Printed Matters

I’m in no position to move to Las Vegas, much as I wish it were otherwise. So why do I think this job posting from Rob Curley is a Christmas present?

Because it shows me that my dream job does in fact exist out there. Listen to this:

But we need more than a good eye and Photoshop comps. We need a designer/developer who eats, sleeps and shits valid XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, and has a basic knowledge of server-side web development. Applicants must be able to design, build, test and integrate features/sites into our Django-based CMS quickly, sometimes in only a few minutes.

Cool. I just did something bad in my pants.

Now if only someone up here in Canada would put out a job ad that looks like that.

I love it when the scholarly professorial types say stuff that I’ve been saying for a while. It makes me feel all educated and stuff.

Take this article, which was sent to me by a former j-school classmate.

“George Sylvie, associate professor in the School of Journalism, has some ideas – and they are not all pleasant to hear,” it starts. And they’re not all new, either.

Look at this bit:

That short-term, quarterly profit-oriented decision-making comes at a cost, Sylvie believes. Inevitably, those cuts show up in quality, circulation and newsroom morale. It sends a message to journalists that what they do, or what they consider essential, isn’t important.

Well, that’s true. I wrote about it four months ago, saying 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!

Or how about this:

One of his recent studies, “One Product, Two Markets: How Geography Differentiates Online Newspaper Audiences,” co-authored with Iris Chyi, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism, suggests managers clearly understand the geographic market definitions for their online editions.

I mentioned these two types of visitors in an essay I wrote for my managers over four years ago. I called them “traffic” and “high-quality readership”, but the concepts are the same. I suggested that you should advertise differently to the two groups.

Traffic, though it is low-quality readership, is readership none the less. Traffic can be sold to non-local advertisers who want access to high volumes of non-local site visitors. You can identify these advertisers easily because they are the same ones who have high-quality websites and are actively promoting them….Your newspaper site can have a high-quality readership as well. The areas of the site that are used interactively by this readership should carry a high premium to advertisers, and can be sold in exactly the same way that experienced newspaper salespeople can sell their print readership.

I included a means for telling the two types of traffic apart. They are the ones (regularly) commenting on a website and participating in its forums or other avenues for user-generated content:

…only the people who wish to actually participate on your site are worth counting as readership, because they are the only ones who care about your site and the only ones you have a chance of getting reliable demographics from. You’ve not restricted them from accessing content, you’ve merely restricted them from adding their own content to the site. They have no reason to do this unless they want to participate in the site and, my friends, that is a reader, someone who will click around, see various things (including ads), get involved, and is not the one-hit wonder we characterized as traffic earlier on.

Then there’s Sylvie’s invocation of the Long Tail to explain concepts in newspaper archives:

In his latest study, “Developing an Online Newspaper Business Model,” [Sylvie] ties Chyi’s extensive work on online markets, as well as his and Chyi’s notion of long-distance online newspaper audiences, with Chris Anderson’s “Long Tailed Statistical Internet Model” to suggest a new, consumer-driven product unique to local online newspaper’s niche markets.

But I already made that link in an article I wrote for my Journalism Law and Ethics class a year ago. And I think I say it a little more clearly:

The new visitors came from search engines such as Google and Yahoo. News stories are chock full of keywords, the things search engine spiders like to eat up and digest and spit back at people who are searching for things online. So the old stories got hits from people located all over the world. In October 2004, Wired magazine managing editor Chris Anderson explained the business model at play in an article called The Long Tail…

OK, I’m tooting my own horn here a bit. But that’s not a bad record.

On the heels of my post of a couple of days ago outlining a new business model for news, based on Jeff Jarvis’ concepts of “doing what you do best and linking to the rest” and reverse syndication, I now present a list of best practices. Mindy McAdams has a list of best practices from an editorial, or curation, point of view. My list is more about the mechanics…how the links should actually be done, from the points of view of SEO and of encouraging a new link economy.

Suppose you are an online editor tasked with providing a package of, say, some of your own material, plus links to the best coverage on other sites.

1. Link to the original. Whenever possible, link first to the story that broke the news. If it’s copy from CP or AP (etc.), link to the story on their site only. Don’t link to the same story on some other site that happens to be a subscriber to the newswire. This entails you must look for the original source. Sometimes that will take work. Don’t shy from it. And remember, what appears first in Google News et. al. is not necessarily the original source.
2. Then link to articles that advance the story. Never link to duplicate material. Only link to stuff that contains new information or advances the story in some way. You’ll have to read the copy to determine if there’s something new in there, something first coming to light or being connected in that story and nowhere else. Do not link to rewrites of the original story, unless they contain something new. Especially never link to exact duplicates of stories you have already linked to.
3. Only link to the canonical URL of the story. Do not link to the front page of a site just because the story appears there. Find and use the unique, permanent URL for the story. Do not link to a page that redirects you to another page. Don’t blindly copy/paste a link; follow the link to see where you wind up. Don’t link to the “Print this story” page for the story. If there are variables in the URL, strip as much of them away as possible before linking to it. Especially important, strip away anything that relates to your own browser or session. Check, of course, that the URL still works and presents the story you’re trying to present.
4. Use JavaScript to insert your referer ID. In a reverse syndication scheme, you will share in the revenue derived from sending traffic to another site. But that can only work if the other site knows it was you that sent the traffic. To accomplish this, normally you will put some kind of referer ID in the URL so that the receiving site knows where the visitor came from. But that conflicts with #3 above: only link to the canonical URL. With correct use of JavaScript, you can do both. Googlebot will only see the canonical URL and distribute PageRank on that basis, while JavaScript-enabled browsers will carry the referer identification with them when they go.
5. Don’t link to pages behind a pay wall. Never. We want to discourage this anti-web behaviour. Following such links is pure frustration for users and will make them not trust the packages you’re presenting. This rule applies to stories currently behind a pay wall, as well as those that will go behind a pay wall once the story stales, a la The Globe and Mail.
6. Don’t be afraid to change the headline. In the link you are putting together, the link text should tell the user something about why they should follow that link. Avoid the temptation to simply use the headline on the story you are linking to – it may not tell the reader sifting through your package why they should go there.
7. Write your own snippet. Use the snippet to tell the user how this story differs from all the other stories you have linked to. How does this article advance the story? This augments Mindy’s point #3.

An old news organization has teamed up with a new one to create a new business model for news that gets about halfway to the future.

Online-only news and blog source Politico has partnered with newswire Reuters to share political news coverage with other news organizations in a wholly new type of syndication. Instead of the traditional model, where the newswire sells the content to other news organizations in exchange for money, this new consortium provides free content to member organizations in exchange for the right to put advertising on their websites. The content provider shares the advertising revenue with the members.

Jeff Jarvis calls this reverse syndication. If you’re like me, you have trouble getting your head around the notion of reverse syndication. Why ‘reverse’? The content still flows from the news gatherer (the newswire) to the news outlets (the individual member organizations) in a one-to-many relationship. The eyeballs still stay on the outlets’ websites.

But the ‘reverse’ comes in when you look at the net flow of money. In traditional syndication, the money flows from the member outlets to the news gatherer when the outlets subscribe to the content for a fee. In reverse syndication, the net flow of money is from the newswire to the members when it shares advertising profits with them.

This model still has problems, in my opinion. For one thing, duplicate copies of content still wind up on multiple websites, something I complained about during the Associated Press kerfuffles earlier this year. For another, it still doesn’t give enough credit to the original reporting.

The next step in the evolution of this new business model is to get all the way to TRUE reverse syndication, where there are changes in the flow of content and eyeballs as well. Instead of sending content to member sites, where the members use that content to attract and keep eyeballs, the news gatherer keeps the content on its own site, and members use links to send eyeballs over to the news gatherer’s site. In exchange for the eyeballs, the news gatherer pays the member site a share of the revenue generated by advertising on its own site.

Get it? The eyeballs flow instead of the content. Much, much easier to accomplish in our link-enabled world.

Maybe this seems counter-intutive. Why would a news organization want to send traffic away from its site? Aren’t they supposed to be content whores, putting any, all and every possible bit of content on their own site to act as spider-food and attract eyeballs?

Yes and no. If that same content appears on many different sites, the eyeballs it attracts are divided across many sites and almost nobody makes any money from it. That’s why the old syndication model is old and must die: it doesn’t work any more. Why should a news organization pay a newswire for content when people can go get that same content on other sites? It doesn’t make sense. It’s foolish even on the face of it.

Worse, it has a detrimental effect on the results in news aggregators like Google News. You end up with statements like “236 related articles” on Google News and they all say pretty much the same damn thing. It’s old thinking and it really should stop before someone gets hurt.

Do what you do best, and link to the best of the rest, to paraphrase Jarvis. Everyone can be a news gatherer. It can be a many-to-many relationship, with everybody concentrating on what they do best, and packaging links to the best of the rest for their readers. Local papers can focus on their local reporting – their mayor’s foibles, and fun at the council meetings. And regional papers can focus on regional issues, or issues not covered by other local papers, and just link out to the best coverage in surrounding municipalities when they need to. The Toronto Star needn’t have done this (and TorStar owns the Vaughan Citizen…go figure!) And big newswires like Reuters and AP can focus on their capital coverage and foreign bureaus.

By now it’s obvious to most observers that the trouble the U.S. newspaper industry has been seeing for years is now reaching us up here in Canada. Add to that list 600 jobs gone at Sun Media.

It’s a pandemic. No surprise, then, that people are casting about for new business models for news. Here’s the beginnings of a revolution in the way news is distributed and monetized.