If your news site isn’t social, great design won’t matter

There’s been a lot of sound and fury in the media sphere recently, sparked by a blog post from web designer Andy Rutledge that tore apart the New York Times website for being ugly and cluttered. This caused a firestorm of sorts on Twitter, as defenders of the site argued that most of his criticisms and proposed solutions were unrealistic — which many of them arguably are. But the biggest blunder Rutledge commits is when he argues that news sites should avoid social-recommendation elements, when the opposite is true.
Many of Rutledge’s points about the New York Times site have a lot of truth to them, and he makes a point of saying that his criticisms are not specific to the NYT, but apply to plenty of other newspaper websites as well. The biggest issue — as anyone who has spent any time trying to find a specific story on the NYT home page will likely agree — is that the site is literally crammed to the rafters with links. Not only is there a navigational sidebar with links to every section of the paper, and section menus, but there are hundreds of separate links and other elements on every page. Says Rutledge:
"I think the object of the game must be to fit as much “content” onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information. If only the reader could learn to ignore 60% of what’s here, she might have a chance at a pleasant experience."

The problem of too much content
To avoid this cluttered look, Rutledge argues that the NYT and other sites should strip out most of what they put on their pages — including much of the navigation — and make their search better and their classification systems more intuitive so readers can find what they want. And he gives credit to many news sites for having mobile versions and iPad apps that do a better job of streamlining their content for browsing, although he argues that many still try to cram too much into a single page.
Lauren Rabaino at the blog 10,000 words has done an admirable job of collecting some of the negative reactions to Rutledge’s post, as has Danny DeBelius. One of the designer’s critics is Nieman Journalism Lab editor Joshua Benton, who argues that Rutledge is ignoring the fact that the New York Times produces a vast amount of journalism and content every day, and that the website has to not only look nice but provide an easy way to navigate through all this content.
But Rutledge doesn’t so much ignore this fact as argue that most of that ocean of NYT content simply isn’t that important to most people, which gets to the core of the problem: for the most part, the New York Times website — like most news websites — is created and designed for some mythical reader who is interested in everything the paper produces. The reality, of course, is that there are virtually no such readers (or at least extremely few of them), and designing for them is a mistake.

No one is interested in everything
Everyone has certain things they are interested in at the NYT or many other news sites, and lots of other things that they couldn’t care less about. That’s why so many have turned to social media tools like Twitter as news sources — not just because it is real-time, and more personal, but also because a person’s social graph via Facebook or Twitter can act as a filter. This is summed up by the famous statement made by a young internet user in a consumer survey on news habits, who said: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Is a great newspaper website design going to influence that process? Unlikely.
Which is why it’s so odd to see the designer say, in his new rules for news sites, that newspapers should dispense with the “most popular” and other recommendation features they have, and not worry about social media at all. He says:
"There is no “most popular” news. There is news and there is opinion and they are mutually exclusive. Popularity of stories is something not contextual to news sites, but to social media sites… News is not social media. If it is, it fails to be news."
This misses the point by a country mile, in a couple of different ways, as Martin Belam from The Guardian and others have noted. For one thing, recommendation tools like “most popular” — or “recommended,” in the case of the New York Times — as well as the “like” buttons and other tools that allow people to share articles through Facebook and elsewhere, can be hugely useful both for readers and for the publications that use them. The Huffington Post achieved some dramatic traffic and engagement growth when it integrated Facebook Connect and made it easy for readers to see what their friends had shared, and others have seen similar jumps from Google+.
To say that “there is no most-popular news” ignores the fact that millions of people like to share news stories with their friends and followers, and that this is an integral part of what the media business is today — whether it’s individually-curated aggregators like Paper.li or News.me, or a more ambitious attempt to create a customized digital newspaper or magazine like Flipboard is becoming. And to argue that news “is not social media [and] if it is, it fails” shows a similar lack of insight into how digital media functions.
All media is effectively social, whether news organizations like the New York Times and others want it to be or not. To ignore that seems like incredibly bad advice from someone who claims to have the industry’s best interests at heart.

Source: Gigaom.com

News matters so much more than what delivers it

By Jeff Jarvis

Portable reading devices were described as offering "a glimmer of hope for the embattled industry" in these pages last week. Having spent the past two months reading two newspapers - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - primarily on my Amazon Kindle, I'd say that glimmer is dim.
The problems with the Kindle could be - and no doubt will be - solved. The reader works wonderfully for books. But it also tries to turn a newspaper into a book, starting us on the first page of the first story and nudging us through its awkward user interface to proceed a page-turn at a time through the entire product, as we used to on paper. The digital among us, however, no longer read news in this way. Online, we search and link and flit and explore. We are in control of the experience, not some editor somewhere.
Online, news has been freed from its packaging. Indeed, that is a key architectural underpinning of the web itself: content is separated from presentation. The same text and media can be fed into a web page, or into an iPhone app or an RSS feed. Substance parts company with style. All of which makes me wonder whether we will ever see the iPod moment for newspapers.
News Corp, Hearst and other publishers are reportedly working with manufacturers to develop flat electronic substitutes for their beloved paper. Their assumption is that we are pining for a familiar, nostalgic presentation of content. They hope that when electronic news reminds us of print news - that is, when editors can once more package the world for us - we'll again be loyal to and perhaps pay for their work and brands.
Sorry, but I think the opposite is occurring. We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall. News is spread in the speed of a tweet. The half-life of a scoop's value is lessened but the value of links grows.
These economics were driven home to me as I read the Journal on my Kindle. Since my days on an expense account, I've subscribed to the Journal online, paying more than $100 a year. For the last two months, I was paying an additional $9.99 a month for it on the Kindle. But in that time, I saw just how few Journal stories I read or needed to read after I'd gone through the New York Times and my RSS and Twitter feeds, which send me to a dozen sources. It's links that most often get me to read articles.
In the emotional frenzy to find a way to make us pay for news again online, the Journal is reportedly mulling the idea of micropayments, in the hope that this will attract a new audience unwilling to subscribe but wanting to get that unique Journal story - folks such as me who come in via links and search. I see unintended consequences ahead. I may end up paying cents for stories instead of dollars for a subscription. Indeed, when the Journal raised its Kindle price to $14.99, I hit my limit. I cancelled.
I will still read news on gadgets, of course. The New York Times has a brilliant iPhone app that is constantly updated and ad-subsidised and free (as I wish the Kindle were). The Times also has a new version of its PC reader that more closely mimics the experience of reading the paper; it's appealing.
But in news, neither the device nor the form matters nearly as much as the information and its timing. This requires that publishers unleash their news on every device possible. But no single gadget will be their saviour. None will bring back the good old days - if they were that - of news and the world delivered in neat little packages we paid for.

Source: guardian.co.uk

"The rebirth of the news business" without traditional media?

THE Economist has made the news industry the special focus of its business section for its latest edition. "Established" news is described as "being blown away" but news in general is otherwise considered to be "thriving."
In an opening paragraph which does not bode well for advocates of traditional media, the Economist ponders if "the surest sign that newspapers are doomed is that politicians, so often their targets, are beginning to feel sorry for them," in reference to Barack Obama's pledge to newspapers last weekend at an industry dinner in Washington, as well as Massachusetts senator, John Kerry's commitment to help the "endangered species" and, in particular, his region's beloved Boston Globe.
Survey statistics from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and information from consultants OC&C are used to build a picture of a fading industry: last month, the former said that newsroom unemployment in the States had reached a 30-year low, while the latter calculated that 70 British local newspapers have disappeared since the beginning of 2008. Of course, the trend is not limited to Anglo-speaking countries, with the press in France and Spain, for example, also suffering: "French newspapers have avoided the same fate only by securing an increase in their already hefty government subsidies," notes the Economist, with regards to a 600 million euro government bail-out.
News consumption is changing, says the Economist, talking about a study carried out by the Pew Research Centre, in which for the first time in 2008, internet overtook print as the primary news source. Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, is cited as saying that online news has come to be viewed as "an all-you-can-eat buffet for which you pay a cable company the only charge."
Traditional news outlets, including print and broadcast, as well the original "internet pioneers" such as AOL.com and MSN.com, are depicted as "old-fashioned department stores." A business model that once worked on account of its ability to offer consumers a wide-range of quality goods all under one roof no longer holds. Instead, customers are enticed by the giveaway discount culture of the Internet; Google has taken over as the new one-stop shop.
The Economist argues that news aggregators - seen by many within the news industry as "parasites" who feed off the work of others - do more good than they do harm and is right to point out that "interest in a story about Iraq in, say, the Los Angeles Times extends far beyond that city. Before the aggregators appeared, a reader in Seville or even San Francisco probably would not have known it existed."
The Huffington Post is singled out as a model aggregator for what the Economist describes as its ability to enlist "an unpaid army of some 3,000 mostly left-wing bloggers" to cater for the 4.2m unique readers that visit the site monthly. "The inherent benefit of spreading stories around helps explain why some established news outfits are coming to resemble aggregators," says the Economist.
British and American news publication, the Week, is an example of a print news aggregator. We would also add here France's Courrier International, an excellent editorial product with sadly circulation figures that do not reflect this (despite a steady increase over recent years). Established in 1987, the weekly title today offers a look at the leading articles from around the world, with more than 900 international publications within its scope. Recurring themes are chosen from several newspapers from different parts of the globe and are translated into French for the home audience. For instance, in the latest edition (printed Thursday), the cover story concentrates on India's "awakening" with 10 articles translated from 8 of India's leading papers. Additionally, every week, stories outlining outside perception of France and the French also appear and Thursday's edition coincidentally kicks off the "France" section with the cover story which appeared on last week's edition of the Economist: "Europe's new pecking order" (France was considered to come out top, although the Economist does not expect it to hold onto this position for long).
With regards to pay walls, while the Economist believes that newspapers and magazines are more likely to be saved thanks to "a careful combination of free and paid-for content," it believes general news will largely remain free on the web, although it seems to contradict this view in another article - also part of the same series, with the role of the Internet in "killing the newspaper" at its core - claiming this approach is unsustainable in the long term.
On the one hand, the Economist is clearly optimistic about the prospect of news, going forward: "As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative." Yet, its stance on the future of print media is vague. Does it believe that newspapers (along with the established press) are heading for extinction? Or does it think there is still hope?
The Economist seems to think there may no longer be a place for traditional media in today's increasingly digital society and hints at a world where such media eventually dies out, in what it sees as the "end of a certain kind of civic sensibility." What's odd is that such a tone should come from a publication which has always referred to itself as a "newspaper." Interestingly, it avoids doing so in these specific articles.
We must not overlook emerging markets such as India and China, where despite some stagnation, the newspaper industry (not just news) is flourishing, as recent investments show. Some may argue that rising literacy levels will eventually lead to news consumption moving online even in these parts of the world, and once internet penetration becomes more substantial, this is a possibility. Although, coming back to the West, Canada is proof that a solid internet network does not necessarily mean that print must suffer.
The argument that Obama has every "intention to bypass the news filter" is unconvincing and it seems more likely that he and his multimedia-savvy team are simply engaging with all branches of the media community, in what some have called a "new spirit of inclusion," which includes the social networking community.
While newspapers may be in decline, it is premature to write newspapers off entirely, although there is no doubt that some aspects of the original business model need to be revised and adapted to the needs of today's readers and advertisers. Newspapers have generally been battered and bruised and bounced about from one would-be proprietor to the next, obliged to cut back staff and, in many cases, forced to shutdown altogether. This is not the result of dwindling circulation, for despite drops, there is still a large contingent of people for whom reading the newspaper is an essential part of keeping themselves informed.

Source: Economist.com

Journalists: Where do you add value?

EVERY day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight - that is, more efficient - times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?
Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story. It did the opposite for me. I was disturbed at the waste.
The correspondent - I won’t pick on him; it was just his turn to play show monkey - stood in front of the new Mets’ stadium to tell us that there’s controversy about naming it after a sponsor. It was just a stand-up. There was no evidence of reporting as he was standing alone in a parking lot. The knowledge was a commodity. Anybody could have read it. But they wanted to scene and invested a correspondent and crew to get it. Then he dashed to the UN because there was a vote happening. But he didn’t run to report. He ran to the bureau to do another stand-up with another background. Again, what happened in the vote was commodity knowledge. Anybody could have read it.
So there is a reporter not reporting. But, of course, that is hardly unique to CNN. How much of the dwindling, precious journalism resource we have - on national and local TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines - goes to original reporting, to real journalism? How much goes to repetition and production?
Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?
Look at a service such as PaidContent. They have a small (though growing) staff and they choose carefully what they do, whether it’s worth it to send someone to a conference, whether they can add reporting to a story that’s already known, how they can curate links to the best of coverage that already exists. They fire their bullets carefully, economically, to contribute maximum unique value. PaidContent doesn’t - and can’t afford to - record stand-ups or rewrite others’ reporting for the sake of rewriting it or waste money on production and design niceties.
That’s the way that journalism will have to be executed in the future: efficiently.
I’ve been wanting to get funding to perform an audit of the journalistic output and value of the entire legacy structure of news in a market. It’s not that the current state of news should be the model for the future but it is where the discussion begins: ‘How do we make sure we’ll maintain this level of reporting?’
Once journalism becomes efficient, I think it can do much better than maintain what we have now. When we cut out all the incredible waste - those standups and rewrites and frills and blather - and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting.
Bloggers have had to learn that, too. Just linking to and commenting on others’ reporting won’t get you much attention. Every blogger who does original reporting and tells the world something it doesn’t know but wants to know learns that this is how to get links and audience. Arianna Huffington told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London months ago that she was hiring reporters because their stories get more traffic; it’s enlightened economic self-interest. This is a lesson we teach our journalism students at CUNY, when we have them add reporting to the conversations that are going on online.
Whether you’re a blogger or a new form of news organization, you’re going to have to ask with every move whether it will add value to the news ecosystem. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t do it.
In the link economy, the value given to original reporting will rise. The ability to waste money on old practices of egotistical journalism will plummet. And what is left standing, I think, is more efficient and valuable reporting.

Source: buzzmachine.com

No one owns the news

Whether you are working in computer programming, or business development, or the arts, creating something new demand a curious mix of hubris and humility. Hubris to believe that you are the one talented and knowledgeable enough to find the new way. And humility to know that you do not yet know that way and must work to discover it.
The legacy news industry today's got the hubris part cold. The humility? Not so much. News companies' sense of entitlement regarding the news that they report is preventing them from developing the new business practices that they need to profit in an increasingly competitive information market.
Witness the temper tantrums that major news bosses have thrown during the past seven days about the use of news stories online.
First, Rupert Murdoch complained that Google was stealing newspapers' copyrights. Then Associated Press/MediaNews chairman Dean Singleton threw down at the AP's annual meeting, threatening unspecified websites with legal action for using AP material in unspecified ways.
Singleton's remarks elicited a flurry of Twitter posts from journalists gleeful at the idea of suing online aggregators into oblivion. But the two names most often cited for their use of AP copy - Google News and the Huffington Post - both have syndication deals with the AP. They've paid already for that content.
Anyone who hopes to understand the game being played here needs to understand the difference between republishing content, beyond fair use, and linking to content.
The AP, as well as any other publisher, has long had the ability to shut down any republication of its work. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes arranging the take-down of infringing content a snap. If the AP knows of websites republishing AP content in a manner that goes beyond established fair use, one letter can take down each of those sites. And the AP's managers know that.
So why the dog whistle this week to AP's subscribers? Because some journalists want to go beyond shutting down plagiarists. They want back their traditional role as the public gatekeeper of all news. That means shutting down the aggregators, whether they be automated agents such as Google News or bloggers such as Drudge and Huffington. Or, at least, requiring those aggregators to become paying affiliates of the AP and other legacy news organizations.
It's the RIAA game plan versus online upstarts all over again: If you can't beat 'em, sue somebody.
At least the recording industry had a catalog of unique works to defend, music that people wanted to hear time and again. But news isn't music. News is information, a commodity that belongs to no one. True, a journalist (or his employer) owns that reporter's telling of that story. But that story itself, the core facts of what happened, when and where, those cannot, and in a free society should not, be owned by any single entity.
Newspaper companies became gatekeepers of information due to the happenstance of technology. They happened to own what was, for several decades, the most efficient medium by which to transmit large quantities of information to local audience - the printing press and gobs of newsprint.
Now, the Internet provides a better, cheaper and faster, alternative. But I fear that too many managers in the newspaper industry have conflated their ownership of a news medium with ownership of the news itself. That belief cannot stand. People must have the right to talk about the news, to link to it and to report upon it on their own.
As Danny Sullivan has pointed out, the news industry today is functioning better than it ever has, with more original content and more opportunities for more people to find that content than ever before. If you look beyond the established media brands, that is.
So what's the problem? Oh, yeah, that means competition for long-established media brands. And many of them would prefer not to have to deal with that.
They got used to owning the means of communication in the past, and came to believe that history entitles them to own the means of communication in the future. Every moment and dollar that Murdoch, the AP and the newspaper industry spend pursuing that false entitlement is a moment and dollar wasted. And the news industry no longer has any money, or time, to waste.

Source: Knight Digital Media Center

Maybe what your news organization needs is a 'spontaneous bashing together of ideas'

RATHER than take a hipshot off those headlines, though, we're going to be proactive on OJR this week, starting with this piece from Eric Ulken, who offers a roadmap for established news organizations to enliven their online efforts.]
In a nondescript training room in the BBC's White City building in West London, about 80 people are huddled around tables with placards bearing names like "Dr. Who" and "Top Gear" [BBC TV show titles], engaged in discussions on topics ranging from user-generated content to alternate-reality gaming.
The assembled thinkers and tinkerers represent many different arms of the British media behemoth, from radio news to Web production to technology. About the only things they have in common besides an employer are an interest in innovation and an eye to the future.
They're taking part in the second BeeBCamp, an "unconference" in the tradition of BarCamp (and partly inspired by the Guardian's GameCamp) that aims to bring together forward-thinking staffers and a few outsiders to talk about themes loosely related to the future of the BBC. [Disclosure: I was one of those outsiders, and, in the everybody-pitches-in spirit of the unconference, I talked about my work in data journalism at the L.A. Times.]
BeeBCamp, according to the BBC blog's write-up of the event, "is designed as a collective, spontaneous bashing together of ideas, with no set structure to the day." A whiteboard goes up first thing in the morning, and anybody who has an idea for a discussion or presentation claims a spot on the schedule. For example, one participant wrote: "We own twitter.com/bbc. What should we do with it?" (Some ideas here.)
I'm a little late with this post, as it's been almost a month since the Feb. 18 gathering. There's already ample coverage of the discussions and presentations (plus tags on Twitter and Flickr), so I won't rehash all that. Instead I'd like to consider the broader idea of BeeBCamp and similar gatherings as they relate to the need to foster innovation in traditional media organizations. BeeBCamp and events like it are great examples of how "big media" — often seen as bureaucratic and impenetrable — can break down walls, open themselves up and facilitate the development of new ideas.

Why might a media company want to host an event like this? Some reasons:

Silo-busting: BeeBCamp brings together staffers from disparate parts of a huge institution — folks who might never have a business reason to talk to one another but whose goals and interests mesh, often in unexpected ways. (I got the feeling a number of the BeeBCamp participants had never met before.) The interdisciplinary nature of the gathering is what makes it so useful, as experts apply their unique perspectives and skills to common problems.
Openness: Everything at BeeBCamp is on the record, unless somebody holds up a sign that says "unbloggable". This means a lot of what is said will get rebroadcast and commented on by people outside the organization, which is, at the least, a way of showing the world that the BBC is thinking and talking about the future, and at best a way to engage in an informal dialogue with the audience.
Innovation: Sometimes it's useful to get away from the desk for a while and talk informally with colleagues. Not the ones you sit next to, but the folks across the building (or across town, or across the country) whom you wouldn't ordinarily interact with. Crazy, silly ideas flow, which beget less silly ideas, which occasionally lead to completely sane and doable ideas. And because people are free to blog the discussions, there's a good record of what's said, which can be a useful starting point for follow-up discussion and action.

BeeBCamp is just one example of how media organizations are opening up the process of innovation. Here are some formats that have been used:

Hack day: This concept, which originated at Yahoo, typically calls for giving techies (often working in concert with product and content folks) 24 hours to build an idea into a functional prototype. After trying out the format internally in 2005, Yahoo conducted the first open hack day in 2006 and continues to do both internal and public hack days. Matt McAlister, one of the instigators of hack day at Yahoo, is now at the Guardian, which did its own internal hack day (with a few outside guests) last year. McAlister has a round-up of the results, complete with video highlight reel, on his blog. (I'd be interested in hearing if other media have hosted hack days.)
Meetup: The Chicago Tribune has been making good use of meetups (or tweetups, i.e., meetups organized via Twitter) to engage in informal dialogue with readers. It works like this: The Trib (in the persona of Colonel Tribune) invites local bloggers, twitterers and interested readers of all stripes to meet – no agenda — usually at a local bar. The result: Ideas direct from readers, kudos in the blogosphere and good karma all around. Last year the Trib also invited local bloggers to tour the paper.
Unconference: BeeBCamp, BarCamp and the recent regional NewsInnovation BarCamps fall into this category. Here's how you might organize an unconference in your organization: Find interested colleagues. Bring in some clever outsiders. Get them talking about the future and see what happens. Make it clear to people that what's said is on the record. You want folks to feel free to blog and comment about what they see and hear, for reasons mentioned above.

Source: Knight Digital Media Center