stdout.be | thoughts about journalism and technology

Simple, good things

2012-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

John Cage’s 4’33" is a composition in three movements, for any instrument or ensemble and it consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. Cage considers it to be his most important work.

People think 4’33" is a joke. Some love it because composing four minutes of silence is, you have to admit, a ballsy, whimsical, out-there thing to do. A musical joke. Equally as many think it’s preposterous and doesn’t qualify as music or as art, a joke in that sense. But there are listeners who consider it to be much more than that. Usually those who know its history and philosophy, often musicians or composers. For those admirers, 4’33" is a keystone composition of the 20th century.

Art is meant to be consumed but for that to happen, first it needs to be created. Those who consume it pay a moment of attention and then move on with their lives, but those who create it obsess about their art night and day. Same thing with critics.

Asymmetry in consumption inevitably leads artists’ and critics’ tastes to move beyond those of their audience: the artists get bored and try new things and the critics, whose tastes have become jaded through overstimulation, are glad that they can finally sink their teeth into something fresh, something new. The audience, observers from afar, might be less enthralled at artists’ experimental urges. Right or wrong, this is why so many people hate modern art but dote on renaissance works crafted under the watchful eye of a patron-dilettante. (“Create art I enjoy or starve.”)

This rift in the tastes of creators and the tastes of consumers can happen in every creative endeavor, growing and shrinking over time. Sometimes sheer market forces heal the rift: you may want to publish a book containing nothing but the first ten-thousand prime numbers, and you certainly can, but nobody will buy it. Sometimes consumers catch up, if you give them time. It took almost twenty years for microwave ovens to catch on. Sometimes reality prohibits a rift from ever forming: when building a bridge, you don’t get to use your own kind of physics. But most creative industries allow for a certain amount of play, professional standards that your users or clients might not care about but that don’t upset them either.

Journalism is a good example.

Every journalist and every newspaper vows to uphold professional ethics mandating accuracy and fairness even though a good chunk of readers wouldn’t mind reading more gossip and seeing more sleazy celeb photos. Newspapers tend to spend more pages on politics and international news than the average reader cares to see, because it’s important. They stubbornly keep reporting on wars and disasters even if readers and viewers are ready to move on. Because it matters.

Journalism also illustrates why professional standards are not always a boon. News websites, the vast majority of them, look like ransom notes. Three columns and five layers of information stacked on top of each other when all we want is a friggin’ list of what’s happening. Mobile is even worse. Someone somewhere decided news websites should look pretty, when really they don’t, they should load fast and be easy to use.

Philosophy’s professionalization during the 20th century is another example: academic philosophers spend lots of time talking about grue and bleen and neo-post-Kantian whateveritis, but precious little time on the kinds of basic questions Aristotle used to ask, like what it means to be a good person. Philosophers don’t write for the masses anymore, unlike, for example, the utilitarians in Victorian England or John Dewey at the dawn of 20th century America.

Directors get to pick unhappy endings, politicians can ignore the tyranny of the masses, a good chef may refuse to cook a steak well done and a poet may write for you and me or they may write for the world’s vast legion of English professors.

Capitalism is a harsh master but contrary to popular opinion she does not often cut throats. There’s wiggle room. Consumers – users, readers, music lovers, foodies – can be conservative or unsophisticated or wrong and when they are we have the power to overrule them and as professionals decide for ourselves what good music, food and journalism is like. Hoi polloi be damned. But we must recognize that power as the mixed blessing it is. Maybe it’s not the unsophisticates, maybe it’s you and me who need (re)education. You and me who can no longer recognize a simple, good thing when we see it.

The importance of being informed

2012-09-24T00:00:00+02:00

Young people consider news to be garbage and lies according to Paula Poindexter’s research at the University of Texas at Austin. Because of that and for so many other reasons, Poindexter says, millenials are increasingly ill-informed. In fact, according to her research, they simply don’t feel being informed is important to start with.

(Of course, it’s the grown-ups who get to decide what “being informed” means as well as brush aside any concerns that that information might indeed be garbage. Judges don’t usually get to craft their own legislation.)

Anyway, young people aren’t informed and Paula finds that scary. But is it really?

I enjoy my daily news fix because it gives me something to talk about, something to think about, something to laugh at and because it’s weirdly reassuring to know what’s going on in the world even if everything is going to hell.

Do I get any useful knowledge out of my news habit, though? Stuff that will help me in my day-to-day life, or anything that will make me a more informed voter? Oh, I guess once in a blue moon I do read a story like that. But mostly not.

We read because it gives us something to talk about and because we want to see what everyone else has to say about that nasty snow storm and because we love reading for its own sake and for so many other reasons.

Maybe we hope journalism makes us a better person. Martha Nussbaum has long argued that literature makes people wiser: more understanding of others’ failings and more open to new perspectives. Maybe journalism, some kinds of journalism, have that power too. (But then, so do travel, volunteering and having kids.)

Plenty of reasons to love journalism. But you don’t have to love it and if you don’t, I’m sure there are many other ways to get where you need to be going. Many other ways to be a good person.

Appreciate journalism for what it is. Don’t get upset at kids because they happen to have a different opinion about what’s important in life.

Civic apathy (quote)

2012-08-30T00:00:00+02:00

The No. 1 challenge for local media is civic apathy.

(Steve Yelvington)

In defense of pageviews

2012-08-27T00:00:00+02:00

Pageviews have something of a bad reputation. They have given us stories like “Baby Donkey In Casts”, “The Entire State Of The Global Economy Explained By Swiss Watches” and “Look At These Bizarre Meat Portraits Of Obama And Romney” not to speak of the endless deluge of listicles and pageview-boosting photo slideshows. What pageview mania hasn’t given us is a lot of great journalism. (Though maybe a little?)

Fair enough.

But the problem is not that we’re using the wrong metric and the problem is not that we focus too much on making money, it’s that the news industry’s entire approach to metrics could use an update.

It’s not about the metric, I don’t think. Say you stop caring about pageviews and instead focus on softer, engagement-centric metrics like time on site or how often your stories are shared on Facebook and Twitter. First: why? Second: be prepared to counteract a ton of perverse incentives, just as many as we have to deal with because of our obsession with pageviews.

This time around companies are gaming the system by buying fake Twitter followers and begging their readers for retweets. We’re drawn into an endless search for what makes stories go viral. And, by the way, the best tactic to increase time on site is to make your navigation such a kludge that people have to keep on clicking and clicking and clicking to get where they want to be.

Pageviews, engagement, mindshare, hell, use impact as your metric and I’m pretty sure we’ll find a way to fuck that one up too.

The problem is not that we’re putting business before journalism. It’s that our metrics aren’t helping us build better businesses. That’s what we need to figure out.

Some random thoughts (not gospel):

We should care about stickiness because finding new readers is harder than keeping existing ones around, and we lose money if we lose our audience.
We should care about addictiveness: most people look for news multiple times every day. Every return visitor who visits less than that is untapped potential.
We should care about evangelism: not how many followers we have on Twitter and Facebook because that doesn’t make you money, but how often the average follower points to your stories and how often people actually click through.
We should care about allure. Most visits from social media bounce: a first-time visitor reads one thing and then she’s gone. If we can convince more of our new guests to take a look around or come back later, not bounce, that’s a cheap way to grow an audience.
We should care about our brand and how our readers are talking about us on social media. People will buy ebooks, go to events and maybe even buy a subscription to a brand they trust and respect. That’s decidedly not what will happen after caving in to the irresistible urge to click through on a piece of linkbait.

And you know what? We should care about pageviews too, because pageviews lead to ad impressions and ad impressions are still the biggest moneymaker for most news organizations.

Things I’d like to know about pageviews but don’t right now:

How to increase pageviews in a way that does not strain staff or readers. (If you have to do more to get more, that’s revenue but not profit.)
How many pageviews I need to satisfy advertiser demand and how many I’ve had to peddle to ad networks that pay hardly anything. No point in pushing for pageviews if you can’t sell them.
How many pageviews a reporter needs to net to break even on his pay and how many they usually get. I want to know when it makes sense to hire new staff.
Whether there’s a sweet spot for how long a plain ol’ news report should be, keeping in mind that bigger stories need more pageviews to pay off. (They take longer to write.)
If there are any diminishing returns when publishing more and more stories each day, or whether total pageviews follow pretty much a straight curve and more is better.

Because ultimately, those are the sorts of detailed questions about pageviews we need to answer to learn about our business.

Now let me ask you something else.

How many news organizations have never done A/B tests to figure out how to design their story pages and the homepage?
How many have funnel analyses set up?
How many track cohorts of users to figure out whether, over time, we’re getting better or worse at converting first-time users into fans?

So you see, the problem isn’t that profit-making motives have distorted good journalism. The problem isn’t pageviews. It’s that our industry has not been able to figure out how to use data to build better businesses. And realize this: that exact same methodology is what would help us figure out how to do better journalism.

What’s worse? Vendors try very hard not to be smarter than the industries they serve, so we’re stuck with shitty analytics software. Even if we were asking the right questions, we wouldn’t get the right answers.

(Good analytics software does exist, like KISSmetrics, but it’s not tailored to products with huge amounts of anonymous, non-paying users, like news websites.)

I’m sure places like NPR and the New York Times have figured some of this stuff out. Maybe your organization, too. But the rest of us are just stumbling along. Time to get our act together.

Silicon Valley startups have gotten incredibly savvy about making data-driven decisions. The news industry has not. This post is part of an attempt at translating the Valley’s wisdom into something that makes sense for journalism.

Metrics are for doing, not for staring

2012-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

Metrics are problem solvers.

Take a look at your website’s page load times and compare with how many pages a user will browse through before calling it quits. People browse more if the site is snappier for them? Then your site is too slow. Metrics help you find problems.

So, if we happen to have a slow site and we’re doing something about it, when can we stop worrying? We can stop worrying when making things any faster doesn’t change how many pages people visit anymore. Metrics let you know when you’ve reached your goal.

Have you noticed how readers who come in through social media don’t often stick around? If we’re smart about it, they could become loyal visitors. Metrics help you see opportunities.

Did you see how many people were looking for information on that big court case? Might want to keep on top of that. Metrics help you prioritize.

Should we have 25 or 50 stories on the front page? That’s easy: try 50 and see how often people scroll down and especially how many click through on the stories at the bottom. Still plenty popular? Lots of stories it is. Metrics help you make decisions.

But the thing is, too many people in the news industry when they open their Google Analytics dashboard aren’t looking for opportunities, they wouldn’t see problems if they were right in front of them and they sure won’t let a bunch of stupid numbers decide what to prioritize.

Either we obsess about pageviews or we pick another metric we like more – time on site, say – and we decide that, from now on, that’s what it’s all about. Or we get all fancy and gather a whole basket of numbers to gape at. Metrics don’t work like that.

Instead of thinking about metrics, think about projects and goals. What do you want to achieve? Maybe you need more visitors to kick your ad revenue up a notch. Maybe you have a redesign project going and you want to know whether your new navigation encourages people to explore or whether it’s off-putting. Maybe you’re frustrated by how few people subscribe to your newsletter, and so you’d like to improve that conversion rate.

Or maybe you have no clue what to work on and what you really should do is line up ten different hypotheses for how you can do better for your readers, and figure out the metrics or experiments that will tell you whether or not any of your hunches made sense. Why did you decide to do that redesign in the first place?

We need to grow up and use data to help us decide on our goals and use goals to decide what data we need. Never measure just because you can. Measure to learn. Measure to fix.

Your metrics suck

2012-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

There’s a story floating around about early Twitter, back when they only had a couple of hundred users. Possibly apocryphal. The way Eric Ries tells it, their tiny user base was so embarrassing to them that they decided to offer a bunch of investors their money back, or what was left of it. “This isn’t working,” they must have thought.

More than one investor decided to cut their losses and took their investment off the table.

Thing is: if anybody would have bothered to look at Twitter’s per-user numbers it would have been immediately obvious that Twitter was destined to be a success. Sure, they only had a couple of hundred users, but those users were using the service obsessively. Obsession is a good indicator for a product that works. Twitter just needed to find a way to grow the product. And they did find a way to grow it, and those early investors who backed out are probably still kicking themselves in the head.

(If intrigue is your thing, another account says Twitter knew full well that they had something special in their hands, and used poor initial adoption as a way to trick investors to back out, leaving more stock in the founders’ hands.)

Early Facebook was different. Zuck didn’t care about pageviews, he cared about how many people with a Facebook account were active on a daily basis. He cared about likes, not pageviews, if you will. If you have active, loyal users, your customer lifetime value is going to be huge, meaning you can mess up in hundreds of different ways and still turn a profit. You can spend tons of cash on acquiring new users and still come out ahead. You can worry about monetization later, which is what Facebook did: if your users stick around, there’s no rush. Optimizing for retention is what allowed Facebook to become what it is today.

The news industry is like early Twitter when we should be like early Facebook.

Silicon Valley startups have gotten incredibly savvy about making data-driven decisions. The news industry has not. This post is the first in a series that hopes to translate the Valley’s wisdom into something that makes sense for journalism. Posts number two and number three are already up.

How the NYT paywall is working (quote)

2012-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

I’d wager that the majority of people buying digital-only subscriptions to the NYT are doing so only after bypassing the paywall at least once or twice. If you hit the paywall on a regular basis and barge past it, eventually you start feeling a bit guilty and pay up. By contrast, if you hit the FT or WSJ paywall and can’t get past it, you simply go away and feel disappointed in your experience.

(Felix Salmon)

The death of online advertising (comment)

2012-07-16T00:00:00+02:00

Neil Perkin disagrees with the growing chorus of people saying that online advertising is doomed to fail: on a sufficiently large scale, and with good targeting, it will continue to work, even with click-throughs way under 1% and banner blindness through the roof. I agree, but the flip side of that argument is that news publishers increasingly find they no longer have the scale to play that game and profit. Even millions of pageviews don't cut it anymore.

But that’s the crux, isn’t it? For publishers, online advertising is the thing everyone hates but that we tolerate because it pays the bills. But with these low rates we’re seeing, it doesn’t pay for very much anymore (if it ever did) and so there will come a point when the revenue/annoyance ratio as well as total revenues will be so low that people will start to wonder, do I really want to pollute my website with this nonsense if it brings in less than six figures a year?

At the local media company I work for, for example, our (online) job listings and daily deals bring in more money than online advertising does. Daily deals may turn out to be a fad, and things are not yet so skewed that we can just dump online advertising, but who’s to say that moment won’t arrive five or ten years from now?

‘Fcuz, you’re right, it’s a different game for Facebook and Google who can really play on scale.

Maybe more importantly though, when I see people talking about the death of advertising, what I really hear is not a scientific argument but rather a plea: “advertising sucks, let’s invent something new.” I really hope we do.

Local newspapers, news deserts and simple stuff

2012-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

Local newspapers are not very likely to disappear anytime soon. Oligopolies, monopolies and all that. It’s why Buffett likes ’em. But would we miss our local newspaper if it went bankrupt, would we end up in a news desert?

I don’t think so. And the reason why is because newspapers are not (and never were) about investigative journalism, the hard stuff only seasoned pros can take on. Go ahead, count the enterprise stories in today’s edition of your local paper, whatever it may be. No, local newspapers are about simple stuff and we don’t need newspapers for that simple stuff anymore.

Simple stuff like the events calendar. A heads-up on diners and stores that are newly open for business, holding a sale, advertising a lunch special or calling it quits. The weather and cancellations. Milestones and obituaries. A local club drumming up interest for their bake sale. A message from city government that there’s still a couple of urban gardening plots available, first-come first-served. The police blotter. Classifieds. Business listings. Consumer journalism, is what some people call it.

Sometimes we get fancy with our community journalism and do a restaurant review, a feature on a local charity handing out sandwiches to kids from poor neighborhoods, a top five things to do next weekend. Those pieces take time to write. And there’s always proverbial gardening to do. Take the local theater, for example. For some weird reason they don’t want to put their stuff on our calendar, so we have someone on staff do that instead. And press releases from the hospital invariably need some tender loving care, because you wouldn’t want to see them unedited. But it’s not a ton of work, really. It’s cut and dried, it’s straightforward.

Community news is generally reported as received. Are you really going to fact-check that the Fieldhouse will be open next weekend for the Freedom Festival, when they say they will be? Small business owners can be overly promotional when you hand them a microphone, but you can’t really put a spin on the schedule for Tuesday Band Nights. More than that, community news is only reported when received. If you don’t want to tell us about the flea market you’re organizing, so be it, you suffer more than we do.

When the local newspaper collects and then spreads news from across the community, it acts as platform and publisher, not as source and hardly ever as gatekeeper. When a business owner tells us about a tasting they’re doing next week and a local high school passes along graduation photos, there’s really not much value a journalist can add to that aside from passing on the news to its intended audience.

Before the web, it made perfect sense for newspapers (not cities or non-profits or private individuals) to provide the public with its local bulletin board. Newspapers are the experts at putting information on paper and getting it distributed to pretty much the entire community for hardly any money at all. Everyone’s happy and it’s one less thing for the city communications department to worry about.

Once a newspaper has been established as the go-to place for local information, it will stay that community’s go-to place for a long while, network effects will make sure of that. But truly, there’s no divine law nor any practical argument to explain why newspapers are the preferred caretaker and distributor of community information.

You could get your information fix through a community-supported non-profit, or a subsidized one. It could be a bunch of busy bee citizens. Or it could be twenty people at the city or county communications department. Or all of the above. It could be one guy in his pajamas who set up a WordPress blog and a community forum on a GoDaddy server, and a particularly well connected sharehappy town crier on Facebook who always has the low-down on where the best bands are playing. The community calendar could be a civil servant’s pet project. Maybe a bunch of concerned neighbors get together and set up a SeeClickFix for their city. Or maybe nobody’s in charge, but every local business has its own Facebook page and people keep up to date that way.

Notices and news from the community are useful, require zero journalistic effort or intervention and can be published with free off-the-shelf software. You no longer have to be a newspaper to do it.

In Flanders, Belgium, where I’m from, the government-sponsored CultuurNet publishes the biggest and best community calendars there are. Not eBay but the privately run 2dehands.be is where most people go to find classifieds. Except if you’re looking for members to join your rock band, in which case you’d go to the website of Humo, a weekly magazine.

Newspapers still dominate when it comes to providing community news, though there’s a successful city blog with a wide roster of contributors. My favorite bars in Ghent have Facebook pages I subscribe to. The city blog is an especially good source for restaurant reviews, which is more than welcome because nobody uses Yelp or Foursquare in Belgium. There’s also het caféplan run by the nonconformist Edmond Cocquyt and his cronies, wonderfully complete overviews of every bar in every major city in Flanders.

There’s no website with local business listings I’d recommend, but there must be at least five crappy ones that are good enough. If I wanted to refresh my swing dancing moves, I’d be inclined to search for a class on the WiSPER website, and that organization is private but subsidized.

For the best coverage of Ghent’s epic 10-day city festival, you should visit Tim Van der Mensbrugghe’s personal blog, a journalist and old colleague of mine.

If I had a brunch coming up and wanted to find a good bakery, I probably wouldn’t visit any site at all but just ask my friends on Facebook or call my mom.

You can do the same exercise for wherever it is you live, and you will find – or I hope you will find – a rich and growing ecosystem of local information providers. And all across the spectrum: philantrophical, subsidized, hobby ventures, state-run, for-profit, and social.

Pretend you’re in a one-paper city, and pretend that city can’t sustain its paper anymore. The immediate result will be that you’ll end up in a news desert: a place where people can’t get the information they need about their surroundings. But is it really so naive to think that a combination of private and public effort won’t soon turn that desert into a beautiful garden again?

And anyway, local news monopolies have always had their disadvantages too:

Once a monopoly, commercial news organizations have no incentive to go beyond “good enough to sell ads against.” Look at the business directory most local newspapers publish online, and you’ll see exactly what that means. It’s not pretty.
Merchants and venues pay a steep price for getting the word out. Newspapers charge businesses to put up daily deals, advertise a job, or promote a lunch special. These messages help businesses, but they also help consumers, so there’s no need for a middleman to rack up profits by selling attention that citizens are glad to provide anyway.
Newspaper companies are talking about paywalls again. Local information is vital to communities, and since everyone contributes to that stream of information, everyone should have a right to it regardless of monetizational whims of a corporation.

I don’t think we should worry too much about local newspapers disappearing. If it means the end of any and all watchdog reporting, then yes, that’d be tough and we’d need to fix that. But let’s not worry about the accuracy of our community calendar or the neutrality of a blogger’s restaurant review. Let’s not assume that governments and concerned citizens can’t step in and take care of things – indeed there’s been a surge of cities providing a platform for people to submit their everyday annoyances (potholes, noise, mess, voting on where to put bike racks) so they can get fixed.

Let’s stop assuming local journalism matters and start proving it does. It’s the only way to make sure we survive.

On punditry

2012-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

In a speech to budding researchers about to embark on a four-year journey towards their PhD, my old dean said this: tease a bit. Don’t cover every angle, give your fellow scholars something to disagree with, something to chew on and something to build upon. That’s the sort of research that’ll get your peers excited. More substantially, it’s the kind of research you’ll learn from.

The human brain works in funny ways. We learn more from examples and anecdotes than from theory. We see patterns where they’re not. We can think in very smart and nuanced ways, but act on rules of thumb.

The human brain works in funny ways, and that’s why I’m so conflicted when I see people jeer at big idea people like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell, or make snide remarks about the latest self-help fad.

See, on the one hand, ever since I took a neurobiology class in college I’ve wanted to punch people in the face for reading all sorts of crazy things into fMRI scans. Lehrer sure deserves a punch or two. As a student of analytical philosophy, I’ve learned to worship exactitude and clarity.

But the knowledge we’d like to possess is not always the knowledge we have. Knowledge doesn’t change how we act. So it settles for second-best: it chips away at our worldview, molds our perception, patches heuristics, adds a little perspective.

In the translation process from knowledge to “ways of thinking” and from ways of thinking to action, things get lost.

I have lost count of the amount of times I’ve made the exact mistakes I’d been told to avoid in a blogpost or a book that I’d read a couple of weeks or months earlier. I also cannot count the amount of times I’ve seen entrepreneurs talk about minimum viable products while they keep hammering away at a perfect V1, or news industry executives praising digital first publishing while not moving towards anything of the sort.

Gary Vaynerchuk, in The Thank You Economy (his latest book), prefaces his work with a warning to readers: you’re going to add qualifications, provisions, but’s and maybe’s to everything I say anyway, so I will speak in extremes. I’m the same way when I write blogposts. I don’t want my words to get watered down twice, once by me and then once more by you. Whenever I see “most” and “maybe” and “perhaps” and “often” in one of my drafts, I edit ’em out.

Now, for big idea books like those Malcolm Gladwell writes and big idea speeches like those that fill TED, that’s a bit of a different situation. They’re not just written the way they are to be forceful. More fundamentally, you don’t write a big idea book because you wish to transmit knowledge. Information is, for Gladwell and Lehrer, a necessary virus to get you to consider a new perspective and to help you grow fresh ways of thinking about old issues. And a dose of entertainment on top because why not.

Scientists don’t much care about these cutesy pop science narratives. By Pete I’m glad they don’t. That’s not the point.

Conversely, entrepreneurs and executives are prime targets for big ideas. They don’t care about the knowledge so much. They care about the perspective.

Where things go wrong is when scientists and professors do choose to evaluate big idea books by the standards of academia, as timeless arguments supported by the strictest logic and the most diligent empiricism. By those standards, a work like Jeff Jarvis’s Public Parts is pretty shitty, as Evgeny Morozov found out. I’m pretty sure Morozov hates Clay Shirky too, and David Weinberger. And he’d absolutely hate the essays that dominate Hacker News.

Books have long been the preferred container for timeless wisdom. So, you pick up a piece of non-fiction and you think, “ah, timeless wisdom.” (Sort of.) It’s a cultural expectation. But paper is a flexible medium and Jarvis is entitled to use it however he likes. The result is something more like the transcript of a long and fascinating conversation at a dive bar with a friend who has been obsessing for ages about this one topic.

It’s not bullshit, mind you, that conversation with your friend (or Public Parts, for that matter.) Not anything goes and true is true and false is false. But in between the facts and the research, there’s a fair amount of spitballing and brainstorming going on. That colloquialism is the achilles heel of big ideas, but their strength as well. It’s what makes these books such exhilarating reads. They invite us to think along, to figure out how it applies to our lives and where we disagree.

When you judge big idea books by the standards of intelligent conversation, these conversations are awesome. A little bit wacky and not particularly full of the Popperian spirit of confutation. And you may have to wade through plenty of snake oil, overstated claims and bad science to get to the good parts. Hey, that’s fine. Nothing is perfect.

(And yes, I fully get the joke in defending pop science, big ideas and anecdotes with the help of yet more pop science, big ideas and anecdotes. Please forgive me.)

The news industry and its problems

2012-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

Journalism and the news industry face so many challenges, it’s difficult to keep track of them all. But let me try.

The value people in the industry attach to our work is consistently higher than the value readers seem to think it has. Why is that? Maybe it has to do with news grazing and the amount of news consumption that happens during quick five-minute breaks at work and waiting for the bus? Maybe we’re not doing what people are hiring us to do: “Too many of us are too focused on what we want to produce and how we expect people to consume news that we’re not spending enough time looking at how people’s behavior and consumption patterns are changing” as Reg Chua would put it.

Or maybe Nikki Usher is right when she says that “Local news, and in particular local news online, is not something people care about as much as local journalists might hope.” We definitely don’t spend a ton of time on news sites, certainly not as much as we spend on Facebook.

Can we ever get our young readers back or will our audience keep getting older?

Joris Luyendijk thinks the Cold War made it easy to get people to care about news from around the world: you could always give it a communism-versus-the-west angle. Now that we no longer have that overarching narrative, it’s not so clear anymore why we should care about elections in Romania or strife in Congo. We need to figure out new and better models for international reporting. And for crime reporting too, for that matter.

Especially in the English-speaking world, there’s just so much information out there. Major newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times each publish over a thousand stories to their website a day. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs, magazines, newspapers and news websites out there, most of them free, and it makes you wonder whether we may be writing more than people care to read.

The Economist praises itself on its finishability – if you read this and this and this, that’s everything you need to know – and it’s not so weird to think that endless streams of content may be overwhelming to readers.

Glut has a profound impact on the industry. When demand doesn’t keep up with supply, news and features become cheap, perhaps too cheap to charge for online. It also means that writing a story is not always the best use of a reporter’s time anymore. It’d be better if we would just do what we’re best at and point to other sources for everything else – Jeff Jarvis’s famous motto.

There’s four kinds of aggregation – the “link to the rest” part – in addition to freestanding hyperlinks. Each model has its merits. Feeds, unfiltered streams of content. Algorithms, like BuzzFeed. Social, like Reddit. And then there’s curation, the human touch, like The Huffington Post or pretty much anyone’s Twitter feed. There are plenty of ways to not write our own stories when we don’t need to.

But if we wish to cure the not written here syndrome, we need to teach journalists how to read, that is, be better about harnessing that huge diversity of content on the web in service of kick-ass journalism. Says Felix Salmon:

The biggest shortage in journalism right now isn’t good writers, or even enlightened proprietors willing to fund investigations. It’s critical readers – journalists who can see when they’re being snowed, who can read between the lines, who can pick up information from across the blogosphere and the twittersphere and be able to judge it on its own merits rather than simply trusting the publisher.

And then there’s problems we’ve had since the dawn of journalism that we’ve never quite been able to solve, like how to confront slow violence: it’s very hard to keep people interested in society’s pervasive problems and long-running conflicts, but we should try.

Curation and the personalized news experience bring their own problems. We might end up living in our own filter bubbles, without the surprises and serendipitous discoveries that are so characteristic of reading a newspaper. The web allows us to infuse more variety into people’s reading instead of less, but do we?

We have to make sure that the work we do has impact, instead of just taking for granted that our innate news judgement always will show us the way. We haven’t quite figured out how to make sure that journalism doesn’t just lament problems but actually helps address them. Instead, we’re stuck with hindsight journalism which, as Josh Stearns notes, “serves as more of an autopsy than an antiseptic.”

There’s another problem in journalism that only recently got big enough to be worrying. Readers were never quite guaranteed to understand every single story and word a newspaper published, but you had more loyal readers and they followed the coverage of big issues in their newspaper, so journalists could write like they were talking to old friends. Now, readers go from site to site, reading a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and the result is that we can’t assume any prior knowledge from our readers.

Very knowledgeable readers will want more background and detail, new readers will want the minimum amount of information to understand a difficult story, and your average reader doesn’t want to read through a ton of explanations he’s read a thousand times before. So we need more context, and ideally, personalized context.

Danny Sullivan:

Online papers could be smarter. They could understand what you’ve read, where you left off and keep you informed with only the new material you need, because they’d understand your read state. But online news isn’t written this way. It continues to be produced as if people are reading offline.

As long as we stick to a one-size-fits-all, we shouldn’t be surprised that for so many people the news is starting to look like monkey screech. Researchers in charge of an Associated Press report in 2008 (PDF) went so far as to suggest that maybe that’s why celebrity and sports news is so popular: we’ve made everything else too hard to follow.

The daily news grind also leads us to emphasize stories over trends. In Scott Berkun’s words, we spend too much time talking about idiots doing something stupid:

Since there will always be important idiots in our population, these stories, as a collective, are not news. They do not express a new trend in idiot behavior, nor do they offer any context for how our view of the world should change simply because this particular important idiot did something stupid.

The biggest idiots unfortunately always tend to show up in our comment streams.

How do we design for the great conversation? I’d argue it’s an interaction design challenge, but part of it is just the fact that we don’t give comments the attention they deserve. As Mark Potts says:

Anytime a newspaper has problems with comments, it doesn’t take long to figure out why: It happens because the site managers allowed anonymity, or they didn’t think to employ a profanity filter, or they didn’t put “report abuse” buttons on the comments to let readers self-police the feature. Fail to do any one of these and you get chaos. Online community managers have known this for years.

If you’re too cheap to hire a social media manager and a community manager, don’t be surprised if the level of user engagement suffers.

Don’t forget that being nice applies not just to readers but to reporters too. Journalists sometimes have a hard time responding to criticism.

Then there’s the matter of whether to require real names or not.

The internet gives us so many different ways to publish our content. More than ever, journalists and editors need to become producers: people who know what to publish in which medium and on what platform, and which format best suits the story at hand. But very few reporters and editors take content strategy seriously.

The internet is also changing how we write. People like writing that’s more personal and direct but go overboard and you alienate people, so we need to find the right balance.

It’s not just journalists that can open up to their readers, it’s entire organizations too. Various newspapers are experimenting with opening up newsroom cafés and mobile newsrooms where readers can meet reporters. Others, like The Guardian, have opened up their story budget, asking people for advice on what they’d like to see covered and angles to consider for stories that are already planned.

The web changes how we write but also what we write and when. Journalism is not so much a product as it is a process nowadays – or it should be.

We need to be closer to the communities we cover. News publishers can be community organizers. Joy Mayer, especially, is doing some great and pioneering work on figuring out what community outreach can look like for news organizations.

The web is also teaching people how to deal with bias. People still prefer news media that are, ahem, fair and balanced, but news with an angle isn’t considered to be as deplorable as it once was. What readers do mind, though, is news media that try to trick us into thinking that their journalists have a view from nowhere. And we hate false neutrality. When the New York Times’ public editor asked readers whether the Times should be a Truth Vigilante, everybody responded with a resounding “Yes!” But it’s not always as easy as that. More and more news organizations are throwing away false neutrality and are are getting involved in regular fact-checking exercises, but it’s led to some sloppy journalism too.

Personal brands are becoming important. Play out your star journalists. Be a brand, because newspapers need heroes.

And make sure people trust what you do. Increasingly, they don’t. As Terry Heaton points out, we hesitate to link to our competitors’ coverage, we hardly ever give readers insight into the primary sources we used in crafting our story, and we pretend our angle is the only angle that is. Journalism is a black box, and that encourages suspicion.

With advertising down and corporate overlords breathing down our neck, journalists are pressured into producing ever more stories for ever more platforms, and that leads us to rehash the same boring content and PR fluff everywhere – known as churnalism – and it means we’re making more mistakes and publishing stories that are simply not true. It’s what British reporter Nick Davies calls flat earth news:

[Cardiff University researchers] discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time.

But journalists have to assume some of the blame themselves. Journos are particularly bad at everything that has to do with science and stats, and newspapers get played by PR firms surprisingly often. Parachute journalism doesn’t help. People rarely notice our shortcomings when we’re talking about things they’re not intimately familiar with, but if they read a story about something they are an expert on and they smell sloppy reporting, it’s easy to start worrying: is every story so full of misinformation? Lazy journalism must go.

Accuracy in journalism is a big, big problem, but there’s some small steps we could take to be better. Jonathan Stray argues for a publicly visible, collaborative error reporting process. Scott Rosenberg spends a lot of time evangelizing MediaBugs, a platform to enable exactly that. Rosenberg’s three pillars of trust: links, revisions, and error buttons. Few organizations have a corrections process as meticulous as that of the New York Times, and if we do we don’t use it to drive improvement, but we should.

News becomes more conversational, we employ our audience as ersatz-editors and we will come to value transparency more than objectivity. That’s all fine, but we need to make sure we don’t give up the quest for accuracy. Because the trouble is, our brains don’t handle corrections that well:

Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account.

Even in a world where people are getting more used to hearing (and placing) biased reports, hopefully journalism can still provide a safe haven, a bullshit filter, a trustworthy source. At least, if we can regain the trust people used to place into journalism.

We will also have to wield our storytelling techniques with care. It is exceedingly easy to turn an anecdote into a trend story, and to see changes in society that simply aren’t there because you’re salivating at the prospect of writing a story about it.

We won’t be doing much more writing anymore if we don’t know how to pay for it all.

Why is that so hard to start with? Maybe because, as Robert Pickard says, despite what they claim legacy media companies are not really interested in new business models, they just want to make more money with the same old things. danah boyd makes the same argument about how we serve people, viz. not at all: “When I hear news agencies talk about wanting to get young people, they don’t want to figure out how to actually inform them — they want to hear how to monetize them. And that pisses me off.”

People sometimes blame the news industry for being bad innovators. Are we?

Well, yes, but not every newspaper company wants to be a technology company and not every news organization wants to be in the information business. Fair enough. But even if we don’t expect news organizations to invent the next Facebook or Google or Quora (which is a nonsensical request), we should at least be able to use the tools that do exist and put them to good use. That’s a plenty big creative achievement.

We’re not trying out new things, or when we do, they usually go nowhere. The trouble is that we’re always happy to share our successes and talk about freshly launched products that can’t yet be judged on their ultimate merits, but we never share our failures, and so survivorship bias leads us astray. We need a FailFaire for Journalism Startups.

You could also argue that our lack of innovation (or good products tout court) comes from the fact that newspapers, when compared to most other equally-sized businesses, have been awful at figuring out what makes our readers and listeners and viewers tick. We do hardly any customer relationship management (or we do it only for print). A survey here and there, at most. News organizations are not used to making decisions based on data.

Especially online, we need to go beyond pageviews or Facebook likes. We should avoid obsessing over vanity metrics. (And no, vanity metrics do not suddenly become useful if you put them up on a big monitor in the newsroom.) So, tell me, who’s your Chief Audience Officer?

The innovation we do get mostly happens in big cities and hyperlocal efforts have the best chance of survival in affluent neighborhoods. That’s where the ads are and the early adopters. We have to make sure we don’t end up in a world where the rich and urban get the news they need while the poor and the rural population live in news deserts.

In the end though, if there’s anything we know, it’s that pretty much every strategy under the sun has been shown to work in one fashion or another. But you need the right environment, the right people, and the right plan.

Don’t underestimate the effect tired executive blood is having on our industry. There’s no lack of ideas and no lack of experiments waiting to be done. But we’re not responding fast enough. Management is usually quick to pass the buck to hidebound journalists, but really, we all share the blame.

Clay Shirky is sympathetic but at the same time gloomy when he ruminates on why newspapers are having such a tough time to evolve and argues, in Clayton Christensen-esque fashion, that maybe they just can’t. Newspapers have scaled up to extract ever more value, which was easy, and now they have to scale down, which might be nigh impossible even if they wanted to. TV stations face the same fate. “In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change.”

If that’s true, the question is how do we rescue the reporters. Not everybody is a fan of nonprofit and subsidized journalism, as in a way it’s giving up on the news business. On the other hand, as Patrick Thornton of the nonprofit Texas Tribune submits, enterprise reporting, the iron core of news, was never very profitable, yet it is critically important to society, and that is exactly the sort of problem nonprofits were made to address. Co-operative news organizations are another model that hasn’t been fully explored.

Nonprofit journalism can only work if we’re careful that we’re not substituting one flawed business model for another. And that we have a business model at all. As Kevin Davis pithily summarizes the issue: “Being nonprofit is not a business model, it’s a tax status.”

Regardless of the business model you choose, news organizations need to start foraging and hunting for revenue and take it anywhere they can find it. Maybe it’s events or ebooks or maybe even master classes. And get used to selling your by-products – which starts by figuring out what those are.

There are some signs that even legacy newspaper companies are finally figuring out how to play online (PDF) – baby steps, frankly though. In any case, don’t expect it to be easy. It won’t be, not for the forseeable future.

Advertising is what made it easy and advertising isn’t working so well anymore. Media folk almost never get into the precise reasons as to why that is or why that should be, but the plain truth is that (with regards to web ads anyway) nobody ever looks at ads, are blind to them, and when they do they hate them with a vengeance.

Second, companies can buy cheaper and more targeted ads with Facebook and Google.

Third, companies have found better ways to reach their audience, like through permission marketing, content marketing and social media.

We can try to tackle the first problem and provide better ads (think of ads as content), more targeted ads, or ads that are slanted more towards intent harvesting than intent generation.

But if companies have really found better ways to reach their audience, we should also prepare ourselves for the post-advertising age. In a way, advertisers are now publishers themselves and don’t need us anymore.

Of course, you can’t talk about making money with journalism without talking about paywalls and getting readers to pay for journalism. I think we can credit the New York Times’ paywall with making the discussion a little bit more nuanced among future-of-newsies, though I fear it has made it more unreasonable among everyone else, who now assume that because the newspaper with possibly the biggest brand equity of any paper in the world can make some money with a porous paywall, it’s the future of the entire industry.

There are many valid concerns about paywalls, like those of Clay Shirky and Howard Owens, and there’s nothing wrong if you just plain don’t like them. But it pays to figure out the theory behind it all, to know when paywalls can work and when they can’t. Small countries with small language communities, for example. Financial news, like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Paywalls that exploit freemium dynamics.

Lastly, and then we’ll stop talking about money and business, be aware that what’s true in the US isn’t necessarily true in Europe, and it’s certainly not true in India or Brazil, where print is a growing industry.

More than one European news startup has faltered by getting their inspiration from American counterparts.

Newspaper publishers have always had a habit of clinging to the past. It shows in the design choices we make online. Still much too often, they’re driven by the aesthetics of print and the limitations of paper. Skeuomorphism, in the broad sense of the word.

When we do try to take digital news to the next level, technology usually fails us. Nobody, truly nobody likes their content management system. Some people hope we might move beyond the CMS and Matt Waite in particular imagines the future of the news website as a confederation of apps.

Dan Conover and myself would argue that a lack of metadata is another big problem: if we were more disciplined in thinking about stories as not just narrative but as information, we could create entirely new kinds of news products. Adrian Holovaty’s seminal A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change from 2006 was what first got people thinking about structured news, and it’s worth (re-)reading. Some think the semantic web holds the key. I’m fine with any approach that’s pragmatic and gets us beyond big blobs of text.

We’re already on our way to a post-CMS world, with all those widgets and third-party APIs that help power modern websites. But it’s a long and painful journey and until we get there, heed the words of Scott Klein: don’t mistake your CMS for a development platform.

To continue our little chat about technology, there’s also the apps vs. html discussion. Especially the old-timers in our industry are enamored with the iPad because it promises (promised?) a return to print economics in the digital sphere. But the results have been meager, especially because the development of a good mobile or iPad app or a digital magazine can be quite expensive. Some people just don’t like the fact that Apple is pushing its own walled garden: it just feels wrong somehow.

A good mobile strategy (or maybe even a mobile-first strategy?) can pay off. But do keep into account that mobile isn’t the platform we once thought it was. People don’t just use their phone on the move, they don’t just use it when they’re ready to make a decision (something advertisers love because it allows for intent harvesting) and they don’t just use it for information they need right now: all the things that make mobile such an enticing platform… but only when they’re true. So make sure you’re really good at inferring intent or adjust your expectations.

Reality always has a way of turning out to be more complex than we thought. But there is growing evidence that people do use tablets, mobile phones, desktops and laptops at different times of day, and it’s not rocket science to see that phones are more lean-forward and tablets more lean-back. (Hey, you there. Stop using your iPad as a photo camera during concerts. It’s tacky.)

Then there’s the question of the future of niche and hyperlocal. Everyone seems to agree that for publications to thrive, they must specialize and do one thing well. On the internet, after all, you’re not competing with your neighbors but with the best reporting everywhere. But it’s not clear that the money’s always there. In any case, hyperlocal doesn’t scale so it may be the future of news but it’s not likely to be the future of news organizations.

In order to get people to pay attention (let alone pay), it’s important to differentiate yourself from all the other news that’s out there. Seems like we’re not getting the message, though: news is becoming more homogenous, not less.

Lots of challenges and lots of new techniques and platforms and new ways of writing. How do we teach all of this stuff to aspiring journalists? And indeed, what do we teach?

Should journalists be entrepreneurial? Some, or all of them? Should they be programmers or is that too much to ask or stupid?

Universities are adapting to these new demands, but not always as thoroughly as they should. Aside from a couple of really smart programs like NYU’s Studio 20 and CUNY’s M.A. in Entrepreneurial Journalism, most universities that offer a joint program in journalism and business or journalism and computer science approach it pretty much like a double major: you study computer science, you study journalism, and if you’re lucky there’s one or two courses at the intersection, where most of the value is.

Regardless, it’s a lot to ask. Matt Waite, who teaches at the University of Nebraska, writes:

The number of things Journalism is asking its journalism schools to teach could fill three degrees plus a couple of minors. Business, law, economics, entrepreneurship, computer science, data science, and also all the journalism fundamentals. We have no idea what The Future is, other than that it’s wildly different from the past, so we’re tossing everything into What Journalism Schools Should Be Teaching and the list is starting to look a little silly.

It gets people to wonder whether maybe it makes more sense to return back to the basics and teach timeless skills how to provide “accurate, fair, authoritative, ethical and clear information” as Teresa Schmedding would encourage. But I’m more like Steve Buttry and join him in hoping that aspiring journalists can be skeptical enough to ask the question Why are you using ‘basics’ as an excuse to avoid teaching me what I need to learn?

Part of the trouble is that these entrepreneurial techno-journalists are increasingly starting to look like unicorns. Part of that is surely a branding problem: it all looks very hard and dreary. Simon Rogers from The Guardian wants to battle that idea: data journalism is like punk music. I’ll give you three chords and just get started. Some programming basics and a rudimentary, high-school level understanding of statistics is really not that much to ask. If we’re not finding those people, maybe it’s because of a more fundamental problem, namely the people journalism tends to attract. Adrian Holovaty, in an email interview from a while back:

I’ve only met a handful of people who became journalists because they like information. And I think that helps explain why there have been some major cultural issues in the journalism world in the age of the Internet

Matt Waite worries too, but for different reasons:

What is the career path for a developer in a newsroom? There isn’t one right now. Who will be the first to hire a developer as an assistant managing editor or above?

One thing is sure, journalism schools will have to keep up. Thus far, the vast majority of them has been too slow to respond to the changes in our industry. It might lead you to wonder whether we need J-schools at all.

Interships and writing for free can be real skill boosters, but journalists and colleges alike have to prevent internships from turning into turning into slave labor without any educational component.

And then there’s the big question: what is journalism? What should it be? What are journalists for? It’s the kind of question that, if you think about it long enough you’re prone to lose all common sense, but it’s still worth asking.

A well-read report (and follow-up recommendations) from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy suggests that journalism can help communities coordinate, solve problems, establish systems of public accountability and develop a sense of connectedness.

Tom Rosenstiel details a bunch of different roles reporters and editors need to fill: witness bearer, authenticator, sensemaker, watchdog, megaphone, aggregator, community builder.

Inversely, why do we read? To learn about our community and the world, sure, but that’s not all. As Steve Yelvington points out, dissecting the local newspaper and why we read it, we have many more competitors than we think:

Pleasant and entertaining activities? They abound. Something to talk about? It’s everywhere. Discovering what’s on sale at local stores? Besides radio and several dozen cable channels, there’s also the big box store’s website, where their whole weekly sales circular is reproduced online. […] People I know? Facebook. Feel like a part of a community? Ditto.

Publishers are becoming businesses, and businesses are becoming publishers. That’s leading to a lot of bland content marketing, but it’s also leading to news organizations that experiment with monetizing products and events instead of their writing, as well as innovative sort-of-journalism: companies that fill similar information needs to journalism except they’re not. It’s no longer newspapers and tv stations (even though those are still big), it’s a news ecosystem and it’s bigger than anything we’ve ever imagined. But maybe not bigger than it was before the advent of mass media. As The Economist mused in a recent report:

Until the early 19th century there was no technology for disseminating news to large numbers of people in a short space of time. It travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends. This phenomenon can be traced back to Roman times, when members of the elite kept each other informed with a torrent of letters, transcriptions of speeches and copies of the acta diurna, the official gazette that was posted in the forum each day. News travelled along social networks because there was no other conduit.

The upshot of which is that “technology is in many ways returning the industry to the more vibrant, freewheeling and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era.”

Maybe that’s not so bad.

Any big issues I’m forgetting?

If technology looks like a black box (quote)

2012-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

From memory, a quote from Joi Ito, speaking at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. Joi heads the MIT Media Lab.

Incremental innovation is not enough for the news industry. Videogames evolved from coin operated machines to cd-roms where you buy the game to subscription services and now virtual items online. And the reason the gaming industry has been able to change their model with the medium, time and time again, is because the people making the content are the same people writing the software. If technology looks like a black box, innovation becomes incremental. You’re stuck with proposals and consultants and powerpoints and all that bullshit. You don’t just need to put technology people and content people in the same room, they need to be the same person.

This Tech Bubble Is Different (quote)

2012-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

Jeff Hammerbacher, ex-Google and ex-Facebook, wonders whether we're still making stuff that matters

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

(Jeff Hammerbacher)

The E-Myth Revisited (review)

2012-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

It’s been a couple of years ago now, at the height of my infatuation with self-help literature, that I read Michael Gerber’s E-Myth. Horrible title, but Neil Giarratana had heartily recommended it during one of the best talks at a technical conference in Washington DC, so I just felt like I had to pick it up.

The E-Myth is a book about running your own venture, and in one pithy sentence, its advice is that you should work on your business, not in your business. You should run your business, any business, like a franchise. Why like a franchise? Because franchises invariably have a reliable, repeatable business strategy. Franchises need blueprints and recipes for everything, because you have to assume that less-than-perfect people will be running the show in many different places across the country or the world, and even if you wanted to, there’s no way to micromanage all of that.

Franchises have procedures that decide how everything gets done, and in the process of learning more about your business, you can tweak those procedures until they’re just right. When that’s done, your business will be just right too, regardless of whether you want to open up new stores or offices or not.

Working in your business is only worth as much as the time you put in. Working on your business pays for itself ten times over. Nobody survives years and years of the 80-hour workweeks so many small business owners feel they ought to put in, and the solution is less labor and more thought. Build a better business, don’t build everything that leaves your shop. Embrace your inner manager, so to speak.

The E-Myth is a book for small-business entrepreneurs, but I like to think it is just as poignant for those of us who don’t have our own business and don’t want to start one either, because the essence of the book is really about what modern businesses are like.

The 20th century was one big effort to turn work from something that just happened into something predictable and organized. Hierarchies keep the boss from having to keep an eye on every stupid little thing, and structure and procedures are the very things that allow a manager to manage.

We’ve all gotten used to disparaging the corporation and its endless layers of middle management, the pointless meetings, the meddling human resources department. What Michael Gerber does is explain it to us like “Frederick Taylor” would’ve done it a hundred years ago: with boundless excitement and a conviction that it will make everyone’s life much, much easier.

Gerber may not be wrong. A process-driven culture can bring out the best in people. If employees never have to worry about the little things like what they should start on first thing in the morning, where documents should be stored away, how to talk to customers, when to take care of a problem yourself and when to bother someone else… so much mental energy that would have been spent on trifles can instead be directed at stuff that’s actually useful. That’s as true for white collar jobs as it is for blue collar ones.

Heck, that’s a wonderful nugget of inspiration even on a personal level: well-chosen routines and rituals allow you to fly through the boring parts of life on autopilot, leaving all your energy for the fun stuff.

So before you get ready to piss on Frederick Taylor’s grave, think about it from that angle instead: don’t make people think about the stupid stuff.

The trouble with a rule-driven culture, of course, is that often it patently does not bring out the best in people. It kills innovation: workers are supposed to work, managers are supposed to manage, and permission to think is the privilege of the board and the executive team. In a franchise, if an employee has a great idea, she’ll have to sell it to upper management through a carefully defined employee feedback process — of course you need a process for that! — instead of, y’know, just giving it a go, relying on your wits to correct course and trying something else if where you end up is not where you wanted to be. Which has led to the almost absurd situations that make up a reality series like Undercover Boss and what makes that show so great to watch. Even if the modern workplace of the knowledge industry is not quite like a factory floor, everybody recognizes the kind of disconnect between what executives cook up and what the people doing the real work actually experience and know.

When do processes start killing creativity instead of enabling it? When is the trade-off not worth it anymore?

To me, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about building your business so that it reliably produces okayish results from okayish employees. Corporations, throughout the twentieth century, have thrived by cutting out risk and uncertainty. In the process, they’ve made it impossible for stupid employees to sink the company, but they’ve also made it impossible for bright people to make great stuff. Or for people to have much fun.

Aren’t the businesses we appreciate most, like 37signals and GitHub in the software industry, or the Anchor Brewing microbrewery described with much love in Bo Burlington’s book Small Giants exactly those that are very picky about hiring but afterwards let people free, inspiring them to produce great work not through a big book of rules but by instilling employees with a sense of shared purpose?

The challenge for 21st-century companies is to find ways to bring back some humanity and creativity to corporate life and cut the red tape without dismantling the structure that’s keeping these businesses in business. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

(Michael E. Gerber)

What happens? (comment)

2012-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

Andrew Phelps did a story recently about a bunch of MIT students rethinking the news. In response, Libby Brittain asked the question "What happens if you treat journalism as an engineering problem?"

What happens if you treat journalism as an engineering problem? I think lots of cool ideas would surface, but I don’t know if anything would happen per se.

This must be ironic coming from me, but I feel like there’s an absolute glut of ideas out there of how to improve the news experience and even on how to radically change what it means, but nothing ever happens, and then we move on to the next nice little idea, ad infinitum. It happened with the big “future of context” discussion, it happened with the post-CMS discussion last summer, it happened in the biz models discussion, it happened when we were talking about designing news to be used, and you’ll see exactly the same scenario play out in Jarvis’s recent thoughts about the story as assets and paths. We toy around with it, try to sell it to the organizations we work for, it doesn’t fly, we move on.

The Future of News crowd urgently needs to find better ways to turn our collective smarts and creativity into something good.

News articles as assets and paths (comment)

2012-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

Jeff Jarvis did a post recently thinking about how we can improve the news article by re-envisioning it as assets and paths that link those assets together, giving experienced readers a short path to the juicy parts and people new to the issue a context-rich experience with lots of background and explainer-type assets. It's an intriguing concept, but I don't think it does justice to the complexity involved in serving a diverse audience with varying levels of knowledge and many different perspectives.

I don’t know about this, Jeff. I don’t think assets and paths really get at the core of the issue.

Before you even start reading something, the first question you subconsciously ask is: should I care about this, is this something for me? Most people never come into contact with stories they don’t understand, because it’s easier to just skip over headlines that look weird.

The Facebook IPO bypassed a lot of people’s natural reflex to not read things we think we won’t understand, because (1) people are interested in Facebook in general and (2) the media has been hyping up this thing to no end without really considering whether it’s actually an important topic for a mainstream audience, leading people to consider reading a business story they otherwise simply wouldn’t touch.

But, okay, let’s continue the journey: people click through to the story. They see stuff they don’t understand. Terminology. What went before. Context. Why it matters. Ouch. Definitely, let’s try to find ways to fix that that don’t annoy readers that are more experienced with the subject.

At the same time, we’ll have to find a way to make people comfortable with the fact that we’re essentially presenting them with “hey, here’s the 10-step, 45-minute process you need to go through to understand this story.” I’m at work, on my lunch break, and I don’t even care about business journalism all that much, so bugger off.

But once we’ve solved the background knowledge problem and found a way to get people onto the page and keep them on it without them getting overwhelmed and fleeing, once we do all that, we will find that there’s a second and equally large stumbling block: different audiences care about the same topics for different reasons, and need a story that aligns with their perspective for things to really click.

Take the Nieman Lab for example, or your blog or mine. There’s no way to intelligently chunk up that content (whether or not it’s mixed up with external sources) to suit both people who have never heard about the challenges of digital media and those that have. These articles and posts are written from a certain perspective with a certain audience in mind, and that perspective is part of the writing, the individual asset, not something you can change by creating a different path through chunks of content. Unless you turn the path itself into a bonafide piece of content. In which case you’ve just created a well-researched story with links, not used the hyperlink to create a new story form.

The idea of treating stories like assets and paths only really comes to life in a scenario where the same pool of assets could be used in many different paths. While I can see some of that happening (it does already), my gut feeling is that to really serve our users well, it takes more than a custom path, it takes tailored assets too. There’s overlap and there are opportunities to avoid duplicated efforts, I’m just not sure the potential wins are huge.

Also, I wonder whether people really get as annoyed by background paragraphs as you fear they do. I just read a story somewhere that explained to me that CPM, in the context of advertising, stands for cost per mille. Does that bother me? No. I glance over it and go to the next paragraph. In fact, repeating obvious and well-known information is a literary device that’s often used in non-fiction, to establish a shared world before diving into the deep. It gets annoying if there’s a ton of that stuff, but in that case, I should have probably skipped the whole thing anyway.

Lastly, consider that the idea of assets and paths is what defines Delicious stacks, Bitly bundles and MentorMob playlists. I’d be interested to hear how you would move beyond those forms towards something that can really be a reinvention of the article.

It’s a really complex problem.

What does excite me is the fact that we’re thinking about this at all – and Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson have written excellent posts about “the future of context” that date back as far as two years ago, to which we can now add your contribution.

As you rightly point out, who cares if the post-article is something of a kludge and imperfect. The only thing that really matters is whether it’s better than what we have right now. It can’t be hard to beat the article.

Crimes against social (quote)

2012-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

About how badly companies understand social media, and how bad social media strategist are at advising those companies

“we love lemon cupcakes, what’s your favourite cupcake?”

If this were the conversational style of a real friend we would punch them repeatedly in the face.

(Richard Huntingdon)

Baseline of knowledge (comment)

2012-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

Daniel Bachhuber suggested that maybe news website should quiz users on their knowledge about complex topics, so they can (automatically) tailor stories and related content for each individual user.

The trouble is that people who don’t know anything about a topic might not even get as far as clicking on the link that takes them to the story. And then if they do, going through a quiz might be frustrating if they have absolutely no knowledge on the topic.

I think we need to start with something more basic, just to get going: an “in a nutshell” link at the start of every complex story that lays out what came before in a couple of clear bullet points, and links to background information if you want it.

And then once we’ve tackled that, track read state so you know when people are jumping into the middle of a story and automatically show/hide those nutshells / refreshers depending on what the user read earlier (and how long ago that was.)

Also really a fan of the Voice of San Diego and California Watch’s “why you should care” and “what’s next” boxes alongside stories. Context is about more than just what came before, after all.

Just some thoughts.

Fungible

2012-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

We don’t realize how much news media has changed in the past fifteen years. We really don’t.

I’m not talking about digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze. Yes, journalism has evolved and is better for it. I’m talking beyond that.

I’m not even talking about the fact that everyone is a potential publisher now, from white-hat PR by universities and non-profits to the advent of blogging by experts and academics (remember that iPhone antenna thing or the ground-zero mosque kerfuffle?) to citizen journalism and by-us-for-us journalism (even philosophers do it), even though that’s huge.

Beyond even that. I think journalism is being replaced.

New habits

We used to peruse the entertainment section of our favorite magazine for movie reviews and recommendations. Now most of us use IMDB or the recommendation engines behind Amazon and Netflix.

Same thing for music: people still find new music through Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, but services like Spotify and Rdio actually replace music journalism for many. More music and less bullshit. Better recommendations and you can start listening right away.

People who like to read about music, not just find good music, are a niche audience. Reading about music just happened to be one of the few ways to explore new music before the web, together with mixtapes or radio, so reading is what you did.

Digital communities of interest like the Telecaster Discussion Pages for guitar afficionados, The Fresh Loaf for amateur bakers and the Aquaponic Gardening community started out as merely the digital equivalent of meet-ups with like-minded people, but thanks to search engines these internet forums have become a type of mass communication too. You don’t even have to participate, you can just read a forum like you’d read a specialized publication or trade magazine. Which is, coincidentally, what a lot of hobbyists and professionals end up doing, to the detriment of stuffy niche media.

Quora looks like a simple Q&A site, but it’s also a reinvention of the ask-an-expert column you can find in almost any newspaper and magazine.

Reddit’s I Am A board, with threads like “I am an astronaut, ask me anything” and “I am an Australian nightclub bouncer, ask me anything,” looks like any other internet forum, but it is also what interviews and profiles can look like in the 21st century.

Wikipedia has, for pretty much everyone, replaced news organizations as the place where you go to get in-depth information about anything that didn’t happen today or yesterday.

SparkFun, an electronics store, does weekly video blogs detailing new products and neat electronics tricks. People eat it up. Would you call that content marketing or is SparkFun a media company that happens to make money through a store?

Curbed is a superb real-estate website. Is Curbed journalism because they started out with news and added a marketplace later? Conversely is SparkFun not journalism because they started out selling components and their video blogs came later? When does a blog or podcast or newsletter stop being content marketing and start being journalism with an innovative business model?

Make magazine is getting by because it’s insanely great, but many DIY magazines will be superseded by lo-fi YouTube tutorials filmed on webcams (like this one.)

LocalWiki and Pinwheel are places where people can collect knowledge about their neighborhoods. Follow the right people and organizations on Facebook and Twitter, and you’ll find out what’s happening close to you, straight from the source. LocalWiki, Pinwheel, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare clearly do not replace a good local newspaper, but they offer a combo that is increasingly becoming good enough.

And Facebook is disrupting the media industry on another front too: it’s offering better and cheaper forms of advertising to businesses than newspapers and news websites do. Advertisers don’t need us anymore. (This is the part of the disruption we saw coming as far back as 2005, when people were having all these “Craigslist killed journalism” conversations. It is also why editors tend to think of the news industry crisis in terms of “the advertising problem.”)

Newspapers have long been the only way to get your voice heard and get things fixed in your neighborhood. But now Open311 and EveryBlock do that. Why complain to a newspaper when you can talk to an alderman?

There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

This is not sharing cat pictures, this is stuff that matters. People can read the health section in their newspaper and get drip-fed badly researched advice about how to live a healthy life, or they can visit the NIH or the Mayo Clinic online, or create an account on one of the many bulletin boards about anything from fitness to dealing with cancer.

And then there’s comics, classifieds, job listings and all those other little things that were never the core of our value proposition but nevertheless a part of it, and we’ve had to give those up too, because other companies do them better.

Immense. The range of sites and services nibbling away at journalism is immense.

Steve Yelvington warned us back in 2009 that we were solving the wrong problem: “You’re not competing on the basis of whether you have unique news. You’re competing with the entire world on the basis of the value that consumers get out of your product.”

We haven’t found the right ways to get people to pay for news and media online, but they have. We are crying but they are having a party on the other side of the river with their not-really-reporting and sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.

Death by nibbles

I will repeat this because it’s important: YouTube nor Facebook or any of these other companies aim to be an alternative to journalism and much of what they facilitate or do doesn’t look like journalism at all. A good chunk of it contains written or spoken words, but sometimes not even that. It’s not journalism. But you’d be naive if you thought their services aren’t often consumed instead of news. It’s the same kind of functionality in a different package, after all, and that new package happens to be rather attractive a lot of the time.

My dad never reads music reviews, but he uses Spotify to find new music. My brother doesn’t subscribe to DRUM! Magazine but he’s seen every drum lesson YouTube has to offer.

Sure, if there’s more good media around (and more good sort-of-media) then people are likely to simply read more stories and participate in more communities. Win-win for both startups and old media. But there’s a limit to our appetite, and every minute spent on Facebook is one not spent on a news site.

Why young people don’t care

There’s a whole slew of research trying to figure out why young adults consume so little news, or consume it in such an erratic way. Most of it, like that of the AP (PDF), the NAA and Amy Zerba, tries to find the culprit in how we write or present the news: too much of it, too little context, overwhelming, presented in a way that does not make sense to a generation who grew up with the internet, not optimized for the devices they use.

Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper.

The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

It sneaks up on you

A movie review on Amazon is not Roger Ebert, and if you’d ask any avid reader, they’d all tell you that the one isn’t even comparable to the other and that they’d never even consider getting their entertainment criticism on Amazon or through a cold, anonymous recommmendation engine on Netflix. Yet that’s exactly what so many Americans are doing now. Nobody makes any sort of conscious decision to stop reading entertainment journalism and arts criticism. It just turns out that way.

Small upstarts in unappealing markets end up overtaking the big molochs in an established market with what was initially considered to be an inferior product. Gee, sounds familiar.

But what makes the news industry such a curious case is that many of the disruptors who address the same underlying consumer needs nevertheless do something that is not recognizable as journalism at all. (Though some of it is.) Is Quora journalism? Is Foursquare?

We’re living through a much more radical shift from narrative and stories and reporting to entirely different and entirely unrelated ways of sharing knowledge.

People used to ask Adrian Holovaty whether EveryBlock should be considered journalism. First he said yes. Then he switched to who cares? Allow me to rephrase: “No it isn’t, but who cares?”

The news industry hasn’t imploded wholesale because it isn’t quite useless, not yet. Roughly a quarter of all adults in the US would be upset if their local newspaper disappeared, according to 2012 research by Pew. Down from more than 40% in 2009, but still.

People still value journalism. Sort-of-maybe-not-media companies are slowly nibbling at part of the value proposition of traditional news media. There’s parts we still like. The sheer joy of reading. The importance of investigative journalism to democracy. The straightforward way in which it keeps us up to date on many, many topics. (Sometimes, anyway.)

People just don’t value journalism as much as journalists do.

How to survive

Once you start looking at news media through the lens of fungibility and with sort-of-media in mind, it’s actually quite easy to see where opportunities remain.

Amp up storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable. This American Life, for instance, or The Awl.
Acknowledge that you provide less value than you used to, downsize and capitalize on scale. What national newspapers are doing, albeit unwittingly.
Join the revolution. Adrian Holovaty comes from journalism, but EveryBlock isn’t journalism.
People read because they’re bored. Un-bore them, like Gawker does.
Write to people’s passion, and they will gobble up just about anything. MacRumors and many other niche sites do this.
Do stuff that does still matter. People are happy to support ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

Notice that I didn’t mention digital-first or social data crowdjournalism or anything like that? Wonder why? Because the entire point is that journalism is not being disrupted by better journalism but by things that are hardly recognizable as journalism at all. Stepping up your game is always a good idea, but it won’t save you.

Chasing quality

The most important reason the news industry is in a pickle is because people aren’t getting much value out of our writing, documentaries and newscasts. We only occassionally sit down to really enjoy and savour journalism. More often we use it to procrastinate at work – which the populist in me frankly believes is a much better explanation for the fact that we consume so much crime, celebrity and weird news, viz. because we’re just looking for a distraction, not, as the most commonly proffered explanation would have it, because each and every one of us is retarded.

I’m confident that strong digital players like The Guardian and the New York Times and Digital First Media will survive. I’m less confident that they’ll ever thrive.

I mean, we’re congratulating The Guardian for losing money online, NYT because its paywall isn’t the crash-and-burn we expected it to be, and because the Journal Register Company is in the black. If you don’t go out of business, you’re a hero.

We have all been so focused on the quality issue: the fact that we’re still doing journalism like we used to do it fifty years ago, that there haven’t been any exciting new news formats since PolitiFact, that there’s a ridiculous lack of context for news stories online, which together with the fragmentation of readership is a disaster. It’s a disaster, and I intend to keep writing and ranting about all three of those issues.

But if people tell you, as they did assistant professor Amy Zerba’s research assistants, that they hate not being able to multitask when reading a newspaper, does that mean we should try to find ways to make it easier for readers to multitask, or is it simply a symptom of people not caring all that much about the news? And does that in turn mean they just don’t care about stuff in general anymore and have become jaded and uninterested in politics and world news (for which there is some evidence), or is there more to it and are people perhaps getting their information needs met in other, more convenient or more exciting ways?

Are we trying to get better at something that doesn’t matter anymore? Perhaps we should take the best traditions of journalism and do something entirely new with it. Whatever we are doing now is not working.

The future

It’s a testament to the enormous value newspapers must have provided to readers before the internet if, even after twenty years of seeing the value proposition of news media sucked away by other media and services, for so many people, even young people, visiting a news site is still the first thing they do every morning. Even the printed newspaper is not disappearing overnight. It’s a long way down.

I’m sure traditionalists are right when they say that media ten years from now will look surprisingly similar to what it is today. Maybe we won’t be printing news on paper anymore, at least not daily, but that’s a minor detail if anything is.

Things won’t stay the same forever, though, and an industry can’t survive on symbolic capital alone – grand talk about democracy and the Fourth Estate. If things that are not journalism entertain, inform and facilitate agency better than things that are, don’t bet on journalism to thrive.

I work for a newspaper and I think about how to reinvent newspapers and reassert their relevance all the time. And people are consuming more news than ever, so we must be doing something right. My guess, though? Most innovation in media and most of the revenue and most of the value will come not from the incumbents and not even from news startups, but from people who unwittingly stumble into producing media as the solution to another problem.

News will be news. But the ecosystem will explode, and traditional media companies will only be a tiny part of it. If you think about it, that’s already sort of true right now.

Young Traditionalists (quote)

2012-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Students are told from even before they walk on campus that being a journalist means Being a Good Writer, Being a Good Editor, Being a Good Photographer. No one is telling them they could be an application developer, or a data journalist, or a media entrepreneur. Or if they have heard it, that voice is getting drowned out by traditionalists. A disturbing amount of time, the traditionalists drowning those students out are other students.

(Matt Waite)

A hard-knock life

2012-01-10T00:00:00+01:00

Humans are storytellers. It’s in our genes. It’s our default setting.

We tell stories all the time. For free. Not out of idealism or anything, but because that’s what we do. We write because we think, and we think because we are. That’s why blogs are so popular, why people use twitter and internet forums and why every organization you can possibly think of has its own newsletter.

Humans are also, as a rule, very curious about what’s going on around them.

Our curiosity and our love of storytelling are what makes a reporter’s job so damn appealing. Telling stories is wonderful, and knowing things others don’t carries prestige. Which leads people to be storytellers and sometimes journalists even if they’re not getting paid, or not getting paid all that much. It also leads so many of us to consider a career in a field that can be downright grueling.

The prestige associated with journalism also leads otherwise very smart people to start news outfits without really caring too much about whether they can make it work as a business. A big chunk of the media orgs that have seen the light of day in the past five or ten years are born out of idealism and passion, fostered by people who would keep on doing journalism even if they weren’t getting paid at all.

When we ask ourselves why it seems difficult to fund (some kinds of) news organizations, here’s an answer we should consider: that most news organizations, especially some of the newer ones, aren’t businesses, not really, not in spirit.

The goal for many web-era news outlets isn’t making money, the goal is having fun and doing something worthwhile. Sometimes they try to close a gap in the news coverage. Fix some perceived lack in reporting standards that needs immediate remedial action. Bring water to a news desert. But a gap in reporting is not, in fact, necessarily also a gap in the market.

Journalism is not an easy business to be in, because we want to be in it even if it’s not. Journalism is not an easy business to be in because we go for it and try to make things work when all the signs tell us we shouldn’t even bother.

People care about the news. They want to pay for it. They want the light stuff and the deep stuff too. They just don’t want as much of it as we — journalists and media makers — produce. But we forge ahead and produce it anyway. We love journalism so much we create supply without demand.

Media professionals are starting to find out ways to make journalism profitable again after the digital disruption, heaven be praised. But not everybody can turn their hobby or even their journalism degree into a job. We will never find ways to make it easy for every writer and every publisher to make money.

Journalism is a cutthroat industry. The wages are lousy. Don’t expect that to ever be different.

Paywall logic (quote)

2012-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

Most people don't use your news site enough to want to pay for it. By putting up a paywall, you don't just lose them as readers but also as eyeballs to advertisers. This is why only the most permeable paywalls have any chance of success.

If you won’t give us any money, we won’t show you any ads!

(Clay Shirky)

Just passing through (quote)

2012-01-03T00:00:00+01:00

[What] is the style of reporting you want to be doing if you are just passing through on your way to some place more cosmopolitan? If you see your performance in Anytown, USA as an extended audition for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post, then you will try to do Inquirer journalism in Greensboro. But maybe that’s not what Greensboro needs.

(Jay Rosen)

Return of the Brands

2012-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Advertising is done with. Our readers hate it, and marketeers are starting to hate it too. There are better ways to reach customers than with banners and billboards. And so ad spends are going down, down, down. Ninety percent of all discussions about new business models in media, beneath the surface, boil down to this: help me, advertising isn’t paying the bills anymore.

Let me back up and explain the ad-supported business model for news in a couple of sentences.

The first thing to realize is that, since the 20th century or so, people have never been willing to pay for good journalism. A good newspaper is worth maybe half a cup of coffee to a reader, but certainly not more.

Complaining has never saved a business, and so instead of whining about the ignorance of the hoi polloi and their unwillingness to pay for journalism, instead newspaper executives sneakily redefined their business as selling eyeballs to advertisers. A substantially more profitable business to be in. The pocket change you shlep out for a subscription is primarily meant to prove to advertisers that you actually care about what you’re reading and won’t just throw it away like a flyer or spam mail. Advertisers care about that sort of thing, because if you’re not an engaged reader, the advertising gets lost too. But subscription revenue is not the point.

Most newspapers get anywhere from fifty to eighty percent of their income from advertisements, and of course, free metro papers get all of it from ads.

When newspapers are actually a service to advertisers and not readers, people running newspapers have to start thinking in different ways. Videlicet: how can I, publisher, sell the most and the most expensive advertising, while spending as little as I can on good writing?

If you sack your senior city hall reporter and that costs you a hundred subscriptions, but it saves you $40,000 a year and doesn’t really bother the advertisers, then why not? If advertorials are upsetting your readers, but not enough for them to actually switch to your competitor, is that really a problem?

Economic optimization of the newsroom and ad-supported journalism go hand in hand.

You could cry and pout all day about how commercialism is destroying newspapers, but it is how it is: readers don’t pay for journalism, advertisers do, so advertisers hold the strings.

But here’s the thing. Advertising is waning. A couple of percents each year, ad expenditures are going down. Upswings happen, but they’re freak events. Plus, the ad money that remains is moving away from newspapers to other outlets. So we have to figure out a new business model that isn’t ads.

Getting people to actually pay for our content at full price is tricky. Even paywalls don’t go that far, and paywalled news websites merrily show you a shit-ton of ads even after you’ve paid over a hundred dollar for a year of digital access. Same for dead-tree editions, of course: that big subscription fee does not entitle you to an ad-free printed newspaper.

There are other, partial, solutions – ways to make money with journalism. Not enough, but enough to get started.

Some organizations have reported great success with organizing real-life events, others are monetizing workshops that teach local businesses how to use social media, some make money with Kindle and books and yet others ask readers to sponsor (not pay for) their enterprise reporting on a per-story level.

All these new business models have something in common: they allow you to make money because people respect your newspaper, your brand. And the more they respect your brand, the better you can monetize it.

The New York Times can sell their Manual of Style and Usage to the general public but the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in Montana can’t.

You can teach businesses how to get their act together online, but not if your own website is horrible.

Your events can be the talk of the town (and cheap for you to organize, with all those journalists and their rolodexes) or they can be “that pathetic thing our pathetic newspaper is pathetically trying to get us to attend.”

There’s no reason for people to come to your newsroom café instead of any other bar unless they genuinely appreciate what you’re doing.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Trust. Community. Fun.

When advertising slips below the symbolic 50% revenue line, news organizations will see that they have to start caring about their readers again. Not because the executives at the top aren’t ice-cold capitalists – they are – but because it will make business sense again to make you, the reader, happy, when it didn’t make business sense before.

When advertising wanes, selling a mediocre product for next to nothing to boost circulation is not a valid business model anymore, and instead, trusted news brands gain in importance. Maybe ten years from now, we can start being proud of the news we put out again.

Taxonomies don't matter anymore

2011-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Taxonomies and tags are a way to connect people to content they care about. They rise to the surface through faceted search, site navigation and related content widgets. I am no longer convinced they’re very good at their job. (I used to be.) Maybe for libraries but not for news websites, anyway.

Let me explain, step by step, why categorization is becoming ever less useful, especially the formal, well-defined, crafted-to-stand-the-test-of-time approach to categorization we call taxonomy.

(Or you can also scroll down to “What we do need” to read, well, what we do need.)

Taxonomies drive navigation

They can, but they don’t need to. It’s perfectly possible to have sections be simple buckets that you push stories to, and those buckets can change organically over time as your editorial priorities change. This year you can have a Presidential Candidates bucket and a Euro-Crisis bucket and an Arab Spring bucket and next year you can have different ones to fit whatever you feel is most important. Section pages only house a couple days’ worth of content anyway, so your categories don’t have to withstand the test of time to be useful.

But then what about our archives, you say? We have search engines for that. Search engines can sometimes fail to find important stories, you say? So can the indexers that categorize your stories. And your readers are just looking for a couple of stories related to topics they care about anyway, they don’t care about an exhaustive repository.

Taxonomies improve search

Actually, caring about search improves search. The reason the search engines on our news websites suck isn’t because we’re not tagging things properly or because we don’t have enough metadata to make them work, it’s because we’re too stupid to devote any time or resources to doing great search.

I outlined a ton of tricks news websites can use to improve their search engine in my Findability and Exploration blogpost twenty months ago. I still think those tips are really good. It’s just that nobody’s trying them.

Tags in any form or shape are excellent at driving search and navigation in repositories that contain very little text: photos (Flickr), links (Delicious), contacts (Highrise), all that stuff. No argument there. Doesn’t apply to stories.

Taxonomies drive content recommendations

The best content recommendations on news websites are inside of the body copy: inline links. With recommendations, you never know what you’re getting. It’s mystery meat. With links, a writer tells you why she’s pointing at something the moment she’s pointing at it.

Automated recommendation engines are mainly useful as cute but non-essential pageview drivers and if your journalists are too lazy to add links.

Taxonomies make topic pages smarter

Topic pages aren’t generally shit because we’re not annotating our content with enough whateveritis or because the world cannot be represented in machine-readable form (though there’s that too), they’re shit because we treat them like shit: we never update them, we never care for them, and the only resources they get are computer resources.

Likewise, our mapping and timelining efforts often suck because we fail to commit the time a dev or a journalist would need to do them right, so everything gets pushed into ugly semi-automated quasi-solutions.

We come to topic pages for an encyclopedia-like overview of events and issues, and to get quick links to the most pertinent content. A way to catch up to big stories when you feel behind. We don’t come to topic pages for automatically aggregated sort-of-relevant content with no editorial guidance as to what’s important and what’s not.

Sometimes, you just have to do things by hand, in prose.

Taxonomies allow users to easily subscribe to particular topics

Taxonomies also allow us to inundate users with text alerts and digests when really what they want is not a firehose but meaningful updates when they make sense. There is really no way to sidestep curation unless we don’t care that we’re annoying our users.

What is more frustrating to me than a lack of solid content categorization is that there is no single CMS out there that allows you to indicate follow-ups, updates, series, retractions, corrections and responses. Now that would be interesting metadata and it’d really allow us to keep readers in the loop and give them updates to stories they care about. Much more useful than telling me that this story is an education story and that that story is about air travel.

Taxonomies allow for alternative ways of browsing

The best taxonomies come in bunches: one for topics, one for genre, one for organizations, one for people, one for… anything you’d like. Mood, for example: you could collect all sit-down-and-relax longform stories, all whimsical ones and all serious ones, so people could view different stories depending on what mood they’re in.

Thing is, we’re already enabling alternative ways of browsing, and we’ve found a way to do it that’s much quicker and much more fun than meticulously tagging all our content. It’s called curation.

What we do need

What it boils down to is this: when you’re building a news site or a news application, categorization is not one of those no-brainers that you can just assume will be necessary, but instead is something that you have to figure out as part of your content modeling. (Which is why thinking of a news site as a confederation of apps makes so much sense: you cannot do proper content modeling for massive news sites, but you can for individual beats.) Taxonomies don’t get a free pass. They must prove their usefulness to the task at hand, just like every other tool we use to structure, annotate and enrichen content.

The kind of categorization efforts we can sensibly commit to will therefore likely be simple, direct, focused. Not complex, not large, not all-encompassing, not, in other words, taxonomies.

When we do need complex hierarchies of content or unusual ways of bundling stories together, ontologies and domain models embedded in news applications are there to help us out.

Play to your strengths

But there’s an even more important lesson news orgs can learn. For so long now, technology and journalism have been fighting each other. We’ve been continually asking journalists to do things they’re not comfortable with. Some of that has been and will remain perfectly justified. But one of the quickest, easiest, most fool-proof ways of making a news website that kicks ass is to play to journalists’ strengths instead.

Journalists suck at tagging, but they can usually write awesome explainers and background pieces, point to previous coverage everyone should know about and collect bunches of interesting related content for specific audiences. It’s not just that they can, they love it.

You can do a lot of contextualization with technology, but you can also do it with people and do it better.

I haven’t been building software that plays to journalists’ strengths. I’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem.

The question I’ll be asking myself in the coming months is: how can I build technology that helps journalists do their job and technology that supports them in areas where they are weak? Better search, so they can actually find the archive content they want to link to in their latest coverage. Sourcing tools like Squire or the Nieman Lab’s Fuego. Browser extensions. Wiki software that doesn’t suck, so reporters don’t have to struggle to bring context to the news.

I won’t be working on automation and repurposing. It’s because of automation, not in spite of it, that news websites suck. It doesn’t make economic sense anyway.

No more mediocrity

For the past fifteen years, we’ve been training our readers to get used to mediocre experiences online. Just look at any news website, any page.

Taxonomies, metadata and structured data can either be used to make those mediocre experiences cheaper to produce, or to make really great experiences. It’s up to us to choose which path to take. The approach is very much different even if the toolkit is the same.

Stepping away from mediocrity, for me, means putting power back in the hands of the newsroom. To make that happen, I’ll be building prosthetics, not machines.

Journalists' right (quote)

2011-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Kara, Wall Street Journal columnist and All Things Digital co-exec, said this a couple of months ago at a journalism roundtable. This is from memory so may not be verbatim.

Journalists feel like they have a right not to have economic realities (en)forced upon them.

(Kara Swisher)

Battling banner blindness

2011-11-22T00:00:00+01:00

Banner blindness is at close to 50% for internet ads. I wonder how long it’s going to take most newspapers to realize that we need to reinvent how businesses connect with our users, because banner ads are just not working out. At all.

I simply cannot believe that there isn’t a way to tell people about new products and services and special deals without pissing them off. After all, at the right times and in the right quantities, we want to know about the new furniture store that opened up just outside downtown, next month’s concerts at the arena and the new flavor of Doritos. The problem is not that we hate advertising, the problem is that we hate the kind of advertising we get.

People are generally okay with commercial information, but they don’t want to be bombarded with it and they don’t want to learn about your Friday special through a screaming, distracting graphic. Why don’t we do things like this instead:

One promising alternative to banner ads, it seems to me, is a revival of the good old-fashioned sponsorship and the copywriting behind it.

If readers and viewers are ignoring visually intensive advertisements, the last thing we should do is to try and make our ads stand out. Instead, we should incorporate them in the content in a way that doesn’t violate our journalistic integrity. Which is a pretty good description of how sponsorships worked in the early days of radio and how they sometimes still work: the host thanks the sponsor, either the host or the sponsor describes what they’re selling in one or two sentences, add a jingle, and that’s that.

Sponsorships — as an ad format — have three advantages over banners.

The announcement of the sponsor is either part of the lede (for text) or the intro for broadcast radio or video — that is, it’s integrated in the content, not something you have to sit through in order to get to the content. That means consumers can’t easily skip the advertisements, but the short length of these messages also means they’re not so annoying that you’d actually want to skip them.
Sponsorship messages put the onus on businesses to think really hard about how to make themselves interesting to your audience; if the business owner or the presenter can’t make your company or product sound interesting in two honest sentences, without the help of whiz-bang advertising, then that says a lot. Conversely, a non-existent creative budget won’t lead to the ghoulishly ugly ads that local news websites currently have to cope with. The Deck also works this way: “Sell us something relevant to our audience and we’ll sell you an ad.”
The relationship between the money that comes in and the realization of the program is also much clearer, whereas for an ad you usually don’t make the connection between advertiser and “the guys that make this thing possible”.

I’ve also been really enamored by the ironic take on product placement on Stephen Colbert’s show in the past few years: his purported love for Doritos and Ben & Jerry’s has been so over-the-top that the advertising is immediately obvious, turning it from subliminal trickery into something more like “hey, Doritos is my sponsor, they deserve some advertising, and let’s be honest, these chips aren’t so bad are they?”

Colbert’s sell is respectful to both the advertiser and the audience; he’s not trying to kid you into thinking that these are the best tortilla chips on earth, he’s just asking you to consider buying a packet, as a courtesy to the sponsor that’s making this show possible. Not every news organization can get away with ironic product placement, but most of us can start emulating that balanced, honest tone.

Sponsorship messages on radio shows, especially the way they used to be done in the thirties and forties, have an aesthetic value and an authenticity to them a precision-engineered banner ad simply does not have. It doesn’t say “BUY MORE DIET PEPSI.” It says “Hey guys, we make this product which we think you may like, feel free to check us out and enjoy the show (or enjoy this great story), like we will.”

Advertising (quote)

2011-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

Should Wikipedia have ads?

Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things: (1) A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume OR (2) A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product.

(nupark2)

Who we enable (quote)

2011-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

[We] shouldn’t focus so much on what we do as much as what we enable, who we impact and what comes from all that.

(Greg Linch)

Frictionless

2011-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

Two different payment models have really impressed me lately: Kickstarter and Kindle.

Kickstarter impresses me because it so potently shows the value of authenticity. Artists and writers and journalists talk about the cool stuff they’re working on, and their enthusiasm is simply contagious. On some pages, it’s hard not to contribute right away. In just the past two or three months I’ve supported Zombies, Run!, Last Two-Step in Texas, Lauren Ipsum and A Thousand Thank Yous, four very cool projects.

My credit card is suffering, but that’s a small price for that fuzzy warm feeling, the feeling that you’re a part of something bigger.

But there’s more to Kickstarter. Each project has a goal, the amount of money the artist needs to complete the work. You only pay once enough people have chipped in to reach the goal. If there’s not enough support, nobody pays.

As a commenter over at Hacker News said last month: Kickstarter is hacking the tragedy of the commons. I would have never payed twelve dollars to support Parallel Print Shop’s purchase of a big old letterpress without some kind of assurance that they’d actually use the money to pay for the press, and that they’d have enough backers to actually do that. And I certainly would never pay a random stranger sixty-five bucks for a book that doesn’t yet exist, but with Lauren Ipsum that’s exactly what I did. Sending money into the void is uncool, and Kickstarter cleverly assures you that’ll never happen. (Projects can fail of course, but nobody will ever just mysteriously disappear with your money.)

The cherry on top for Kickstarter is that, after playing to our sense of wanting to belong to something bigger, after making us all excited about the project, it makes things just a little bit sweeter by appealing to our selfish side as well: oh, by the way, if you sponsor this project you’ll also get one of these very cool rewards. And that seals the deal.

Kickstarter is superb social design and something news organizations, both non-profit and for-profit, can learn a lot from.

We’re used to doing the whole “without us, democracy is doomed” shtick, but scaremongering and overinflating our own importance rarely leads people to reach for their wallet. Telling people that they should pay, because content is valuable and they’re a bunch of gosh darned freeloaders, well, nope, that doesn’t help either.

Getting people to care about your writers and their work, that’s the first step. Make them want to pay you.

Authenticity. Good-natured fun. Being part of something bigger. Getting appreciation for giving. Excitement. That’s Kickstarter.

The Amazon Kindle and Kindle Store has a more traditional approach. They’ve made the whole purchasing and delivery process so frictionless that you’re bound to do impulse buys: an age-old marketing trick. The good kind of impulse buys, mind you, the kind you end up loving more than you’d thought.

Even though it’s based on simple impulse buying, Kindle is intriguing because the crucial second ingredient that it adds is that it gets you away from your computer.

Reading on a computer is either a harried experience or a part of wanderings across the web that go anywhere and everywhere, with constant distractions from your email, your Facebook and your twitter accounts. I’ve noted before that such a hyperkinetic environment isn’t conducive to getting people to buy anything at all, no matter how easy it is.

With a Kindle, you get the good old-fashioned reading experience of a paperback or a good magazine, which is the kind of relaxed emotional state publishers want you to be in when they are peddling their wares. It’s leaning back in a comfy chair that gets you buying, and it’s the great e-ink reading experience that keeps you buying.

Another way Kindle works (for me) is through vastly limiting my choices, but again: in a good way.

Let’s face it, even news curators don’t help us a lot with information overload, because we just end up using ten different curators in addition to a ton of “regular” content providers and then there’s those endless tweets to keep track of too. Curation adds to the overdose instead of making masses of information easier to grapple with.

Magazines and Singles on Kindle battle information overload with a good dose of retro: just pick a magazine you like (my favorite thus far is Slate), buy it for a buck or so, sit down, trust in their selection, read it from cover to back and feel happy that, despite the deluge of information out there, you’ve managed to read a very fine selection of stories indeed, and managed to finish them. (Finishability is the next big thing, I feel it.) Yes, those same stories are available online for free. Even more of them in fact. But that’s not the point. The experience is different, and the return to editors as gatekeepers, while it’d be a stupid move online, is a refreshing experience once you’re away-from-keyboard. Sometimes we do need to act like digital space is expensive, even though it’s free.

The Kindle lesson is: think about more than just the content you offer. Think of the experience you’re trying to create, and look for platforms that will help you create that experience.

The corollary to that lesson is that we, as an industry, are still clueless about how people are reading the news, when they’re enjoying it and when not. We need more ethnographic reports like the one the Associated Press did in 2008.

When we do research, we don’t necessarily need to figure out what people think they need or like. The very basics will do: how do potential news consumers act when at home, what do their days and evenings look like, and how could our products fit into those routines. We think we know but we’re often blind about our own behaviors let alone those of others.

Our websites and newspapers aren’t as good as they could be because we don’t have a clue how people read.

Kickstarter and Kindle are fascinating platforms that news organizations can leverage and profit from. But they’re also models that we can learn from. Make payment frictionless, think about the experience and not just the content you’re selling, make people feel a part of something bigger, don’t force people to pay but infect them with your own enthusiasm and passion so they want to pay, and realize that doing and offering less is a selling point.

Eye-opening (quote)

2011-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

The Guardian's Emily Bell about why it's not true that talking with readers takes time away from reporting and writing.

The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it.

(Emily Bell)

Paralysis (quote)

2011-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Do you know what it’s called when you lose all sense of touch? It’s called paralysis, and they push you around in a wheelchair while you calculate black hole radiation.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best.

(Bret Victor)

37% there

2011-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

The Columbia Journalism Review just published Dean Starkman’s Confidence Game. Read it — it’s a skeptical take on the “future of journalism” crowd and our vision.

I’m skeptical too, the other way around.

Something that’s bothered me for a while is that most proponents of good ol’ journalism defend it by setting up a straw man, not of their opponents’ position but of their own, which they sell thusly: vintage journalism, made from one hundred percent pure investigative reporting. According to Starkman, public-interest reporting is “the point”.

To warm us up to this idea, Dean tells the wonderful story of how Ida Tarbell took on big oil in the early 20th century, leading to the dissolution of the Standard Oil monopoly a few years before the Great War. This is real journalism, this is the good stuff. It’s impossible to disagree, and why would you want to anyway? It’s not like Ida herself can disagree either, and yell something like “damn, this liveblogging stuff is hot.” She can’t because she is dead.

The argument breaks down not because it’s an appeal to emotion, but because it conflates x is good y with y has to be x to be any good. Gypsy jazz is good music, some people think it’s the best kind, but music doesn’t have to be gypsy jazz to be any good.

Investigative reporting is important, but it’s not the only kind of important journalism out there. According to the Knight Foundation’s report on the information needs of communities, we have a need to coordinate, solve problems, establish systems of public accountability and develop a sense of connectedness. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says journalists have to be authenticators, sense-makers, navigators and forum-leaders. On those criteria, criteria that can hardly be said to come from future-of-newsies, enterprise reporting like that of Ida scores 1/4 and 2/4. That’s 37% there, almost half of what we need to put out a solid news product. If we stop there, you get an organization like Amnesty International, whom I actually donate to, but they’re not a media company, I don’t think. So would you mind us searching for the other half?

There’s irony here: Starkman complains that people looking to reinvent journalism always bring up the same five or six success stories, and then proceeds to make a case that goes something like “I mean, wasn’t Watergate kick-ass journalism, though? More of that stuff, is all I’m saying.”

Now, if you’re under the delusion that all journalism is investigative reporting or aspiring to be investigative reporting or reporting that was not allowed a fair chance to develop into an investigation, you’re bound to make a couple of very funny conclusions about how the news industry should work.

For example, when talking about the mantra that readers often know more than journalists, Dean simply counters that for most enterprise stories, like the News of the World scandal, this isn’t the case. And when evaluating the oft-repeated statement that content has become a commodity, his response is predictably that enterprise reporting is unique, expensive and valuable.

To make this counter work, of course, he has to ignore

academic reports and books that lay out how pervasive imitation and rewrites are and have long been in the news industry, and how even before the internet, newspapers were on a course towards homogenization
the fact that j-schools train reporters to be generalists that can cover any kind of topic moderately well
the dozens of reporters that float around important officials at any time of day, begging for a soundbite
seats at press conferences, all filled with journalists that will report on exactly the same thing in exactly the same way.

All of these are facts that hold even for the golden age of journalism. Calling news a commodity, not because we like it but because it’s unfortunately the way things are, how dare we.

When Jeff Jarvis argues that it’s damn hard to make money from journalism by getting people to pay for it, Dean responds that the collapse of the advertising model doesn’t imply the editorial model was failed, and that’s entirely correct. But does our perennial reliance on advertising not also tell us that readers commonly value content less than what it costs us to make it?

I love long-form journalism and I think every newspaper needs more investigative reporting than they have now. I think Dean is right that small operations and bloggers can’t do everything a big news organization can. I believe paywalls can work sometimes, even though they impede conversation. I think print has a future, and so do a lot of other not very sexy models. Most importantly, I feel very strongly that we’re asking journalists to churn out too much content at too fast a pace, and, what’s more, that the pseudo-journalism a lot of reporters are asked to produce is an insult to their professional honor.

It’s just that I have no idea how any of that implies that journalists should go easy on social media (time better spent reporting, apparently), that good pro/am collaborations are and will always be the Pegasi of news, that personal branding is silly, that free can never be the basis of a business model, that lots of text is always the best way to report on current events, that reporters can only waste time talking to their readers and that news has value even if people won’t pay and won’t read.

The first set of facts has absolutely no relationship to the second. That’s ultimately why I feel Dean Starkman’s exposition holds no water: as much as I appreciate some kickback to opinions perhaps too forcefully held, his arguments don’t say what he wants them to say.

Give me a strategy and I'll show you a success

2011-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

Want to know what works in news?

Instantaneous (Al Jazeera’s liveblogs) or old news (any newspaper) or even older news (The Economist)
Print-first (most student newspapers) or digital-first (it has saved the Journal Register papers) or even newsletter-first (DailyCandy and tons of B2B)
Quality (The New York Times) or good-enough (Gawker, free Metro papers around the world)
News from all over the place (HuffPo) or unique coverage (McSweeneys, The New Republic)
Social (Hacker News, reddit) or algorithmic (Google News) or editorial (Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish)
Professional (every newspaper) or amateur (Evanston Now, Berkeleyside) or by students (The Local East Village)
Mobile-first (arguably The Wall Street Journal) or no mobile at all (most local and rural papers)
Niche (TechCrunch) or subculture-based (Monocle) or something for everyone (Sunday papers)
Paywall (The Financial Times, Mediapart) or porous and metered (Morris among others), contributor memberships (MetaFilter) or free (many, many others)
Service-driven (Curbed) or community-driven (Davis Wiki) or format-driven (Politifact) or story-driven (Harper’s)
Collaboration (California Watch plus its many partners) and competition (any country with more than one national broadsheet)
Non-profit (MinnPost) or for-profit (The Batavian)
Short (Newser) or long (Slate) or longer (ProPublica’s Kindle Singles)
Being a technology company (The Texas Tribune), meticulous about metadata (The Guardian) or neither (any and all bloggers)
Opinionated (Techdirt) or even biased (FoxNews or IndyMedia) or dryly factual (BBC News)

Give me a facet and I’ll give you success stories from all over the spectrum. Business successes and editorial ones.

People always look for the one best solution. Fact is, you can make just about anything work if you’re smart about it.

Getting it

2011-10-30T00:00:00+02:00

As much as I love new stuff, I’m your archetypical late adopter. I don’t have a smartphone and I don’t think I’ll ever get a tablet. I started using twitter just a couple of months ago. My MP3 player is seven years old and it’s not an iPod. I started using the Delicious bookmarking tool at precisely the moment everybody decided social bookmarking was passé. I write all my blogposts in TextEdit.

All in all, I sympathize with the old farts in the newsroom. A liveblog here and a Google map there isn’t suddenly going to turn you into a better reporter.

What does worry me, though, is that many journalists seem to define their jobs in an oddly circular way: journalism is what journalists do. Hence, to be a good journalist, you should emulate what good journalists did before you, or more specifically, how they wrote. And because the best journalists ten and twenty years ago didn’t know the first thing about statistics, never used an RSS reader to keep track of their beat and surely didn’t care about engaging with their readers, why should we?

But by imitating the best journalism of yesterday without a full understanding of why that journalism was great and what made it so powerful, our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair.

If accountability journalism is your thing, why do you not know how to use Excel and Google Fusion Tables? If awareness is what it’s about, then why are you so afraid of using twitter to reach out to people? If it’s important for your job to keep up with the latest happenings in the music industry, how can you not realize how much easier RSS will make things for you?

I don’t believe there’s a great digital divide between journalists and techies. I believe there’s a great divide between those who merely do journalism, and those who get it. Between people who want to write and people who want to be reporters. If you get journalism, you won’t allow a little uneasiness around computers or a lack of mathematical aptitude to faze you and keep you from being a better journalist. If there’s an obstacle preventing you from giving your readers the kind of reporting you feel they deserve, you’ll pick up whatever tool will help you to do a better job and you’re not going to rest until you get it. And if you don’t find the right tool, then you try your best with the tools you’ve got, like liveblogging by constantly updating that same post, cajoling a tech friend into helping you out with that Google map or keeping in touch with readers over email if your boss won’t let you use social media.

Conversely, we can do without the gadgeteers and the fakers. A lot of the journalists that use twitter nowadays stupidly use it as a cheap way to get quotes from readers without having to leave the comfort of their chair. Or they ask the graphics department for a flashy infographic because interactive visuals look so pretty. That’s technology too. It’s just not very interesting.

It’s that old cliché, courtesy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Get people excited about being better journalists, show them how technology helps them reach that goal, and the luddites will be luddites no more.

Prototyping with Draughtsman

2011-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve just put up a small app on GitHub which I’ve been using to help me create prototypes using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It works a little bit like mod_php and Apache in that you just write code or stylesheets in whatever kind of format you want, and the app takes care of transparently compiling and serving up the result, but without having to create any kind of project structure or scaffolds, and without having to mess with application servers or autocompile scripts that continually watch file directories for updates.

I’d been noticing this weird gap in how I prototyped and how I worked on production apps: for prototypes I usually started with quick-and-dirty plain HTML and CSS just to get something on the page, but whenever I had a decent-enough prototype that looked like, hey, it might be worth actually turning into something real, I had to convert my HTML into the Jade or Django templating language, my CSS into SASS or Stylus and my JavaScript into CoffeeScript, losing valuable time but more importantly being forced into the rather boring and uninspiring task of converting things that already work from one format to another before you can get back to business again.

So you surf to localhost:3400, browse through the directory listing (which defaults to ~/Sites on OS X), click on a .jade file and it renders HTML, transparently converting any .styl, .sass and .coffee files as well, if you have any. Of course, whether this would be useful for you depends on how much prototyping you actually do, and whether it supports the kind of formats you use in real projects. That’s why the whole system is plugin-based, and you can add your own formats with little snippets of code like this:

I’m taking requests for handlers (and might even do a PHP handler sometime) and if you need some help building your own, or just getting the app up and running, holler.

I’ve included autostart scripts for Ubuntu and OS X, though I don’t know if they’ll work for everybody.

You can use it together with Apache too, by having draughtsman forward any requests for formats it doesn’t need to or can’t compile — say, PHP — to an address of your choosing. For me, though, draughtsman has pretty much obviated the need for a LAMP install.

Full docs and details at https://github.com/stdbrouw/draughtsman. Check it out!

Designers need engineers

2011-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

Like so many of you, I’ve been indulging in the amateur analyses all over the web about why Steve Jobs, p.b.o.h., was so great. The recurring message is pithily summarized by Mathew Ingram: “Technology is the least important thing about Apple products”.

Bullshit. The reason why Apple manages to build such magnificent products is because design and usability drive the engineering, yet the technology behind their products is by no means trivial. Apple cares a lot about engineering, more than Dell and Samsung and RIM.

It takes one designer to decide that touch interfaces are the bee’s knees, maybe another one to come up with intuitive finger gestures for such an interface, and then it takes engineers to convert the electrical capacitance of your fingers on a piece of glass into digital information, engineers to make the best damn screen they can, and more engineers to get a computer to interpret your wildly inaccurate finger movements.

Have you ever used a bad touchpad? Like, any touchpad not made by Apple? It’s horrible. Designers without engineers to back them up.

It takes one designer to say “we’re going to build a small, sleek laptop”. It then takes engineers to make sure that laptop doesn’t overheat, engineers to assure that its tiny speakers don’t sound like crap, and engineers to fit everything into that small package.

Have you ever noticed how none of those beautiful Bose speakers in the hifi store sound any good? What a disappointment. Designers without engineers to back them up.

Oh, and, do you remember Windows ME? “We’re really working toward simplifying the computing experience for home users.” said Microsoft’s Shawn Sanford. Except it crashed all the time.

It might seem like semantics, but there’s a big difference between putting design first and saying design is more important than technology. It’s the kind of attitude that leads companies to hire UX experts and design experts who then push all kinds of recommendations down to IT and engineering, and afterwards complain that nothing ever got implemented. Why? Because these companies don’t understand that good design is more than pretty and friendly: good design has meat, good design has substance, good design depends on great engineers.

Reading is for suckers (quote)

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

Lewis DVorkin from Forbes talks obliquely about how single-page stories are not high on the list of priorities for his news site.

Translation, reading on any major news site is a terrible experience. We know this but are doing nothing to distinguish ourselves because we’re quite happy with the revenue our ads bring in from artificially inflated pageviews created by a design that places our users’ reading experience somewhere between last and not even on the radar. In the meantime, can you please purchase the print magazine so that we can stay in business?

(Andrew Spittle)

Day-old news (comment)

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

We've worn out the idea that yesterday's news doesn't cut it anymore in this fast-paced uber-connected world. There's good journalism at every time scale.

I’m not going to complain about the New Yorker for being print-first and not very interested in audience interaction. I don’t think that’s the right approach for most media outlets but it works for them and they have some kick-ass journalism going on. WIRED has an amazing online presence but I really only read the monthly magazine, which by the way always arrives two weeks too late here in Belgium, so depending on their editorial calendar the reporting I’m reading is 4-6 weeks old. I don’t mind. And when I’m reading a day-old newspaper on the train, I don’t mind either. So in that sense, I do agree with Godin when he says that the value of breaking news is overrated: there’s room all over the spectrum, for live reporting, for enterprise stories that take months to produce, and yes, for day-old news.

Now, the more interesting question is: when you stop hunting for breaking news, is there anything you can do with the time you’ve gained? Can you provide a service that is perhaps more valuable than breaking news to your audience if only they’ll humor you while you’re slow-cooking? Answer that, and you know what to do.

A wild success and an utter failure

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

Reading an old post by the wonderful Jason Scott about The Great Failure of Wikipedia and then a more recent one by Megan Garber titled Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed? about research by Benjamin Hill and these pieces reminded me of something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, about how Wikipedia is a wild success despite its utter failure.

Hill’s big finding is that Wikipedia has become so popular because its founders didn’t buy into the if you build it, they will come meme, so they knew they had to write and edit and evangelize to get people on board instead of fetishizing technology.

And the evangelizing worked. I couldn’t live without Wikipedia anymore, it’s that good. Frankly, I’m so in love with Wikipedia that I’d gladly pay to keep it running, and so I did: last year, I donated. You should too.

Procedural whackjobs

But Wikipedia works its magic through what is actually a massively inefficient publishing process. Important stuff gets deleted by idiots, discussions about unimportant issues drag on, pages get deleted because they’re somehow deemed not notable enough, and so on. People get pissed off and nine times out of ten they’re right to be mad. Wikipedia has accumulated its fair share of self-righteous, power-hungry people with too much time on their hands.

Wikipedia works despite its guardians and community standards, not always because of them.

Luckily Wikipedia is such a big place that each subsection has grown its own contributor culture. As a senior during my undergraduate studies, I contributed pretty actively to Wikipedia, doing research about philosophical pragmatism and related articles. Surprise: I enjoyed it, it was great. The procedural whackjobs tend to leave literature, philosophy and science alone.

Share!

As a contributor, it’s more pleasant if you actually understand that Wikipedia has a very specific purpose, and that is to make all kinds of subjects and concepts understandable to a general audience, with a (good!) bias towards perpetuating the common wisdom and mainstream ways of thinking. This is Jason Scott’s old beef with Wikipedia and it doesn’t make sense to me.

If you have uncovered fantastic new information about a certain topic, you should write an essay or a book or a blog post and then maybe that will get incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles.

If you have a particularly zesty way of writing and are worried that *-for-brain editors will eat it all up and regurgitate it as a bland soup, you’re probably right, and you should find another place to share your knowledge.

If you’re bringing a fresh new angle to a subject, a new way of thinking about things, for Pete’s sake, don’t waste it on Wikipedia.

You’ll find that you’ll feel much better about Wikipedia if you look at it as just one repository of knowledge, rather than as a grand unifying thing.

Create your own knowledge base, answer questions on StackOverflow and Quora instead of writing about it on Wikipedia, blog about your area of expertise, release your rights-free images on Flickr (I do) instead of Wikipedia.

The important part is that you share knowledge. Wherever you want, really, as long as we can find it.

Feeding the machine

Wikipedia is about people, not technology. But here’s a less charitable interpretation: Wikipedia has to be about people because it never cared about technology.

Editors manually create endless list pages, like all people born in 1603 or people from Rhode Island, because Wikipedia’s data model, viz. no data model at all, doesn’t allow these pages to be autogenerated from simple database queries. Same thing for disambiguation pages, figuring out which pages map to which translations, and linking broader topics together with more specific articles.

We’re all complaining about our crappy CMS but our misfortune pales in comparison to MediaWiki and the way it devours Wikipedia contributors’ cognitive surplus and cajoles them into repetitive manual labor that you figure, this being the 21st century and all, computers would do for them.

Wikitext

Then there’s wikitext, which once upon a time had a Markdown-like elegance but has now spiraled so out of control that most local or topical wikis fail before they’ve started: potential contributors take one look at the syntax, decide rocket surgery might be more within their cognitive capacities and run away before contributing even a single word.

Frankly, considering how hard it is for non-techies to write in MediaWiki, I’m surprised that a local city wiki like the Davis Wiki has ever gotten off the ground. It has certainly survived against all odds. And I’m not surprised they’re looking to get rid of MediaWiki.

The WikiMedia foundation has been looking for a Rich Text Editing software dev for a long time. They try, but I don’t know if they can truly solve much considering MediaWiki is such a decrepit codebase. All improvement is bound to be the electronic equivalent of dodging landmines.

Blobs and bots

Part of the problem is that Wikipedia and its engineers are introducing ever more (confusing) wiki syntax to cope with semi-structured data. Semi-structured data are things like a person’s birth date and current residence, anything that’s not a blob of prose. Structure can give content a second life in maps and timelines, and makes it easier to find what you need, like famous people from Rhode Island born after 1972.

Getting any of that good stuff out is really hard, which is why DBpedia — DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. — deserves so much kudos. Of course, if Wikipedia’s data model were anywhere near reasonable, creating an api.wikipedia.org wouldn’t take a separate project like DBpedia, instead it would be a good day’s work for a software engineer and that’d be that.

Wikipedia bots alleviate some of the drudge work by gardening and cleaning Wikipedia automatically while crawling through its pages. For example, many American city pages were created and are updated with new census information and maps without human intervention. Thank you, rambot. But these bots themselves are convoluted pieces of technology. Wikipedia’s data model means they have fudge raw text without stepping on anything real humans have written, which is not easy.

Bots help, just not enough.

Wikipedia is tragic that way: there has been no money, no strategy and no guts to take the software to the next level for ages now, so we’re stuck with a patchwork of fixes and tweaks on top of software that was already out of date when it was first released in 2002.

Inside the sausage factory

As a reader, you don’t really notice that developers have a hard time getting meaningful data out of this huge bank of knowledge, you don’t notice that professors and experts get frustrated fighting with nimwits about stuff those experts know inside-out, you don’t notice that many early contributors never return, you don’t notice the vandalism, you don’t notice how many people whose contributions we’d cherish are put off by that horrible, horrible wikitext syntax.

(What English readers also don’t notice is that local versions of Wikipedia, like the one in Dutch, are even more inconsistent in their quality than the English-language flagship. Wikipedia wins by sheer numbers, and when those numbers aren’t present, quality suffers.)

But here’s the thing: the common wisdom that garbage in means garbage out doesn’t actually apply to Wikipedia. In the Wikipedia model, you put in lots of raw material that’s decidedly less than perfect, but the stuff that comes out is actually damn tasty. In other words: Wikipedia is a sausage factory.

Wikipedia needs to knock out the bullies and improve their tech, because both are making Wikipedia less great than it could be. But while they do so, let’s also just take a minute to appreciate the enormous value of this thing that we’ve created, we, together, people from all over the world.

The Five-Minute News Break

2011-10-18T00:00:00+02:00

Facebook is perfectly optimized for a nicely distracting two-minute browsing session during work. We open up a browser to research something for work, but, ah… why not check how our friends’ day is going first.

News websites work similarly: a homepage with a smorgasbord of content, all stories a mere click away, and each story can be skimmed in one or two minutes. And then shared through twitter just as quickly.

When we think about how to monetize news, we hardly ever account for the fact that over half of all news consumption happens in short five-minute breaks in between work, studying or waiting for the bus. But these short breaks change everything.

You will never ever be able to ask money from somebody who’s surfing during work time. It’s embarassing enough that we’re getting distracted while we ought to be productive. Actively investing money into making those sneaky distractions more pleasant wouldn’t feel right, would be a bit seedy even.

In The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, one newspaper after another reports not being able to properly monetize online video even though the advertising rates for pre-rolls are very attractive to publishers. Well duh, I don’t even have a headset near my work computer, and I’d rather die than have anyone see me watching what for all they know could be cat videos on YouTube.

But it’s not just that paying for more enjoyable work breaks would feel wrong (or that work breaks are wrong!), there’s just no need for quality journalism during the daytime. When I’m working, I want to be distracted. Maybe something to clear my mind. Short updates about what’s going on in the nation fit the bill. Celebrity news does too. Cat pictures too. And news from friends on Facebook too. An investigation into how methamphetamine destroys lives… eh, not so much. Cheap content is actually the most satisfying when we’re just snacking for news.

In fact, we actively save up the really good stuff for when we’re not at work, using Instapaper, Read It Later, Klip.me, Spool and the Safari Reading List feature. But we encounter the good stuff when our frame of mind is one of uncritical consumption and aversion to paid content, which is really bad luck for publishers. By the time we get home, we, true news omnivores, have already saved up our evening reading. By the time we as a reader would be inclined to maybe pay for media, we don’t have to because you as a publisher gave it to us for free earlier. And if you wouldn’t have made it free, we’d have just skipped it. Because skipping and skimming is what we do during a five-minute break. Now that’s a Catch-22 if I ever saw one.

You can’t ask people to pay for your content at the time they’re least invested in it. You can’t sell engaged users to advertisers during the daytime, because they’re not engaged, they’re surfing and hopping.

Despite the Catch-22 that affects the news fiends among our audience (who save up during the day to read at night), can we take advantage of the smaller visitor peak from 9 to 10 P.M. and traffic during the weekends? Most news sites see a big reduction in visitors on Saturday and Sunday, in vacation periods and during the summer months. But while there’s less consumption, especially online, it’s also more relaxed and people’s tastes are a bit more refined. People still take time to savour a Sunday edition. People pay to get more out of their weekends. We should try to work with that audience, both online and in print.

Keep our daytime coverage short and sweet, and make kick-ass video, features and enterprise reporting for the evenings and weekends, when advertisers pay more and people may at the very least pay something.

The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual? (comment)

2011-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Some academics are complaining about how vapid popular literature about internet culture is, insisting that more people should listen to *them* instead. I disagree.

I’d have to disagree that academic works are by definition or even de facto more rigorous or closer to the truth than popular works à la Jarvis.

While sociology and psychology are empirical sciences, the closer you get to theoretical sociology and communication studies, the more philosophical these investigations become and thus the more dependent on the persuasiveness of the argumentation and, let’s be honest, on being able to string together a bunch of pithy quotes by important precursors that through a process akin to magic end up supporting your argument. I have a master’s in philosophy and plenty of buddies with doctorates, so I know full well how this works and how dishonest some academics are in this regard — whether the intellectual fraud is pursued wittingly or not, I don’t know.

In my own field of expertise, epistemology, it was at times plain dazzling to see how childish philosophers can act when confronted with their opponents’ arguments, with how much nonchalance opposing views get brushed off. Or how simplistic some of the proposed theories and arguments were in the first place. A PhD does not a scholar make.

(As an aside, the slightly immature running joke among my fellow philosophy students was always that critical theory and communication studies was just crappy philosophy, and that we felt sorry for people in those fields, heh.)

There is amazingly great work going on in academe (though not all of it as well-written as it could be), but for every good paper there are ten bullshit ones. Which is about the same ratio that you can expect to see in the literature “business folks” write. Yet the message you seem to convey is one of blanket rejection — maybe at most this stuff is “enjoyable”, but it’s not written by someone in my professional sphere, so it can’t be any good. Is that really what you’re saying? Is that opinion based on broad and substantive evidence, viz. have you read a lot of these books, and have you tried to read them without too many preconceptions, without begrudging the non-professionals for entering your territory even before you start to read?

Come to grips with the fact that universities are not the only place where wisdom originates nowadays, and take responsibility for academia’s utter failure in disseminating its findings and theories. Solve that problem before you complain about jaded publishers, a public that does not listen and before you start calling anyone an anti-intellectual.

(And, yes, you hit a nerve here.)

Just a matter of time (comment)

2011-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

Matt Waite remarks on how some students, when faced with a technical challenge, respond by saying "No idea how to do this, but gimme some time and I'll figure it out" whereas other students respond by saying "No idea how to do this", end of line. Is this the self-imposed "journalists can't do math" meme rearing its ugly head all over again?

Isn’t it an exposure thing too? Once you’ve mastered one specific tech, learning another is suddenly that much less daunting, and the perceived challenge becomes ever smaller for each new technology you learn, even if the learning process itself is more difficult each time. But familiarization takes time, and I don’t think a teacher can influence it very much.

Or maybe there’s a disconnect between the technology and the goals students want to achieve.

The engineer’s attitude when faced with a big problem is to cut it up into small chunks that are manageable, so when the problem is “telling great stories” an engineer can see how programming can be one small but important chunk, alongside the more traditional writing and reporting curriculum.

But if you’re not used to the engineer’s way of thinking, then the idea that you’ll have to learn how to code to be a better journalist will sound very foreign, no matter how passionately a teacher tries to explain it. And thus you won’t be motivated to persevere when shit gets tough — coding becomes a dreaded obstacle that keeps you from graduating (or keeping your job) instead of a useful skill you must acquire at all costs.

So how do you get journalists and future journalists to yearn for technical knowledge?

Great Expectations (quote)

2011-10-02T00:00:00+02:00

So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

(Howard Owens)

On bundles and blobs

2011-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

News is information. (It’s many other things, too, but forget that for now.) The news industry often bundles information, because bundling is a convenient and an efficient way to disseminate information.

We bundle information over time: instead of reporting everything as we find it out live, we gather up all kinds of related information and bundle it into a story. Bundles come in different sizes: we can churn out a quick news report in half an hour, or we can save up months of work for an enterprise story. They also come in different colors: most often we bundle topically related information (a story), but sometimes we bundle by type of information (a rumors section) or time (today’s linkblog).

We also bundle — weave — information into narratives. Stories are not concatenated facts, they’re not bullet-point lists. Stories combine related information and glue it together in paragraphs. Let’s call these narratives blobs.

Now, the thing about bundles and blobs is that they’re simultaneously awesome and stupid. Bundles and blobs are like nuclear fission, really: splitting the atom powers your house and it happens to be a great way of killing people.

Bundles are convenient and efficient, but slow. We can’t have slow in a 24-hour news cycle. Blobs are the stuff of every great story, but they’re unstructured which means we can’t use computers to make them even better.

You know when we know

Whenever we bundle information over time, we’re stashing information onto a backlog when we could be releasing it into the world right away — that’s why bundles are slow. Newspapers are yesterday’s news and for stories we really care about, that just doesn’t cut it. Hence 24-hour news channels, live reporting, text alerts, tweets, sneak preview blog posts and living stories.

Slowness is one grievance, another is the distance stories create between the writer and her audience. There are bound to be many smart folk who use our news websites, and by only giving them access to the finished product, we’re refusing to let them help us tell a better story. Journalism is one great big conversation… but only if we allow it to be.

There’s a catch… Unbundling (cue dramatic orchestral soundtrack) has a price. More bits means less context and less understanding. Let me explain that.

Our brains are really good at context switching, but it’s taxing. Leaving your email client on all day and reading each mail immediately as it arrives is a productivity killer like few others. And don’t bug me on the phone while I’m working, unless you want to ruin my day.

Our brains are also really good at connecting the dots, but they’re best at it when there’s a good chunk of information floating around in the working memory. You can’t read Aristotle’s Organon one sentence a day and end up a Peripatetic.

Learning twenty different facts about a news story one at a time and spread throughout the day implies lots of context switching and a pernicious lack of that chunkiness you need to get your brains up to full power. The end result: tweets and bits, much like giant cookies, are best produced and consumed in moderation.

It’s not surprising that together with the advent of update-as-we-learn-more styles of reporting, there’s also a growing interest within media circles for long-form stories and explanatory journalism.

As we do more bit-sized reporting, we have to figure out the right mix between long-form and short-form. Nothing but tiny updates and readers will tell us we’re not doing our jobs, that they’re drowning in information but don’t feel like they’re learning anything. This goes double for unfamiliar topics: readers don’t care for and can’t understand nuggets without a good old-fashioned story to tell them what it’s all about first. No updates and no process journalism on the other hand, and people will flock to faster and more participatory platforms, where they are treated as more than just a spectator.

Structure

I mentioned before that stories, which bundle information by translating it into sentences and paragraphs, are unstructured. Stories are big blobs of text. News stories hint at all sorts of structure, mind you, mostly of the x is y type: this person said that, this review gives that pub a four-star rating, this story is about that organization, which organized this event which happened at that place right there. But all of that structure is hidden in narrative prose, which makes it hard to parse for computers, which in turn makes it hard to display in another way or to repurpose it for another goal. Publish a map alongside each crime story? Nope. Create something as simple as a Top 5 of all recent movie reviews? Nope. Grab all the latest quotes from interviews with local politicians? Definitely nope.

The solution here is doing away with that other kind of bundle we’ve just talked about: the blob. Don’t for a second think that because you’ve done away with bundles, you’ve done away with blobs too. You can slice up your story into individual sentences if you want to, but instead of one big blob you’ve now got many tiny blobs. Doesn’t help you very much. You can tweet and live report all you want, but that doesn’t give you any more structure to work with than a big fat story would.

If we want to repurpose news or create mashups and need structure to do so, we have to put every individual piece of information we care about in a database — say, a database that links all stories to the geographical coordinates of the places those stories talk about. (Coordinates instead of place names, because names are free-form, thus blobby, thus bad.)

There’s a price to pay for unblobbing the news too. Applying structure to news usually means adding structural tags in addition to categories, dates, locations and other metadata. What it usually boils down to for a journalist is this: first, we submit our story as usual; then, we fill out a form so computers can sort-of understand our story too. But “just” filling out a form for every story we work on can turn out to be more drudge work than we signed up for. We don’t want to hasten through the categorization and data entry either, because if we don’t do it right, our data will be a mess and all our structure will mean nothing because it’s unreliable.

As metadata is such a time sink, getting rid of blobs is the art of doing just enough and not too much. It’s an art most news organizations don’t yet master.

So I guess what I’m saying is…

Stories make sense because they have just the right information density and allow journalists to add some much-needed context to the news in a way bit-sized updates can’t. But they’re slow, and they shut out readers instead of making them part of the process. Tweets and blog posts and short updates fare better in that regard — as long as you don’t overdo them because then it gets confusing and annoying. How much is too much depends on the story.

Stories make sense because people learn more from engaging narrative than from fact sheets. Without those fact sheets, however, computers can’t help us explore fresh ways to tell a story. We need new ways to tell stories: readers are losing their bearings in a sea of news and we need the tools to turn that experience into something better.

Keep writing the trusty old news article. But do more than that.

Making money with media

2011-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

“I think the economic challenge is too high”.

It’s ridiculously hard to make good money with news. It truly is. I’ve been working in this industry for three years now. I feel like I’ve become pretty good at what I do thank you very much. Just don’t ask me how to make money with news.

Some newspapers and blogs are still in that happy zone where they can rely solely on advertising. But advertising budgets keep shrinking, and anyway, there’s something deeply unsettling about making money by annoying the hell out of your readers and viewers. (Oliver Reichenstein would disagree, however.)

Yes, there is good advertising too.

I actually enjoy leafing through a magazine with beautiful full-page ads.

I like sponsorship schemes too. A sponsor’s logo next to an act of journalism feels like a company telling us that, hey, they like this stuff just as much as we do, and they want to support good reporting. (Yes, I know it’s actually rather less altruistic.)

And while advertising that works on the principle of intent generation — buy this, buy this! — is annoying, that’s not the only kind of ads there are. Google’s AdWords or featured listings in a classifieds section can actually be pretty helpful. That’s because they rely on intent harvesting instead: trying to sway users towards certain options when they’ve already decided they want to buy something much like what you’re offering.

As we switch more and more from interruption marketing to permission marketing, advertising will in all likelihood become more helpful and less intrusive, but there will be less of it too. How much money can we get out of just sponsorships and contextual ads?

The cold hard fact is that if I were a local business owner today, I would not for the life of me pay for a banner ad on a news website. You get so much more out of a simple Facebook page it’s ridiculous.

We’d need less money in the first place if we cut down on spending and organized newspapers a little more like startups. But lean hyperlocals are struggling too. And that new flagship in Texas, the tightly-run well-oiled Tribune, is a non-profit. John Thornton simply does not believe the Texas Tribune and its kind of journalism could work as a commercial enterprise.

The jury is still out on the workability of paywalls. I agree with Steve Yelvington that a porous wall can make business sense. But part of what makes online journalism so much more engaging than its print counterpart is all the conversation around stories and news reports. No matter how soft your wall is, it’s still a wall, and you can’t talk about something you can’t see. Making money by destroying part of our value proposition is better than having no money at all, but you’ll forgive me for not being all psyched about it.

Cross-subsidization has long been the way media companies made money. News itself never made much money, but the classifieds did, so all was good. Thing is, when you sell a bundle of only tangentially related things where one part subsidizes the other, eventually somebody is going to take the profitable part of your business and copy it — without the news part.

A couple of years back, the Chicago Tribune toyed with the idea of offering general web design services. Rue89 actually does. But a web design company doesn’t need a news website to provide its services, so you’re at a competitive disadvantage against the vast majority of web design firms that aren’t media organizations. I’ve heard people say that it’s embarassing that it wasn’t a newspaper that invented Craigslist. I disagree. If we had, Craig Newmark still would have kicked our ass and still would have stolen our classifieds. Again: if you bundle things, prepare to get unbundled.

Cross-subsidization and loss leaders in journalism aren’t entirely dead though. Solid reporting leads to strong, well-respected brands. You can leverage that cultural capital to help sell social media courses or a styleguide or an event. There’s money there, but again, less than there used to be.

Perhaps it’s just that the web sucks for making money. Who knows. But iPad apps and interactive magazines are turning out to be far from the huge revenue makers they were hyped up to be. Don’t expect a solution there. Print won’t die, but circulations are declining and the average subscriber keeps getting older.

Micropayments, then? Something like iTunes, say? Long-form journalism on the Kindle (where you pay a couple of bucks for a single story) seems to be working out for ProPublica. But honestly, there’s so much news out there, so much of it interchangeable. Why pay for stories when Google can point you to the same story on a different website for free? And even when it’s great, unique journalism we’re talking about, it doesn’t take a genius to see why a news experience that consists of having consumers ask themselves “Okay, should I pay for this article? Maybe? Maybe not? Maybe? Maybe not?” over and over and over again is unpalatable.

Among the many tip jar systems, I like Readability most, but I don’t see it going mainstream.

Premium content was a fad some years back, but it turned out “premium” really just meant jazzed-up mediocrity. Yes, you can charge (or charge more) for superb content, but really great content is also really expensive to make, so while increasing revenue with premium content is easy, actually getting profits out of it isn’t.

Some media execs still want to make money with user-generated content, but, um, 2005 wants its business model back. Among community-driven sites, MetaFilter and Reddit and Davis Wiki are doing well, but it’s not like their model is easily replicated.

Steve Buttry wants local media companies to become community service companies, and I like that line of thinking, but the Internet hates middlemen so getting your cut on ticket sales and daily deals as a facilitator might be harder than you imagine.

I refuse to believe that media is a hard business to be in, but evidence is against me.

It seems the best we can do is mix-and-match ten different sources of income, none of them sufficient on their own but not too shabby if you add ‘em up. Thing is: that’s what news gurus say, but I’ve never actually seen one of them pull off said diversification.

This is driving me nuts.