Printed Matters

Someone who has worked in TV most of her career writes about moving to a big paper.

Notice the assumptions being made? that the paper SHOULD be doing video? That they ARE making money from it? Will someone give me some proof once and for all?

My blog’s connected to Twitter and my Twitter’s connected to my Facebook. And back again.

I don’t know yet where all this will lead, but it’ll either be useless or a new phase in my transition to connectedness.

I was thinking back on the weekend to the words of a certain northern community newspaper publisher with whom I had dealings. He had a fairly stock answer any time one of his salespeople (or me, the web guy) wanted to give something away for free. He hated giving stuff away for free. So he’d say, “It just knocks the value right out of it.”

Which on the face of it looks like a pretty good argument. He was an intimidating sort, so that counted as an argument, at least.

In my context, for example, I wanted to give real estate listings away for free in a new real estate vertical for the website, in order to make the listings useful. My thing was always that listings are useless unless they’re comprehensive and complete, and the correct way to proceed is to jumpstart these things by giving them away for free, build a user base, and then do upsell or sell advertising around it.

“That knocks the value right out of it,” he’d say.

But no, it doesn’t. There is still value in things that are free. The success of free dailies like Metro, which makes all its revenue from advertising, should be an indication of that. I forget who it was that said it – Murdoch, maybe – but someone said (and I paraphrase): “Never in the history of humankind has a company developed a large audience for something and then failed to make money from it.”

What the publisher was really saying, of course, is that it knocks the value perception right out of it. And he has a point. If you give something away, people get used to that and you have a hard time selling it or selling into it. He’d have come to that conclusion after some experience in the business – he was a successful publisher for many years.

But boy, what a difference a word makes. The addition of that one word, “perception”, turns the problem into a marketing problem. If you’re having trouble with the value perception of something, then it becomes a marketing job to put the value back in.

All right, here it is: the long-awaited diatribe over the use of video on newspaper websites.

Now, at first glance, it might seem cock-eyed to impugn the use of video. After all, it’s something that newspapers couldn’t do before. They had to leave the use of action-pictures to TV stations. Now they have a shiny new platform that lets them compete: websites. And if you CAN do something, you SHOULD do something, especially in the current experimental phase papers find themselves in with respect to the web, right?

No. That’s not a good argument for anything. Saying newspapers should do video because they can is like saying they should have nothing but opinion and editorial in their print product, because they can. It requires some analysis.

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A couple of posts ago, in a comment, I whined about how newspaper associations like the OCNA influence how newspapers do their websites, by rewarding certain behaviour. Well, here’s a couple of tidbits of news on that front.

First, the OCNA announced their Better Newspaper Competition award nominees yesterday. Lo and behold, there’s no longer any award for Best Online Edition (a.k.a Best Website)! There used to be one….I should know, I placed top three in that category three years in a row.

So I sent an email to the OCNA people, who inform me that they’ve taken the award out temporarily while they work on a whole new suite of awards for websites. So that’s good, I’m glad to see that newspaper associations are taking websites seriously (like, 15 years after the fact). Any bets that Best Video will be one of the categories?

Also recently, Metroland released its Metroland Award Categories for 2008. Finally, this year, they have awards for online stuff. Look at those new categories: Best Web-Only Story, Best Video, Best Slideshow, Best Online Series or Special Section. Notice how they encourage certain behaviour on member paper websites? Who says newspapers should allocate resources to doing video on their websites? Metroland Corporate does, because they give an award for it! Is that correct?

Nuh-uh, I say.

Talk about thwarting initiative and experimentation by your subsidiaries. Metroland must really think it’s got this shit figured out, if they’re encouraging certain behaviours – inevitably, at the expense of others.

For balance, let’s look at how the CCNA does it. That is both more detailed and less “we know how it’s done so just do what we say and we’ll give you a prize.”

This was written a couple of months ago for a journalism course, but it seems to have new legs as Fantino and the gang held another “naming and shaming” this week.

Online news archives: The business case and the legal uncertainties

As media companies race to post breaking news – and practically everything else they have published – on their websites, legal questions swirl around the old stories that are online.

Known as archives, these collections of stories and features can be searched and the stories in them brought forward with ease. Unlike their dustier relatives -print archives – web archives keep old news a mouse-click away.

While good for readers used to Googling to get information they want, and good for news outlets looking to reach more readers, online archives exist in a legal no man’s land.

This, media insiders said, is about to change – and soon.

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What follows is an essay I wrote for my bosses back when I was with the Parry Sound North Star, to explain some of the concepts I had come up with and was bandying about. A couple years later, it still seems like good advice:

Newspapers do not sell editorial content

The editorial content of newspapers is free. That is, it should be treated as though it was free and distributed for free. Indeed, almost any organization in the business of generating content could base their business model on the notion that content is to be given away, distributed freely – or at least, for no more than the cost of distributing the content in some physical format to consumers.

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Who are the real customers of a newspaper’s website? Why, it’s the advertisers, stupid. They’re the ones that give you money.

Nobody makes money from subscriptions to websites. Even if they did, the trend is to move away from pay walls. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are two big names that have begun recently to take down their pay walls.

Yes, the game on newspaper websites is advertising. It’s not e-commerce, or customer support, or lead generation, or any of the other common reasons why websites exist. Why, then, have news organizations paid so little attention to the real customers of their websites? Continue Reading »

In the interest of balance, let’s discuss five reasons to avoid letting users comment on stories on news websites – to go with yesterday’s 10 reasons to do comments.

1. Moderation – the labour involved in moderating comments can be substantial. At CBC.ca, for example, they’ve hired an outside company just to take care of moderating comments on their news stories and in special discussions set up for the purpose of soliciting reader comments.
2. Glib responses – given an easy venue for comment, readers may choose to write short, not-very-well-thought-out responses to issues rather than the longer, more thought-out essays they would have written in a letter to the editor.
3. Libel issues – even with moderation, the volume of comments may preclude busy editors from checking the comments for defamatory materials.
4. Maintaining tone – every newspaper or news organization has a particular voice and character that editors maintain with special care in its publication – including its websites. Comments may swamp or overwhelm that voice.
5. Advertiser alienation – ad clients may pull campaigns if the things they see on your website – including comments – do not fit with their image. You don’t want to piss off your advertisers.

All of these points have to do with moderation, in the end. Setting good moderation policy for comments should make decisions quick and efficient. A for the cost of moderation itself: I’d wager that the benefits of added content and community discussed in the last post outweigh the relatively small cost of editing free, user-generated content.

Just in case you’re still not convinced, here are some good reasons for newspaper organizations to allow comments on stories on their websites. Hard to believe, but some newspapers still don’t allow comments (ahem…Toronto Star).

1. Instant Feedback – maybe too obvious? You can get immediate reaction from your readers about how they feel about the issues you’re reporting on.
2. Corrections – many readers means more eyes to spot errors. And they delight in spotting them. Let them tell you so you can fix it. Especially important in the new 24/7 news cycle, where there are less eyes looking at stories as they go up, and more looking at them after they’re up.
3. Lead generation – a common complaint from editors is that people don’t tell them what’s happening in the community. What are they supposed to do, pick up the news with a special news antenna? Hmmm…maybe it’s because you haven’t provided an easy mechanism for your readers to tell you what’s up. Give them a venue, and they’ll tell you all kinds of things.
4. Story amplification – readers will come with new angles, new inputs, new sources, new details, that your reporters didn’t catch or have time or space to expand upon.
5. Starts conversations – this expands a bit on point 4. You can get people talking about the issues, debating, arguing, adding, asking.
6. Reader enjoyment – the opinion page of a print paper is often the best read page in it. People care as much about what other people think about a story as they do the story.
7. First step to CitJ – comments are probably the easiest way to start doing citizen journalism. So if that’s a buzzword your boss cares about, comments are a quick way to get into the buzz.
8. Reader participation – let your readers feel involved, participate, help in making the news report. There is no easier way to do it.
9. Website content – comments, if well-written, make more content for search engines to index and therefore more traffic for your site.
10. Community – knowing where others stand on issues, reacting with them, having the conversation – that gives a sense of shared values.