Printed Matters

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.