Printed Matters

A post by Yelvington yesterday sparked a little bit of a debate about what it is that newspapers actually sell.

Yelvington claimed it is not print and not news. It’s readership.

“Your core product is a commercially relevant audience,” he said in bold type.

I chimed in on the comments at his blog:

…your product is not newspapers, or news or information. It is readership.

Another commenter said he totally agrees.

But then two other commenters had differing opinions. One agreed that newspapers sell readership to advertisers, but “for our readers, the news is the product.”

Another made a distinction between core product and core business, saying “our core *product* is news (or more accurately “news and information”), our core *business* is using that core product to deliver a commercially relevant audience…”

I was intrigued enough by these differences in the understanding of what the core product of a newspaper is to conduct a Twitter survey. I asked, what is the core product of newspapers? Discuss.

Now, this is by no means scientific. I got four respondents. (I’m not Scoble; my Twitterverse is small.) And I was interested in who gave the answers, and how what they do for their livings relates to the answers they gave.

Here’s the list, starting with Steve Yelvington and the commenters on his blog.

1. Steve Yelvington, news website developer: audience.
2. Tim Burden (that’s me), news website developer: audience.
3. Dan Thornton, marketer: audience
4. Chip Kaye, news website developer (papertrane): news for readers, audience for advertisers.
5. Marc Matteo, news website developer (SacBee): news is the product, audience is the business.
6. Dave Coleman, marketer (Spreed): brand
7. Gary Hilson, freelance writer and PR: news with context.
8. Kim Champion, newspaper editor: audience.
9. Stanislav Bender, j-school prof: it’s an ecosystem.
10. Zac Echola, news website developer: audience.

Zac wasn’t part of my Twitter survey, but he wrote a post a short time ago making the claim:

The newspaper business has never been in the journalism business. Journalism is a means to an end (an end that unfortunately may no longer support the luxury of “wasteful” spending on bureaus and months long investigations that turn up little to no news). The true core business is not newspaper production and distribution, it’s advertising.

If this were a vote, audience wins. The core business of a newspaper (or any other news organization) is selling eyeballs to advertisers.

What do you think? What’s the core product of a newspaper? And why does it matter? (Hint: it’s crucial.)

I generally applaud efforts by news organizations to get seriously jiggy with the web. In particular, when news companies make APIs available for their content, it represents a real willingness by that company to make the ultimate sacrifice: to give up control of their content and their data and let others see what they can make of it.

Take a look at the cool work of Vancouver artist Jer Thorp. He plays with visualizations based on the word frequency in the huge data sets made available through these APIs.

And visualizations are great, but they don’t reflect the best thing about APIs: as people use a news company’s data in various mashups, it gets more people looking at its content. The company gets more of a chance to engage a community of interested news consumers. They get more readership. We get a better web.

So what’s my beef?

The Guardian API is different from the other API offerings from the NYT and the BBC in that it provides the full content of stories. And the proposition is that you can use the full text of stories on other websites, as long as you display Guardian advertising alongside it.

So why is that bad? It’s not, per se. Aggregators can do a better job of aggregating, and semantic taggers can do a better job of semantic tagging, if they have the full dataset. And that’s the point of the exercise, after all: to increase the overall utility of the web for everyone’s benefit.

What I specifically don’t like is that the Guardian is explicitly saying it’s OK to duplicate their content on other sites. How then do aggregators decide which are duplicates? How does the semantic web figure out what the “canonical” address for the story is? It is specifically disutilitarian to have identical (or even similar, for that matter) content strewn around the web. Or worse, woven “into the fabric of the Internet,” as the Guardian announcement put it.

So they’re right to provide the full data: that’s a plus for web utility. But they’re wrong to condone outright duplication of content, which is of negative utility.

Shafqat Islam of Newscred says he hopes people will realize this problem and not duplicate full content feeds. But the Guardian could fix this problem easily by continuing to provide the full dataset, but putting a clause in the otherwise rather strict Terms and Conditions stating that outright duplication of the material is forbidden.

The Terms and Conditions already stipulate that a link must be provided back to the original article on the Guardian site. Which begs the question: why not just link back to the Guardian site? Why does anyone need to publish the full story, and duplicate that content, on their own site?

This is interesting, and perhaps even useful for Toronto-based journalists: you can track all the calls to the Toronto fire department live (or close to live, I suspect) on Twitter.

Found this via @jeffjarvis, who pointed out that it’s like being on the city desk and being on the radio scanner.

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.

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.

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.

What’s the difference between a blog post, a forum post, a news story, a comment, an event listing, and a business listing? Not much, as far as your database and your app are concerned. They all share similar attributes, like title, body, author, time published, time edited etc. and so it might make sense to put them in a database together. I’m thinking, of course, about sites that might have all those types of things, like a community newspaper site.

If you did that then you could easily build new types of applications within your site just by defining a new category and (optionally) creating a couple of new templates.

Advantages: simplifies search, speeds coding time (since one type of query would work for all content areas).

Default template: display title, body (if any) and then list any children in a dl (title, snippet) format. From there, you can define special list, list item, and single item formats that each child member can inherit.

Wordpress does something like this, and I was pretty close to doing exactly this on ParrySound.com.

Ok, back to coding.

Ok, I tried Disqus and didn’t like it because it wouldn’t let me change my display name, and wouldn’t let me change my comment system without losing all my (myriads of) comments, and didn’t do trackbacks. So I’m trying Intense Debate, which looks a little slicker. Not a lot of blogs supporting it yet, and they don’t appear to handle trackbacks either, but it’s better than a system that you can’t personalize and that you’re stuck with.

One thing I really don’t like is that all your comments are in JavaScript, which means that links back to your own blog won’t count in Google. Hmmm.

A couple of recent articles in EditorsWebLog have me thinking about advertising again. Newspaper execs are having a tough time figuring out how to monetize their websites, while advertisers are concerned about how to measure audience on websites.

And I think interstitials deserve another look.

Interstitials are ads that take up the full screen as you move from one page to another on a website. Here’s the Wikipedia entry. And here’s a better explanation, complete with an example.

I think we all know the problems with standard banner advertising, those flashing, blinking rectangles of annoyance that occupy the margins and header areas of webpages. People have trained themselves not to look at them. There’s evidence that people don’t even see them. Sufficiently irritated people can get programs or browser plug-ins or mini-scripts to block them entirely. Click-through rates, about the only measurement we have to determine whether people are seeing the ads, are dismally low and at any rate can be gamed.

Pop-ups/unders/overs have similar problems and are even more annoying. Modern browsers come stock ready to block these.

Yet, a content provider has to make money from the content it provides somehow. And when it comes right down to it, there are really only two ways to make money from content: the consumer pays to get content (e.g. subscriptions, box sales, pay-per-view) or the content is supported by advertisers (e.g. sponsorships, banner ads, flyers, etc).

I think, and the consensus today among publishers is, that advertising is the way to go on the web. Pay walls go against the spirit of the web and reduce its utility. Besides, big media outlets like the New York Times have found that the money they can make from advertising far outweighs the money they can make from charging for their content, prompting them to take down their pay walls. The traffic that comes into their archives from search engines like Google is massive, and also, nobody’s going to pay for content (news, in this case) that they can get elsewhere for free.

But if advertising is the way to go, and traditional web advertising performs poorly, where does that leave content providers?

I’d like to make a case for interstitials. Cookie-based, server-side interstitials. Why? They can’t be skipped unless the user turns off cookies. You can limit how often a user gets hit with an interstitial – say, every 10 minutes, as the user moves from page to page, he gets hit with an interstitial. He’s forced to look at it for, say, 10 seconds, before he’s allowed to move on to the content he wanted to get to.

If the user dumps his cookies, then he just gets hit faster…he moves to one page and then when he tries to move to the next page: an ad. Some users may turn off cookies. In that case, you can also turn off certain premium content, like videos. Those are expensive to make, and don’t do anything for Google traffic anyway, so if cookies are off (like a search engine spider) then the browser doesn’t get to see video. They also can’t log on, for example, so depending on how you have comments set up, they won’t be able to comment or participate on the site. I’m sure there are other ways that users could be gently punished for turning cookies off.

But why would the user do that? Surely the user can stand looking at an ad for 10 seconds every 10 minutes? There’s a much bigger ratio of ads to content on TV and yet people have watched TV under that regime for many years.

The advantage to this scheme is that you know for sure users are seeing the ads. At first, they may use their 10 seconds looking frantically for some way to skip the ad or avoid the horrible punishment of looking at the ad. After a while, they’d get used to it, and see it as an acceptable compromise, I think. Somehow the content has to get paid for, and this it is really not much to ask a user to contribute less than two per cent of his time to the cause. Acceptance levels would be higher, of course, if media companies got together and standardized the details.

The numbers can be adjusted, of course. Maybe the ratio should be one per cent or five per cent. Maybe five seconds is enough time to see the ad, and maybe it should be served every five minutes. Testing will sort all that out.

You can get ad-blockers that work by domain name, so that stuff from doubleclick (for example) can be filtered out. In that case, the user would be left staring at a blank screen. So maybe ads should be served from your own domain name. If you belong to a network, maybe they have to push the ads to your server somehow.

Note that the “one-hit wonders”, people who come in from Google to read your stuff and then are off again, don’t get hit with an ad. You know what? That’s OK. They probably don’t care about your message anyway.

I’d really like to hear some feedback and comments on this one.