AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Much has been written in this space about the AR&D strategic platform known as Continuous News. Our definition of the concept was first articulated in my 2007 essay, News is a Process, Not a Finished Product,” and it’s a chapter in our book, Live. Local. BROKEN News. Continuous “real time” News IS the future of online news, because it is designed for the online audience for news, which is Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

We can and should stunt all we like in creating rich content portals, niche verticals, microsites, full local advertising solutions, ad networks and hundreds of other options, but if we’re going to be in the online news business, we must be presenting a Continuous News service. We’re having some truly wonderful success stories with our clients, but we still run into people who want to fight about the core assumptions of the concept.

While we believe strongly, for example, that Continuous News should be presented in blog format, with the latest entry at the top, this is a difficult concept for many to grasp, largely because it’s so different from the “lead story” or “banner headline” of finished product journalism. In the old form, completed stories are presented in ranked order of importance, a ranking determined by the skill, training and intuition of an editor or a producer.

The paradigm of ranked presentation is what the newspaper industry dragged with it to the Web in the mid 90s, which was then copied by the television industry, because, well, that’s the way media companies did it. While it’s an oversimplification to blame industry woes on how news in presented online, the reality is it hasn’t exactly blossomed as a viable replacement for traditional forms of media. Meanwhile, the people who built the Web moved in an entirely different direction, in part, because they knew something media companies didn’t — that the Web is a real time database, not a transport system for content.

And so, from the very beginning, media companies were going up the down staircase, and the results are not surprising. The analogy of pouring new wine into old wineskins is appropriate, with the predictable result of exploding wineskins.

The database-driven, real-time Web doesn’t play well with traditional news items, because the values of the Web conflict with the values of what we call “finished product” news, that which we publish in our newspapers and deliver in our newscasts. Speed, transparency, authenticity and unbundled ubiquity are quite different from that which is bundled, carefully constructed, fully vetted, and complete. It is no surprise that the individual blogs of many media company employees are providing the online oomph for their employers. These are designed for the database-driven, real-time Web, and make no mistake, there is no other kind of Web.

So the conflict between the traditional and the new is innate and deep. Try to convince an old-timer that online news should be presented differently than offline news, and you’ll generally get a harumph and horizontal head movement. The resistance can be extreme. We’ve run into media properties that try to promote a hybrid model, with the “top stories” presented in a block at the top, followed by the continuous news stream.

The perceived assumption with those who resist Continuous News is that people both want and need to have everything summarized for them in one place. We would argue that this is elitist, contrary to evidence, and contrary to the established trends of the Live Web (Seth Godin, Google, Wikipedia-Semantic Web) and social media. The creation of an online finished record, therefore, is a throwback to the days of the Static Web and the logic and reasoning of the late 20th Century. For broadcasters especially, transitioning from the static to the live is difficult, because our instincts and traditions tell us to “gather” an audience. However, television news people understand the word “live” better than other traditional forms of media, so the execution of a vibrant Continuous News strategy can be almost second nature.

Let us also note that “the stream” of information in the Live Web is much bigger than that which any website can produce, which is why we need a strategic approach to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Think of it as a giant funnel through which flows a massive flood of information and data that is much bigger than us. Figuring out how to curate the stream is a problem that many are currently working to resolve, but that should not prevent us from shifting our focus to “live,” because we want to be rightly positioned for where things are going, not for where they have been. If, for example, Facebook becomes “the Web within the Web” as some predict, we will be prepared to adapt to the environment. Too much is fluid today and too much is at stake for us to remain in a Static Web mode.

In the Continuous News model, everything is a breaking event. There is no “lead” story, for the only thing that matters is the time. Bits of stories are sufficient and they can be tied together through search, tags and a “more coverage” button, if we believe that’s necessary. Belief that the audience can’t figure out what’s going on — what’s important — is tied to our finished product news genes, but it’s an insult to empowered consumers. Creating news for the Web that appeals to the lowest common denominator is a broadcast mindset. If we challenge people to move ahead and create an environment in which THEY are in control, we will be rewarded by their loyalty. People “get” Facebook’s “News Feed.” People “get” Twitter. And the numbers for both are northbound, so it isn’t really too much of a stretch to make the assumption that they will “get” what we’re trying to do in the Continuous News world as well.

And beyond all of that is the need to fully understand that this “real time” stream is where all of the news business is headed downstream. It’s much, much bigger than simply a discussion of whether our website output should be a part of it. The Semantic Web itself will be able to harvest all kinds of database files simultaneously to provide facts, context, understanding and knowledge. We must be a part of the stream, and the time to begin is now.

ASIDE: I just learned that Albritton’s new online news venture in Washington D.C. will be presented in a form of Continuous News. Note this quote from the Broadcasting & Cable article:

“TBD will never be a finished product,” wrote Director of Community Engagement Steve Buttry in its inaugural post April 28. “We’ll always be in motion: constantly updating, improving and evolving. We’ll be a place you visit to watch the news unfold in real time.”

Here’s a caution for Mr. Buttry. The online audience for news is generally at work, so be careful with hot audio on all that video. We don’t want to disturb the guy in the cubicle next door.

I don’t often get to write about my clients, but occasionally milestones are reached that I can’t keep quiet about. The subject matter here is Continuous News, something I’ve been working with clients on for the past several years. WLEX-TV in Lexington isn’t the first TV station to go this route in presenting news online, but they’ve reached such a level of success with it that I think it’s time you heard all about it.

Continuous News is just the first step in a sophisticated business transformation and re-engineering project underway at the station led by AR&D principal and senior strategist, Jim Willi. The idea is a complete overhaul, top to bottom, of how the station functions over the next several years that will lead to dramatic changes in not only content creation and distribution but also how the company makes money. It is exciting to be a part of it.

Here’s the story that I published today in our newsletter:

“It’s just another way to beat somebody,” says Assistant News Director Kathy Stone, of LEX18.com’s remarkable Continuous News website. Kathy smiles as she says that, because they’re writing the science on how to beat competitors online, blazing a trail for those who will follow. Since the station bought into the real time blog format for its home page last September, everything has gone through the roof, including the news department’s ability to knock the socks off competitors. “In the last five months,” says news director Bruce Carter, “we have NEVER been beaten online by our television news competition. Not one time!”

“95% of the time,” he adds, “we beat kentucky.com, the Herald-Leader newspaper website.”

“Continuous News” presents the news of the day as an ongoing stream, not as a finished product. In breaking away entirely from the long trend of television stations trying to be newspapers on the Web, the LEX18.com site is published in blog format, with the latest story, or “item,” appearing at the top. Many traditional news people complain that this format doesn’t present any “top story” or “big headline” at the top of the page, but this is turning out to be an empty argument, for the audience in Lexington is flocking to the website in record numbers. “People know what the top stories are, because they’re following us throughout the day,” says Carter. “We don’t need to hold their hands. We have too much respect for them to do that.”

They hit 9,000,000 page views for 2010 at the end of February, already over one-third of the site’s total in all of 2009. The growth has been absolutely explosive over the past two months as users have caught on to the model. The bounce rate is under 50%, unique visitors total 726,000 for the year — the vast majority from the DMA — and the most fascinating statistic of all is that those users spend an average of almost 6 minutes on each visit. The graph below shows that this number — “Time On Site” — jumped the moment the station switched from a conventional news portal model to the Continuous News format.

And where eyeballs visit, money follows. While not giving exact numbers, the station is within mid five-figures of topping its entire 2009 revenue number and all in just a little over two months. The secret? In addition to a lot of hard work, Continuous News is sold by daypart, with advertisers paying a premium for ads during three traffic peaks throughout the day, roughly 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Fast food advertisers love the idea of serving ads in the morning and at the beginning of the lunch hour. The station has also innovated what it calls “bubble banners,” custom size and shaped ads which exist between items in the blog side of the site. The ads are very effective, and advertisers love the reach. The station also sells roadblock ads across the page by daypart and for a real premium.

“TV sales people understand daypart selling,” says General Manager Pat Dalbey, “so it’s made it a lot easier for them to participate in our success.”

To help drive the site and its real-time gathering of news, the news department pulled a page from the AR&D playbook and rearranged its central assignment desk by adding a couple of key people to what is now called its “content center.” Shaped a bit like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Stone and Carter join assignment editor Mike Taylor and daytime Web content producer, Jim Wilkeson and work together to filter everything that’s coming in and pushing it out to staff, producers and, of course, the Web. By joining together the most experienced editorial minds of the news department, it’s making a difference not only in its Web work, but equally with its newscasts. “We’re all together here,” says Stone, “No yelling across the room. It’s just a logical way to run in real time.”

To the jokes of his teammates, Carter sits in the “captain’s chair” and monitors everything, while constantly (and I mean constantly) interacting with enthusiastic people on the news department’s rapidly growing Facebook fan page.

A news director on Facebook?

Bruce Carter does it, because he thinks it’s important.

I used to think ‘Facebook? Why would I want to do Facebook?’ but this is where its at. These are our viewers, the first people to turn on their TV sets when they get home. They badly want to interact with us and to become a part of the fabric that is LEX18 News.

The only time Carter goes into the news director’s office these days is to hang up his coat at the beginning of the day and put it back on at the end. He’s living the news, right there at the very hub of everything, the content center, and he believes strongly that this is a news director’s role in the new world.

“I was mortified at first,” says assistant news director Stone of Continuous News. “I didn’t understand it. There was no model to copy.” But now she’s completely sold, mostly because of the way the audience has responded. “They love it,” she adds with a sense of pride. “They’re telling us they like it, because they keep coming back and bringing more people with them.”

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” assignment editor Mike Taylor says, “and the news has always been evolving, but this is a pretty huge change. You have to be aware of everything NOW. You’ve got to get it on the Web NOW, get it on Facebook NOW, get it on the air, and in the midst of all this mayhem, you still have to prepare newscasts.” Physically bringing the top professionals together in the content center is a big part of what makes it all doable, according to Taylor.

While many people work to create the items in the Continuous News stream, the main chore falls to the department’s two web content producers. Jim Wilkeson has been on-the-job for seven years, and this was a big change.

I was a straight, old school guy. I come from a newspaper background, and that top story’s got to be that top story. But I’ve become convinced, because of the numbers. The content management system we have gives me instant gratification, because I can put a story up and see an hour later that it’s had 1,000 views and say ‘maybe that’s a story we should follow more closely.’

But for Wilkeson, like everybody else in the content center, it’s all about winning. “It feels good,” he says, “because I look at our site and I look at our competition’s site, and we’re killing them.”

Continuous News in blog format imitates the communications method created by Web denizens for Web denizens, which is why it seems so intuitively natural for users. The idea that we, as media gatekeepers, need to filter news for mass consumption online by “stacking” content in some hierarchical order of importance is a quaint relic of the past, and no where is that more evident than at WLEX-TV.

The next step for a newsroom participating in the “news as a process” business is to include the audience in the process of gathering and reporting events as they’re occurring. This may seem obvious, but Continuous News is a continuous loop that includes consumers on a scale with which traditional media companies are unfamiliar.

Traditional media is a one-to-many paradigm, and this influences our use of social media. We “get” that Twitter, for example, is a great notification system, so a part of its appeal to us is its one-to-many side. We want to get a message “out,” and Twitter is very good at that. It’s the feedback loop that we fumble with, and this is even true in the Continuous News model. To begin today’s lesson, let’s back up a bit.

News is evolving away from what I’ve called “finished products” for several years. To be sure, we’ll always have newscasts on TV, some version of a “daily record” in print (after all, we need that first writing of history), and websites that offer completed stories, whether they are blogs, like Duncan Riley’s wonderful Inquisitr or online newspapers, such as the Huffington Post. What the news is evolving “to” is a continuous stream of elements that need no finished packaging, as is practiced by the gossip site TMZ.com. You can laugh all you want about the content of TMZ, but they are masters of the concept of continuous news.

Social media is also driving the news business to the continuous stream. This is a new form of news, which, I suppose, is why it’s so hard for media companies to explore. We keep defaulting to finished stories and everything that goes with that, and we’re missing the opportunities of professional life in the stream.

One thing we must all learn about the stream is that it’s not exclusive, because our contributions are just that — our contributions. They’re part of a vast linear timeline that is here and now. We don’t wait for anything; our deadline is always “now.” So if we are but contributing to a much bigger stream than our own, what are our responsibilities to others participating in the stream? This is a critical question, as it relates to our future relevancy as professional journalists in the ongoing stream of consciousness that is the Web. We may even have to interact one day with, OMG, our competitors!

One problem we have with this feedback loop is that we don’t control it, and this is counterintuitive. We may not control it, but we can influence it. For example, let’s say a television station airs a segment in one of its finished product newscasts that shines a light on the best local tweets of the day on that particular story or issue. We certainly can use such — and we should — but how many of us go the extra mile and notify those people that we’re using their creations? What happens when we do that? Lots of things:

• We acknowledge that the stream is bigger than just us.
• We give credit to those who participate, thereby encouraging others to do so.
• They get a chance to notify their friends about “being on TV.”
• Our Twitter street creds grow exponentially.
• Our “finished” presentation is better served, and we’re better off for it.

The same holds true for comments on our sites. Merely acknowledging their presence is big, but connecting back with them is even bigger. Interaction begets interaction. If we have none, we must look in the mirror. The stream is alive with people — our people — each of whom has a place in the infrastructure that is Continuous News, and we’re smart if we lead that all that participation by example.

When big events take place, do we create hashtags that everybody can use? Do we engage those on Twitter through the use of hashtags or through replies or direct messages? The people formerly known as the audience are waiting to be invited in, but not just to become our pawns (let’s face it — that’s what they mostly are have been to us).

In the stream, we’re all equal. Let’s not forget it.

Continuous News is a work-in-progress. We’re all learning as we go along. The AR&D clients who practice the concept are, we believe, far ahead of their competitors who don’t. “News as a process” is a lot different than finished product news, and that includes the way it’s monetized. The sooner we learn how to drop commercial messages into the stream, the better off our bottom lines will be served. Our clients are figuring all this out as they go along.

Others in the business are waiting for somebody to figure it out first. What they don’t realize is that by the time “the book” is complete on Continuous News, it’ll be too late for them.

(Originally published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

One of the things I try to teach clients is that the metaphor of a Web “site” is misleading, because nobody actually “visits” any thing or any place. The code that comprises the back end of the Web talks to individual browsers on desktops, laptops or mobile devices. So everything about the Web flows TO THE USER, and not the other way around. This is useful in helping people understand that the serving of ads, for example, can be disconnected from the serving of content. But the newest iteration of the Web makes this kind of knowledge critical, for we’re moving from a static, destination-oriented Web to one that is real-time and alive. The new metaphor is “the stream,” and it will demand new strategies and new tactics for anyone wishing a seat at the media table in the future.

The Web’s Widening Stream