Printed Matters

This is just a quick reaction to this little Romenesko tidbit about three newspapers in South Florida, owned by three different news companies, who have entered into an agreement to share certain types of stories.

Great! People in Florida must be ecstatic that they can now read the same stories on three different websites. What a huge windfall for them.

Look, this is a fabulous idea for their print products. Why send three different reporters to cover the same events? You know the stories are going to be pretty similar at any rate. So be efficient and cooperate.

The problem is that you know these same stories are going to end up on each paper’s website. The head ed at the Herald said so in his memo:

A second part of the experiment will enable the papers to pick up reviews – from theater to restaurant reviews – for publication on both the web and in print.

Three different places where you can savour the heady nuance of viewing the same review three times, each with its own different masthead and advertising down the side. Three different places for news aggregators to pick up the same story and then report it on their own sites as three different stories, each with some implied incremental value-add to entice you to read each one.

Google should punish at least two of the websites for doing this – but which two?

I’ll give them the same advice I gave the AP: let only one website publish each article, presumably the one that actually did the story. The others can link to it, giving their content-sharing partner some link love.

Jeff Jarvis and I have our differences, but there’s no questioning the fact that he’s got a handle on the state of the news and the future of journalism. He’s done a great slideshow for his students in his Interactive Journalism class. I’m embedding it here for your convenience. I must say Slide 5 was a Holy Shit! moment for me.

Editor’s Weblog has published an interesting interview with Nick Davies, author of the book Flat Earth News. He makes what I think is an absolutely crucial point: reporters are hamstrung by time constraints.

The big change in the business over the last ten years is precisely the reduction of time available for almost all reporters to do their work.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the curmudgeons – you know, the old school, old-media reporters who are more or less anti-Web. They see the Web as a piss-pot of useless blogs passing off drivel as reporting. They see their jobs dwindling away, and blame the Web’s free content model. But I think Davies has put his finger on exactly what the problem is.

It’s not that old-school journalists are against the web per se. Most reporters I’ve talked to genuinely enjoy doing stuff for the web. Reporters at community weeklies, for example, like the fact that they can get out a scoop without having to wait for the print cycle. They (mostly) don’t mind having to go shoot video, because, hey, it’s different, you get to learn a new skill, and you get to tell your stories in a new way, and video is cool.

What they do mind is that they are having to work harder – produce more in less time – without, in most cases, a change in their compensation, and at the expense of their core competency: reporting.

It’s natural, and it would happen in any industry, that employees get upset when they have had to learn new skills and produce more work without a corresponding increase in pay. This was the big issue in last year’s labour unrest at the Toronto Star:

The company would diminish specialists and promote generalists – while paying less… We didn’t come to Canada’s No. 1 daily to be part of this.

This, I think, is the crux of the problem. It’s not that reporters hate the Web, or producing material for the web. It’s that news companies are cutting staff, expecting more work from those that are left, and throwing new skills into the mix, while at the same time cutting pay and benefits. I’d be a curmudgeon too!

This is why I’ve said before, newspapers should focus on their core competencies. And video isn’t one of them. Leverage what you do. Jeff Jarvis has said it too (although I disagree with his particulars).

News organizations around the world should be sitting up to take notice: if you thought news aggregators like Yahoo were eating your lunch before, now they’re gearing up to eat your breakfast and dinner too.

In an interview with AFP, director of editorial programming Jessica Barron said:

Yahoo News is a news organization. We have been doing a lot of original reporting and we are going to be doing a lot more.

Why is this important and scary?

1. They already have millions of viewers – half a billion, according to Barron, although Comscore puts the number at about 140 million uniques per month.
2. According to this report from the AP (pdf), young people get their news casually and in snippets while doing other things – like checking their Yahoo mail.
3. They can afford to staff a big news bureau. Like maybe AP or Reuters big. See where this is going yet?
4. They understand the Internet and have tons of data about what people are interested in and what they click on. Barron said Yahoo’s news judgment is constantly shaped by how many people “click” on news stories and the instant comments by readers.
5. They have tons of other properties (everything but the kitchen sink, you might say) so mash-ups and context and insinuating all kinds of other data into stories and story presentation will be dead simple for them.

Not content to make money on the back of the stories you produce, Yahoo is now in competition with you on your core product: original reporting. Look out!

We want to be the number one independent news source on the Internet.

Right. And who will stand in their way?

Via: The Editor’s Weblog

Via TechCrunch: Here’s a social bookmarking site that downloads the full text of the pages you bookmark so you can search through that text. Yesterday I did a post about bit.ly and I talked about how these new URL shortening sites that are springing up should get into social bookmarking, because it’s a natural fit. While you’re on there getting a shorter URL, it would be a simple matter to also bookmark the page. Now here’s another parallel: both bit.ly and del.izzy go and grab the page when you shorten its URL or bookmark it, respectively.

Why is Google not in this space? It wouldn’t have to go grab the page when someone bookmarks a page or shortens an URL – it has already spidered it, in all likelihood. And the bookmarking aspect would integrate nicely with GMail/Reader and the sharing features there.

Update: Google does do bookmarks. Who knew? Pretty low profile. And no social aspect (they’re private bookmarks). And of course, no integrated URL shortening service.

Here’s a very cool thing that nicely illustrates the principle of leverage: reCAPTCHA.

It turns out that what you do when you decipher text in CAPTCHA mechanisms – you know, those images that blogs and forums throw at you during registration, to help prevent spam – is the very same thing that is needed to help in digitizing old books. So why not kill two birds with one stone: battle spam and help digitize old texts?

Can you think of an application of this for newspapers? Hint: think archives.

The title of this post borrows heavily from Scott Karp’s post entitled Connecting The Dots Of The Web Revolution. But although both posts involve the recent kerfuffle about AP, I connect the dots in a slightly different way, which I promise to do by the end of this piece.

I’ve just gotten around to reading a report from AP titled A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption (pdf). If you’re in the news business, and haven’t downloaded and read this yet, you should. At the very least, it will give you some ideas.

But, as will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog, I disagree with their conclusion. On pages 49 and 50 of the report, the authors outline their three recommendations. But one theme dominates all three recommendations.

In “One: Delivering Depth”, they say:

News producers have a unique opportunity to re-engage this enlightened segment of the audience by designing innovative formats and creating easier pathways to deep content.

In “Two: Addressing News Fatigue and Balance”, they say:

News producers can give control back to the consumers by improving the discoverability of deep and relevant content, eliminating as much duplication as possible in their news and bringing closure to stories whenever possible.

In “Three: Creating Social Currency”, they say:

Deeper news resources, beyond the oversupply of Facts and Updates, must be built out, and the routes to those resources need to be constructed.

Creating easier pathways to deep content; improving the discoverability of deep and relevant content; constructing routes to deeper news resources: OK, guys, we get the theme. Perhaps we should create links to deeper, relevant content.

The problem is, though, that it seems like wishful thinking on the part of AP. The study is based on an anthropological study of 18 young people from around the world, who kept diaries, answered questions and subjected themselves to observations about their actual news consumption habits. But not one of them, as far as I could tell, ever complained about not having access to deeper news resources. At least, not that I could see in that report as it was published by AP. Maybe they did say such things to the ethnographers, but the report doesn’t say where and I can’t see how to get at the full interviews.

So why do a whole ethnographical study and then make up stuff about what the subjects actually said to you? Sounds like AP has an axe to grind. They WANT people to want deeper, relevant content, because that’s part of what they and their member papers do. They want a market to develop for that deeper, contextual reporting, and they want to be able to monetize it. On page 42 they actually call it “premium content delivery.”

But that’s not what the subjects said. At least, not as far as I could tell. Mark Potts commented on the report as well, and seems to have accepted the idea that kids want depth. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I just didn’t read between the lines, but I don’t think that’s what those young people were saying.

Here’s what they did say, and this is actually outlined quite well in the section called “Field Study Findings” on pages 39 – 47.

• They get their news when they’re doing other things, especially when getting their email.
• They check news when they’re bored.
• They experience news fatigue; they are debilitated by information overload.
• They get a kick out of sharing news with their friends.
• They get whatever depth they want from the news by watching Colbert.

Does that list sound like a clarion call for more news and greater depth? Not to me. To me it says we have to do a better job of presenting headlines and snippets, on the platforms where young people are spending their time: in their webmail clients and on their PDAs.

Here are my recommendations, based on what the young people in this study are actually doing:

1. Hire or train people to write headlines and snippets for consumption on portals and aggregators. It’s an art: you want stuff that is good for SEO and also makes people want to click.
2. Don’t leave it up to the screen-scrapers of the aggregators. Publish feeds and APIs that allow people to aggregate your stuff the way you want it to look. This, by the way, would also solve the problem of those nasty people who want to link to you but end up using your headlines and leads, the very things that store most of the value in a news report. So give them a different headline and something other than the lead that they can use for a snippet. What did you expect them to use? These people aren’t (necessarily) writers, so they’re not going to want to or be able to write concise summaries. Do it for them, so they can share links to you!
3. Never allow your stories to appear on more than one website, or in more than one place on your website. Use a single, canonical URL to access that story. This will help solve the problem of duplication, recognized by the authors on page 49 as a contributor to news fatigue.
4. Actually partner with a news aggregator who will play by certain rules. They will not scrape your pages, they will use the headlines and snippets provided by you in your APIs. They will avoid – no, punish! – duplicate content. They will give credit where credit is due. They will link to other relevant content.
5. Don’t try to do #4 yourselves. Partner with an independent aggregator that does not themselves produce content and who will partner with all news providers, big and small. Because we don’t need another walled garden. And the value of a network increases exponentially with size. I think there’s a law about that.
6. After you have opened up your APIs and partnered with a news aggregator, play by the rules. In your snippets, tell what is new in your story. If you are not breaking the news, tell what your story adds to the context that has not already come before.

The idea of the news aggregator mentioned above is not to eat your lunch. That’s what aggregators are doing right now – eating your lunch. They are making money from what you are giving them for free. So change the rules by playing by the rules. Give them what they want, but on your own terms. If we get rid of the senseless duplication, have news aggregation that makes sense, and properly encourage consumers to click links to news providers to get the news, then the public will be better served, and news providers will have a business model.

Just a quick thought on bit.ly, the new URL shortener that everyone is talking about. Why are they talking about it? Well, it adds features on to URL shortening that you never knew you needed. Like semantic web analysis.

But isn’t that a job for search engines? Why would you want semantic web analysis just on the few URLs that users have shortened?

Here’s what a URL shortener should really do: become a bookmarking site like delicious. Why? Because if a user is already on your site, entering a URL for shortening, it would be a simple matter to also let him add a few tags and a description and save it as a bookmark. I mean, while he’s there.

What does this have to do with newspapers? Not much, except that it illustrates an important principle: leverage what you already do.

This post by Jeff Jarvis pissed me off over a month ago. Never mind why I’m just getting around to writing about it now – but it’s important that I write about it.

Jarvis is saying – with help from Bob Wyman from Google – that newspapers should get out of the technology business. They should turn over their website platforms to Google:

Newspapers should concentrate on what they are supposed to do and stop trying to differentiate themselves with technology.

What they are supposed to do, according to Jarvis, is journalism:

So why not hand over those segments of the business to Google and concentrate on what a newspaper should do: journalism?

But journalism isn’t the business. The business is developing an audience for the journalism, and then monetizing the audience. Newspapers don’t sell newspapers, or news, or reporting. They sell readership.

So how can newspapers distinguish themselves from competitors, when everyone’s using the same platform? In other words, how can you get more readership for your stories vs. the stories on your competitors websites? Strictly by the quality of journalism? Hardly:

1. Newspapers have known for years that the quality of their journalism has almost no impact on their bottom lines or on their circulation numbers.
2. And anyway, the Internet is a whole new ball game. The game is findability. I will get more audience if people can find my stuff more easily than it can find yours. And guess what: newspapers (and everyone else) outsourced that to Google a long, long time ago.
3. You know those catchy headlines and turns of phrase found in good journalistic writing? They can actually hurt a story’s chance of being found, of developing an audience. Don’t care? You want good writing at the expense of everything else? You’re in the wrong business, friend. Right calling – wrong business.

So what happens when you do want to do something different, when you want to tell a story in a new way, and Google (or AP, or Daylife, etc.) doesn’t have that capability built yet? Good question. Guess you send an email off and wait a month or so. If enough people want that feature, then they’ll build it. Oops – there goes your differentiation again.

Within an organization, like a newspaper chain, that can be hard enough. Though you (supposedly) have their ear because you’re, after all, on the same team, you’ll wait months for a feature to be built by corporate IT even if lots of member papers want it. But think, now, if the paper has given away all its power to innovate to Google. Thousands of papers, all wanting to innovate, all wanting to differentiate. Who’s Google going to respond to? What are they going to build? Why, the things that the most papers seem to want! Bye-bye, differentiation: you can’t have that until hundreds of other papers have it too.

Even if all your platforms are belong to Google, papers will still want to have people on board who can “game” the system, and make their stuff stand out more than the next guy’s. That person will likely be fairly technical in nature. The techie’s managers will see the advantage and want to turn him loose – “Do more of that!” they’ll say – and the techie will promptly respond with “Then get me off this platform so we can really differentiate! Let me build our own platform that we can innovate on!”

You still need techie people to help your stuff get seen by more people. That’s called SEO – Search Engine Optimization – and it’s been one of the most important and most-overlooked aspects of newspaper websites for a long, long time.

If this is a critical time for newspapers, and for journalism as a business – and I’m pretty certain Jarvis thinks it is – then we need as much innovation as we can possibly get. Even within organizations like Metroland, a community newspaper conglomerate owned by Torstar, all the papers should be trying their own things, innovating, trying to be first in their markets, trying to give the people in their own communities the things – tools, platforms, whatever it is – they want. Unless, of course, they think their centralized IT department has it exactly right, and all the innovation can be left to them. But can you think of one newspaper IT dept. that has it exactly right? Can you think of one newspaper with a flawless web strategy with no room for innovation and improvement? Didn’t think so.

So can we entrust all the innovation to Google? To do that we’d need to be assured that everything they do now is flawless. Is Google News perfect? Is their search product?

The time for innovation in journalism is over. It’s mature. It’s been done, perfected, written about, studied, taught, and analyzed for a couple of centuries. It comes down to a few simple things: check your facts; include as many sources as possible; avoid bias; avoid libel. Jesus Christ, these are things a ten-year-old can grasp.

The innovation, the ideas, in the Internet age MUST come from the content delivery side. Papers need to innovate, to differentiate, to get more audience, to get more money, to support the journalism they already completely, thoroughly know how to do. And it’s hard. Really hard. We need lots of innovators working on this.

In fact, I’d turn Jarvis’s dictum on its head: fire the reporters, outsource the journalism, and invest in innovations: new ways of delivering that journalism, new ways of being more findable, news ways of developing bigger online audience. That is the challenge today.