimes.org). Although I arrived late (something about the Queen St. streetcar trying being diverged, and partly a result of a late night hunt to find a Gypsy jazz band and a Yahoo party), I’ve seen his talk on this before (and he is a good speaker), but it is heartening to see that it was incredibly well attended.

As he has readily admitted, it’s not rocket science, but it is a very original concept to the vast majority of the news industry, including those in the session. Each time he talks, and people see the results (both direct or indirect) of his work, there’s hope more news organizations will begin doing this kind of kind of interactive journalism, along with the more typical multimedia presentations.

From my experience, the two hurdles are:

finding the resources (both human and technical) to build out these applications;
and making it user-friendly for the reporters to input the data (i.e., creating a WYSIWYG interface).

The first is not insurmountable; there are a lot of talented journalist and Web developers who would be willing to do this kind of work. The second would require a more concerted project effort and training, but the results would continue to pay-off the years.

Midday at ONA, Day 1

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:12:00 -0400

So far, Toronto Hydro is failing me, hotel rates are too high, but I do have a recharged laptop (I still can’t believe there’s no free WiFi at an online journalism conference). Thankfully, I’ve been able to catch-up with a lot of people, some of which live in my city, or I’ve just met. And that was one of my hopes in attending this conference.

Of the two of the panels I’ve attended, the one on serious gaming was the most interesting. Essentially, the panelist just spoke about the relationship between online (educational) gaming and interactives. That simple notion sparked a lot of ideas that I was hastily jotting down in my trusty Moleksin. The second, post-lunch, was an all-star panel (Rob Curley, J.D. Lasica, Dan Gillmour, and Jay Rosen) that was interesting thanks mainly to Curley’s willingness to dive deep into how they are doing local blogging.

Many of the panels seem to be “ideas-based” and a lot of “wouldn’t it be great if…” Perhaps because I already believe what’s being preached, and have myself preached the same, that I find the tone a little too academic.

The nosepicker is that I have spoken to others here that are completely wowed by those concepts, which is good, very good, for this industry.

Two more sessions today, and I expect at least one more post.

ONA conference starts

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:35:00 -0400

Arriving for an early start at the Online News Association’s conference here in Toronto, and I have, so far, have run into colleagues I’ve worked with, might have worked with, and could be working with. Apparently the rare, and heavy Toronto fog has closed the airport, preventing some from arriving, but still it is quite packed.

The plan was to live blog this session, but in my rush to get a coffee, I forgot my power cord and my “typewriter” ribbon is running low. That, and I’m using Toronto Hydro’s wifi network — I did manage to connect, but its slow…

Keynote by Yahoo’s Hilary Schneider is interesting, if not quite enlightening overview of the Web 2.0 tools and how theoretically it could be applied to journalism. (Best line: “rapid failure” is good.) Elections, methinks, is going to be a big trend (the U.S. is due for one in a year, and Canada…well who knows), she just mentioned it in the keynote, and there’s a whole session on it later today.

More as deemed necessary. Technorati Profile

New York Times free again

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:30:00 -0400

The New York Times is dropping its online paid-subscription plan two years after launching it (and four after The Globe and Mail launched the model The Times used). The spin is the online advertising boom change the rules of the game. However, advertising revenue would be a pittance compared to the potential revenue generated through annual subscriptions.

The real reason then? Uptake was less than 300,000 subscribers on 13 million unique monthly visitors. At about two percent, the online conversion rate is better than some, but that rate will decline as subscriptions plateau while site traffic grows.

Which brings us to the Trojan Horse of this announcement: archives for the past two decades are now free as are all public domain articles from 1851 to 1922. In addition, some material between 1923 and 1986 will also be released from the paid archive.

All of a sudden there will be near-primary source articles for a lot of historical events that, until now haven’t had a public online presence. From a business perspective, the company has greatly improved its available inventory and calls its competitors: release your archive or lose traffic. (While working at The Globe and Mail, one of my disappointments was being unable to convince enough people of the importance in freeing the digital archives from only institutional settings.)

Both The Globe and the Wall Street Journal rely on subscription revenue and are sitting on large archives, and I know both were re-examining their business models. The Times’ move, however, should help weaken those previously unassailable revenue models.

Google News rewards original content

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:10:00 -0400

Over the North American long weekend, Google announced a deal it struck four of the top English-language newsfeeds that will see Google News hosting wire stories.

Effectively, Google has exposed the dirty laundry of many online news outlets: the bulk of the news posted on a daily basis is sourced from third-party providers. While such a practice is not new (the objective voice of modern journalism arose from the need to blend articles from a variety of sources into one cohesive package), it has been a lucrative crutch for the online industry more than a decade. Even the wire services have known this, and tried to cash-in — Reuters’ site design, with its pagination and online ads, is a prime example.

News organizations have had a love-hate relationship with Google News since it launched more than five years ago, but have recently become extremely reliant upon the traffic it brings. Although I don’t believe the deal is the beachhead to the portalization of Google, this latest move will no doubt increase publishers fear factor of the big G because, in the current market space, it will effect the revenue targets of most news sites.

Even as the online edition of newspapers are experiencing tremendous advertising growth, there continues to be a reluctance to reinvest that money into the core product. Too few outlets are hiring editorial staff; even those that are, the hires are editors, not reporters. Staff are expected to vet and/or repackage the content instead of writing new material. Although the wire feeds allow sites to publish huge amounts of news, the amount of work involved often means original (online) reporting is sacrificed no matter how simple it can be to do.

Smart publishers should realize the irony, and see Google’s move a forced weaning from the wire and begin investing in exclusive content which Google — as it has shown in every tweak its made to its search services — will reward with prominent, traffic-generating page placement.