Clearing away the confusion

November 23rd, 2011

It’s all so confusing to traditional media folks, this thing called “new” news. Permit me the chance to provide a little clarity.

Mathew Ingram (The future of news and why Digital First matters) points to a piece by Seattle Times associate producer and blogger Lauren Rabaino with nine questions:

The big questions I see popping up in newsrooms like my own are:

1. Do we tweet if we don’t have a link to direct users to?
2. Do we send an email alert if we don’t have a link to direct users to?
3. When do we write a story as a blog post vs. a web story?
4. When do we append an update to the top of a post vs. writing a new post?
5. When do we stop writing blog post updates and switch over to the print story?
6. After switching to a print story, do subsequent updates go to the print story or in the blog?
7. How do we update the blog posts to direct users to the newest information in the print story?
8. How do we institutionalize the act of adding hyperlinks within previous coverage to newest coverage?
9. How the hell do we make this all make sense to our users?

To begin with, these questions become easier to answer if we separate our thinking into two streams: continuous news and finished product news. These are two different animals entirely and require different kinds of thinking. If we’re a newspaper, our finished product is the paper and our brand-extension, traditional website. Our continuous news efforts (Web, Twitter, Facebook) are separate, because the nature of the medium suits them better than finished product news. Most importantly, we must not assume that the business model for each is the same. This assumption is the mother of all online mistakes (and confusion) by traditional media companies. I’m not sure we’ve found the right business model for continuous news just yet, but we’re working on it here at AR&D. A traditional media company can do both, but the point is that they must be approached differently.

With that in mind, let’s address these nine questions.

1. Do we tweet if we don’t have a link to direct users to? Yes, of course. Always. We’re in the news business, not the linking back business. Linking back is a finished product strategy. Remember: separate the two. Speed is what matters in the net. Don’t wait until you have a link. That can come later. This is especially important during breaking news events.
2. Do we send an email alert if we don’t have a link to direct users to? Not unless it’s the second coming, because you can provide a link to your Twitter or Facebook stream. Link to continuous news.
3. When do we write a story as a blog post vs. a web story? The question assumes it’s either/or. The answer is both, and to the extent that blogs are a part of your continuous news strategy, then the blog would come first.
4. When do we append an update to the top of a post vs. writing a new post? It’s always, always, always a new post. Google news doesn’t “see” updates, but it sees new posts and ranks you accordingly. Software can handle “full coverage” — a link to all the pieces relating to a topic — so don’t worry about updating. Save the finished work for your finished product(s).
5. When do we stop writing blog post updates and switch over to the print story? Watch traffic to your efforts during the day, and your own users will tip you as to when this “should” occur. Again, I don’t view this as either/or, because it all depends on the situation. The time for finished product online stuff increasingly appears to be late evening (see the chart from comScore) while the continuous news audience is mostly a daytime phenomenon.
6. After switching to a print story, do subsequent updates go to the print story or in the blog? Again, the answer is easy if you view these as two separate services. This is especially important when the story originated in the continuous news service, so the correct answer is both.
7. How do we update the blog posts to direct users to the newest information in the print story? You don’t, as long as you view the services as separate with separate audiences.
8. How do we institutionalize the act of adding hyperlinks within previous coverage to newest coverage? This kind of question flows from the earlier traditions of “guiding” readers/viewers (because they’re too stupid to guide themselves). I’d argue that this is unnecessary, as long as you separate continuous from finished product. Where it is necessary, let software do it for you.
9. How the hell do we make this all make sense to our users? Again, I think they make sense of it easier than you think, and the question itself is actually pretty insulting. Regardless, clients of ours who practice continuous news AND finished product news find that the most important thing to emphasize is a commitment to “if it’s happening now, we’ll bring it to you.” The rest is intuitive or requires a very short learning curve.

Just remember that these are two separate forms of serving the community. Continuous news precedes finished product news, because it is actually the news-gathering process made public.

Posted in Continuous News, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Advancing the second-day lead

June 29th, 2011

The rapid growth of real-time news and information has turned the news world on its ear. We’ve been talking about what we call “Continuous News” for almost five years now, and many of our clients have embraced the concept. I don’t need to go into a big review, but the essential nut is this: the Web allows us to make the news-gathering process public, so that our followers can participate in it throughout the day. Twitter is an ideal tool for this, but so is Facebook, Tumblr and many other applications. We believe it should be the central focus of any media organization during the prime time for online news reading, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

As that strengthens, it becomes clear that the challenge for “finished product” news BEGINS with the acceptance that the audience, whether readers or listeners or viewers, is already aware of the news-of-the-day. To publish “the news” as it has always been done, therefore, insults the intelligence of a potential audience for that news, and again, it doesn’t matter whether this is in print or broadcast. A simple shift in our language alone would do wonders at enabling the trust we have lost by, among many other things, pretending that there’s a market for information people already have.

I still am convinced there’s a market for finished product news. The morning paper still has appeal for many reasons, although none of them are associated with ink on paper. It’s the summary of news and its associated serendipity that has appeal. At AR&D, we are absolutely convinced the evening newscast has considerable value, although we think the time period needs reinventing. Passive participation in “the news” may not be for everybody, but it certainly is for a large enough group for it to be profitable. The problem is we won’t mean a thing to that potential audience unless we do something other than what we did that drove them away.

The key to unlocking finished product news is recognizing that its audience already knows the basic facts of the news of the day. That shifts the entire enterprise forward and advances the second-day lead to the forefront. The fire itself is the first-day lead. Reaction to it is often the second-day lead. That story moves to the front in a universe where the audience already knows the who, what, why, where and when. Tom Snyder used to say that it was the “how come” that needs exploration, and that, too, is a second-day lead.

The second-day lead is often where the real practice of journalism begins. Anybody can stand in front of a fire and describe what’s going on, and we already know that this is increasingly being done by amateurs with a curiosity and, by chance, happen to be on-the-scene before anybody else. Word spreads fast, and before you know it, the Web knows it, and so it goes. The second-day lead requires thought, and so the job of the journalist may be harder in this world, but we can adapt. Frankly, it’s a challenge that’s worth exploring, for the benefits are obvious.

The entire cycle of news has accelerated. Whereas our production cycles used to determine everything about us, including our invention and distribution of “the article” — see the work of Jeff Jarvis — today’s news is dictated by the events and coverage itself. We’re at the dawn of the Age of Participation, and that includes the news gathering process. Real-time is where it’s at, and while we need to be the curators of record in the new world, we must also be the analyzers and advancers of the news as well. That is best done via finished products, because real-time can (and will) lead to errors. Oh, the network can correct them, but the market for the vetted advancing of stories will always be with us.

Even if real-time news is taken over by others, media companies can still make significant contributions to the industry by owning the second-day lead and, thereby, advancing the issues and stories of the day. This is no small assignment, and it should give everybody in the business — from journalism professor to the experienced practicing veteran — something to shoot for downstream.

Posted in Continuous News, Journalism, Reinventing Local Media, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

The conversation goes on, with or without us

May 25th, 2011

I got a tweet from Sarah Hill, anchor for KOMU-TV in Columbia, Missouri yesterday that says much about the current state of journalism and how social “media” is impacting the institution. We’d been exchanging direct messages about their coverage of the horrible disaster in Joplin, when she wrote:

The telethon has raised $175K thus far and it doesn’t start til Thursday.

The people of mid-Missouri are coming together to raise money for the relief effort, and Twitter, texting and Facebook have made it easy for people to connect with the cause. This is an excellent use of social media by a TV station in trying to make a difference, but it says even more about their recognition of the reality that is journalism today, that it’s no longer about us. We wish them well on the telethon.

Here’s the thing: fundraising efforts are also taking place beyond what a traditional media company is and can do, as everyday people pick up the cause and pass it along. This is the “Great Horizontal” of which Jay Rosen speaks, that remarkable new empowering of the people with which, sooner or later, those who practice professional journalism must come to grips. The question for the pros is this: do the people really need us anymore, or perhaps it’s better to ask “How can we as pros best fit into this conversation?” There are those who say that the pros should “lead” the conversation, but City University of New York professor and author Jeff Jarvis isn’t one of them.

I think the conversation is happening all around us, with or without the journalists. I teach now that it’s the role of the journalist to add value to that conversation: verification, debunking, facts, reporting, context, platforms, teaching…. The late James Carey defines the role differently. As Jay Rosen explains in the Carey Reader: “The press does not ‘inform’ the public. It is ‘the public’ that ought to inform the press. The true subject matter of journalism is the conversation the public is having with itself.”

But I’m seeing that news organizations think it is their role to lead the conversation (they set the agenda), allow the conversation (you may now comment on our story, now that it’s done), and judge the conversation (see Bill Keller’s sniffing at vox polloi).

…that is the reflex of the journalist: to control the conversation.

In a conversation with Michael Arrington this week (see below), Jarvis clarified the concept:

The conversation goes on without us. We in journalism thought the conversation needed us. That’s not the case anymore. It’s end to end, like the Internet. We can add value to that in all kinds of ways. We can vet and find good people and find nodes and networks, and give perspective to journalism.

This is why the word “curation” must be a part of our everyday language and practice. Here’s a series of images that I use to convey the concept. It begins with the output of a traditional news organization on a 24-hour, horizontal scale. “Real time” is what’s being outputted horizontally. That line moves across the horizontal line as the clock ticks. This is continuous news.

This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that millions of others are outputting what’s important to them at the same time. So news in real time doesn’t just refer to our horizontal line; it includes everybody’s.

The opportunity, therefore, for “new” journalism is the ability to slice through all of those horizontal lines and makes sense of it all for others. This is what Jeff is talking about, and any attempt to exclude those other streams is not journalism in the 21st Century. Technology will help with the task, but it involves human judgment at some point.

We’ve come a long way since the days of criticizing “citizen journalists” in understanding what’s evolving before our eyes with news in the network. People aren’t stupid and no special group has a license on the practice of journalism. We all want to know what’s going on, and as the events in Missouri confirm, participate in what we can do to fix things that are broken. This may whack the fatted calf of professional journalism, but that’s a small price to pay for a more involved citizenry (and electorate). The more, the merrier, and while it does present challenges (certainly), we’re all better off for it in the long run.

The window for mass media to carve out a profitable role within this new hegemony is still open, but it will be closing slowly as more and more smart people get into the curation act. Traditional media companies still have the local muscle to block such efforts, but we must be smart, and that begins by acknowledging that the news conversation IS going on, with or without us.

Posted in Continuous News, Culture, Disruptions, Journalism, Media 2.0, Reinventing Local Media, Social Media | 5 Comments » |

An open letter to television managers

May 11th, 2011

Dear Television Manager,

This letter is offered in good faith and asks some fundamental strategic questions that have probably already been on your mind. If not, this might be eye-opening. Either way, it’s my hope you will act on what’s stated here.

When I first began consulting nearly ten years ago, I was known for little sayings about news that people dubbed “Heatonisms.” Here’s the very first: “Revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem. Fix the problem.” What television did back then is the same thing we’re doing today, we’re trying to fix a secondary revenue problem while the real problem just keeps getting worse.

Television news just isn’t what it used to be, and it never will be again. We look at research proving we’re still the best advertising bang for the buck and completely miss the point that it won’t matter soon, because the trend lines are unmistakable. Viewing has been dropping for many years, and nothing is going to change that, absent some totally different way of presenting some local product.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual “State of the News Media” report earlier this year was straightforward about this:

The most basic problem facing local television news is that its traditional audience is shrinking. In 2010, audiences continued to decline in all three key time slots: morning, early evening and late night.

…A pattern noticed a year ago continued in 2010. Our analysis found that ratings dropped more sharply than share (emphasis mine) for all key time slots in most sweeps periods. Ratings measure the percentage of households with TVs that are tuned to a particular program. Share measures the percentage of people who actually have their TVs on at a particular time and who are tuned to a specific program. A ratings decline, while share holds steady, means a program has fewer total viewers but the same percentage of the available audience. To put it another way, one reason local TV news in the traditional time slots is losing viewers is because people are turning off their sets when the news is on (emphasis mine).

Why are they turning TV sets off during news time? Because “the news” is already known by the people formerly known as the audience. So we fiddle with managing revenue in an environment that needs — but doesn’t get — attention. Well, Terry, it is what it is. What would you have us do?

We are promoting a decaying strategy, so the first thing we need to do is to stop that, and nowhere is this worse than on the Web. We have websites. We use Twitter. We use Facebook. But our essential purpose in so doing is to be a better TV station online. Make no mistake about it, this is a dreadful error, for AR&D’s own research shows that up to 90% of a TV station website’s traffic is comprised of the station’s own viewers. We’re talking to a closed and shrinking universe. We brag when we beat our competition online with absolutely no sense of who that competition really is. We’re still competing with the other TV stations online, and how foolish is that? This is the same strategic flaw that produces convergence sales. The brand of a TV station is today both a blessing and a curse.

So, Mr. and Ms. Managers, lead the local TV cheers for your sales departments, because they won’t be inspired to sell otherwise, but let’s work on fixing what’s really broken: the loss of audience. Let’s begin with four simple acknowledgements.

1. Television news as it’s currently presented is a dying beast. We can do lots of things to be top dog in our markets, but even the top dog is the equivalent of the last buggy whip maker. At AR&D, we’re working on some prototype program concepts, because we know that nobody’s going to come back for that from which they fled. Those people turning their sets off will never reverse themselves for the same old good-looking people with boxes over their shoulders. Online is the future (I consider mobile to be “online”), so let’s look there.
2. Our online competition is not the other TV stations; it’s all the pureplay revenue grabs that aren’t bound by the rules of being a TV station online. The most important current and future use of our TV stations is to use them to promote our online offerings, and that’s smart strategy. That and feet-on-the-street are the only competitive advantages we have over those pureplays. Doing news online is a smart thing, but it needs to be in real-time across-the-board and not just Twitter and Facebook. News also needs to be aggregated and curated, and that means acknowledging the other news producers in the market. That’s what the pureplays do. They’re not encumbered by a local brand.
3. We need to embrace the reality that content isn’t our “business;” advertising is our business, and we need to be immersed in the latest from the revolution in advertising. The biggest, most fruitful shift in advertising today is the sharing of risk. Google pioneered it (pay only for clicks); Groupon raised it to an art level (split revenue; no customers, no deal). However, I think the greatest innovations in this area are still ahead. Advertisers are the new media companies, and the idea of money for simple placement alone is slowly dying, unless you’re the Superbowl. Results are what the new advertising world wants, provable results, and unless we’re in there with those who are offering such, we’re simply going to be left behind. But this is an advertising problem, not a content problem, so content solutions won’t do much. If you believe that advertisements adjacent to content is the best business model for the Web, I feel sorry for you.
4. Our content will be aggregated, and this is where we will compete with traditional and other forms of local media. We resist this at our own peril, and so the smart thing to do is develop strategies that make it profitable to completely unbundle our content from our owned infrastructure. We want our content aggregated. We want ours to shine among the rest. We want users to take our content with them and to interact with that at their convenience. We want to find new advertising opportunities within an aggregated environment.

The paradox of working in media today is that it’s both brutal and exciting at the same time, kind of like being at sea during a storm. The advice there is to keep your focus on the horizon dead ahead, for attention to the waves is will make you sick. Here, that focus must be on the truths made apparent by acceptance of certain big trends. Follow those and hang on for the bumpy ride.

There is a future, and it is bright.

Thanks for reading,

Terry

Posted in Broadcasting, Continuous News, Culture, Disruptions, Facebook, Reinventing Local Media, Twitter, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

The Web is the top guy’s job

May 5th, 2011

In TV newsrooms, that’s the news director.

The most common mistake I see in media company (mostly television) newsrooms as they address this thing we call “Media 2.0″ is to treat it as just another production system that must be defined and managed. As Emily Bell would say, “it’s ‘yet another thing’ for a working journalist to understand. The answer to who writes for the Web is different in almost every shop, and in many places it’s generally considered a pain-in-the-butt. The idea that anybody can write for the Web is universal, and it’s often treated as an entry-level task. A good grasp of grammar is a bonus, but for the most part, the answer to “who” is “anybody.”

Reporters write “their” stories. Producers add elements when they’re not writing for their shows. Production Assistants and Associate Producers (where those positions still exist) are called upon to add fresh material when they can. Anchors are forced asked to create content for the Web in between reading and editing copy written by others. There are no bylines; it’s a team effort. It’s XXXX-TV’s Web effort, and expediency and efficiency are its goals. As the old saying goes, “It’s better than good, it’s done.”

In shops that function this way — that is to say most shops — the Web is an extension of the main product, an online replication of what you’d expect to find in the 6 o’clock news. Even in newsrooms where the Web is a genuine priority, the matter of who does the work is generally the same. At a time when stations are economically challenged, the idea that there should be resources dedicated exclusively to the Web is generally unrealistic, so what’s a well-intentioned news director to do?

In two highly successful shops that we’re involved with, the news director him or herself runs the online content show. They try to turn administrative tasks over to others and run the Continuous News content themselves, both on the Web and via social media. The news director, you say? Yes, the news director, and it really makes a difference in their online products and services. Why? Because the news director is often the most experienced news person in the shop. They understand the nuances of the news and especially how it all fits with the marketing goals of the station. This can’t be overstated.

Bruce Carter of WLEX-TV in Lexington, Kentucky is one such news director. He told me via email that the days of putting together a newscast and waiting until 6pm or 11pm to put news on-air are a distant memory. Instead of questions like how do you find the time to run the online ship, his response is how can you not be involved in this age of instant news? We agree.

Everything we do has an immediate real-time effort. When storms enter the viewing area we not only crawl information on-air and have live cut-ins but we also engage our online and Facebook loyal to help us gather information. We handle breaking news the same way. The content management center is the hub for our news managers, including the News Director. When news comes to us via scanner, phone, email, news source, Facebook, etc. it is instantly communicated to every news manager and immediately decided upon on what to do with this information. The decisions are swift and immediate. It is imperative the News Director be part of the process.

The ease of today’s web content management systems allow anyone to post stories and information to the web or through social media. The key to making it work for a station is having strong managers that direct the flow of content and oversee focus and branding. There has to be a method to the madness and a purpose to what you do online just as there is to your on-air product. Have a plan, have a strategy and stick to it. When it comes to online content, be tenacious. Post frequently, post immediately, update constantly and don’t be afraid to try new things in the continuous news stream. We do all the time.

Letitia Walker, news director of KATC-TV in Lafayette, Louisiana agrees and adds that it’s all about leading by example.

Why should I expect anyone in the newsroom to do something I’m not willing to do myself? The running joke is that if I were ever involved in a horrible accident or tragedy, I’d be taking a picture to send to our site before the ambulance takes me away. I take that as a compliment.

I’ve always been one to be passionate about my work, and I try to make my enthusiasm rub off on others. When the decision was made to switch to our continuous news format, the goal was to incorporate the entire newsroom in the process. Posting not only on our website, but our social media sites, texting campaigns, crawls, etc. If I’m in the room, I’ll take the lead in making sure all formats get information as soon as responsibly possible.

And that, I think, is the key to solving the question of “who.” It must start at the very top on everything, because it’s our future. To assign it to others and walk away is to leave that future to happenstance. The online effort of a TV station is every bit as important as its newscasts. Every bit! The bastard step child will, sooner than you think, inherit the throne, and the time to prepare for it is now. As a news director, if you don’t have a hands-on leadership role in this, I strongly recommend you re-examine your priorities.

Posted in Broadcasting, Continuous News, Reinventing Local Media, Twitter | 1 Comment » |

News in real time is journalism’s great challenge

May 4th, 2011

My colleague Jim Willi has an excellent piece on his blog about how he thinks social media “clobbered” traditional media in bringing information to light Sunday night in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Coming from Jim — a 40-year veteran of TV News — it’s a pretty profound admission. My family, too, sat together watching TV while sharing information we got via various social media terminals. In that sense, I suppose we were fairly typical.

At AR&D, we press our clients to move to a world of Continuous News, because, frankly, that’s what news has evolved to, and that shows no sign of abatement, only moving forward. We are criticized in some quarters for this — even mocked — and it is to those who disagree that I address the following.

NPR’s Andy Carvin has, since the revolution in Egypt, been the shining star of news in real time via Twitter. He’s a human marvel, aggregating many, many tweets and retweeting those that fit the narratives that he’s following. It is the purest form of real-time news. Carvin told those gathered at World Press Freedom Day in Washington Monday, “…in some ways, what I’m trying to accomplish is in a sense an oral history in real-time.” This is the essential problem for naysayers of Continuous News, and it’s an energy that won’t be stopped. The fundamental charge of newspapers has always been to “write the first draft of history,” and that very essence is being challenged today by millions of people with cellphones and social media. The day after bin Laden was killed, we learned of those who actually tweeted the raid in Abbottabad unaware of what it really was. That is news in real time, folks.

Technology will help the Andy Carvins of the world, and soon the only thing that can be rightly judged “news” will be what’s in the stream. We avoid this at our own risk, and I’m deadly serious about that. You can scoff and mock, if you wish, but I encourage you to examine what’s really taking place while you’re doing it. I don’t care so much about being right as I do about watching the demise of the business that was my life.

Mathew Ingram writes of social media being an “ecosystem” that has its own place in the news hegemony.

Looking at it as an ecosystem instead of a competition reinforces the point that all of these things feed into each other: TV reports are spread through Twitter, news that breaks on Twitter forms a part of TV and newspaper reports that try to summarize what has happened, and so on. As one person put it on Sunday night: “Twitter breaks news. TV covers it.” And leveraging the power of social media can help traditional news outlets find sources — like the guy who unwittingly tweeted about the bin Laden attack. Twitter and Facebook-style networks also helps the mainstream media distribute and promote their content — using network effects to their advantage.

I would love to believe that each has its place, but why turn away from real-time instead of exploring the ecosystem? Why should those of us in traditional media turn over the future to others?

Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Formerly of the Observer and the Guardian, Ms. Bell is one of the most respected British journalists of our day. After the bin Laden event, she wrote “Real time, All the time: Why every news organisation has to be live.” Ms. Bell makes several remarkable statements, including this one: “Live is not ‘yet another thing’ for a working journalist to understand, it is the great journalistic challenge of our time.” I couldn’t agree more.

If you are related to the world of news, as opposed to the world of analysis, if you don’t have a strategy for live stories and reporting, then you have a very limited future. If you wish to have credibility even in the world of analysis and have no presence in the breaking news conversation then I would strongly argue that over time this is going to dramatically and adversely affect your brand.

…The live updating stream of thought and reaction is here to stay, and it will become more prevalent rather than less. If they haven’t already news businesses will need to prepare their journalists, their technologies and their interfaces to reflect this new world. It is not about ‘being first at the cost of being right’, it is about being there, or not.

So the idea of Continuous News — while we’re pioneering it — wasn’t born or nurtured in a vacuum. A great many of the best minds in journalism see what’s taking place and are doing what they can for those who will listen. What’s taking place with the real-time Web is far bigger than just journalism, however; it’s the new way of thinking for every Western institution in the new world.

In looking back at his seminal epic about the Web in 2004 (We Are The Web), Kevin Kelly told me that if could rewrite the thing, he’d add much more about the drift to real-time in the world of information. Kelly is a brilliant thinker whose recent book, What Technology Wants, is a deep journey into a culture that is changing forever.

Some are convinced that the old way is the only way, that completed, vetted stories are what makes “real” journalism and that the rest is just noise. They’re also convinced that that’s the way the people formerly known as the audience view things, and so we proceed by pouring our old views into the new wineskins of interactive media. The result is the arrogant taunting of real time, as our waxen wings soar oh so close to the sun of the new. Like Icarus, we’re so convinced of our own immortality that we risk everything by following only that which Madison Avenue will currently feed. This is so foolish in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Our view of Continuous News is born of the Web. It has no legacy counterpart. It can’t be bolted onto brands that stand for something else online, because those will always default to the old. We’ll “promote” rather than inform, because that’s what we do. I’ve argued that TV stations are particularly well-suited to Continuous News, because it’s really just the daytime news-gathering process made public. Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm is prime time for news online, and that fits perfectly with the workflow of a TV newsroom. Our evidence from places that are executing the concept well is stunning; people love the idea of being kept informed as things are happening and dislike being forced to wait. The stream is a natural conduit for news and information.

Why can’t we see that?

Posted in Continuous News, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Why Gawker’s (apparent) design failure matters to us

April 20th, 2011

The Atlantic is reporting today that the Gawker media sites redesign has produced a traffic loss greater than anybody anticipated. This is extremely important for local media companies to watch, because it appears to prove a point about website design that is counterintuitive to mass media thinking. Gawker is a group of highly successful blogs. Owner Nick Denton ordered a redesign in early February that changed the front page of each from the blog format to a more conventional portal appearance. Denton felt he was “moving past the blog,” but the reality is that he went backwards.

Writing for The Atlantic, associate editor Nicholas Jackson noted that the Gawker sites suffered a huge hit on traffic immediately and that the situation has gotten worse over time.

Here, a graph we put together using the number of unique visitors to the homepages of five sites in the Gawker network — Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9 and Deadspin — from November through today.* The April numbers are only for the month to-date, but it isn’t hard to see, now that we’re twenty days in, how many of these sites will need a big boost to even reach March’s traffic.

*Update 11:23 a.m.: This post originally implied that the graph displays unique visitors to each of five Gawker Network sites. The chart shows Gawker’s internal statistics for unique visitors to the homepage of each site represented.

Prior to the redesign, Gawker sites presented their content in the standard reverse chronological presentation of blogs, and we have long contended that this is the format for Web news content display and distribution. Here’s what I wrote about it after Gawker made the changes:

The blog format of reverse chronological order was created of the Web, by the Web and for the Web. Traditional media types had nothing to do with it and wanted nothing to do with it. The entire back end infrastructure of the Web is designed to seek out and sort that which is new, that which is “at the top,” if you will. If you wish your work to shake hands with the Web, the Web will shake hands with that which is new, always. There is no aggregator that seeks out the “top story,” because the Web doesn’t care, and if you artificially seed your output, it will figure out what’s going on. It wants what’s new, and, well, that’s one of the definitions of “news” anyway, right?

One of the points of genius about this is that it respects the recipient of content, the customer, the user. It does this by presenting the time of day as the only filter, something that cannot be manipulated for gain by the content creator. It respects the intelligence of the user to figure out and find what’s important without the manipulating guiding hand of the editor. Traditional media has gone far by assuming that the average person needs our help in “shaping” his or her experience, to understand what’s important and what isn’t. The problem is that this has been twisted in the name of self-serving marketing and people have lost trust in our assumption. They want to decide for themselves, and a system based solely on time that allows them to do that is refreshing precisely because it’s not filtered in any way.

For more of my thoughts on this, you can look here and here.

Nick Denton is a smart guy, but he fell for mass media reasoning when he instituted these changes. He noted at the time that their best work needed showcasing that it didn’t get with the blog format. He thought people needed (wanted?) a display that highlighted their best work and top stories. This is precisely the argument we hear from clients who don’t want any part of the reverse chronological order of blog presentation.

And yet here we have evidence of the opposite, evidence we also see with regularity from clients who’ve switched to a Continuous News, blog format for their main Web page. It works, folks, because it fits with the Web and doesn’t try to force the Web into what we’re comfortable with.

Posted in Blogging, Continuous News, Reinventing Local Media, Technology | 1 Comment » |

Keep your long-term glasses on

January 19th, 2011

When I was a news director, I was often hired in turn-around situations, where a company was dissatisfied with something involving the news department, usually the news ratings. Not every one of my appointments fell into this category, but I always enjoyed the challenge of competing with entrenched winners. I had a few rules that I’m sure the talented people who worked for me remember. Rule number one: there are no rules. We wouldn’t let ANYTHING hold us back from disrupting the status quo. Another rule was: keep your long-term glasses on. We needed to know that taking the mountain was a process that wouldn’t happen overnight.

This rule about long-term focus applies to traditional media, I think, in these times of change, because we’re on a path illuminated not by short-term fads but by long-term trends. It’s vitally more important, therefore, that we always act on behalf of those trends but always question the short term whirligigs that come along every day. I learned in the Coast Guard that the way to avoid sea sickness in rough weather is to keep your focus on the horizon, not on the waves or the view that keeps rising and falling. That’s good advice in any time of change.

But the problem is that many can’t see the horizon. We’ve either got our heads down, buried in day-to-day operations, or we’re trying to make ends meet. The horizon, however — our destination point — is what we need most, because if we can see the goal, we can create the processes needed to get us there. This does require, however, fixating our gaze forward instead of down or to the side.

Take, for example, Twitter. To properly view this wonderful notification system, we must begin with AOL. In fact, you’ll always be safe if AOL sits in the back of your mind as a red flag. AOL was training wheels for the Web, but it was its walled garden approach — building a web within the Web — that eventually spelled trouble, the same kind of trouble that Twitter, Facebook and other proprietary, closed systems provide today. What are the broader strokes that Twitter is providing? This is the important question.

This is why AR&D is writing a new book, 2015: The Future of Local Media. Nobody who reads this newsletter regularly will be surprised by anything in the book, because the book merely advances our vision. In the interim — and in the name of our long-term glasses — I thought I’d publish a list of five of the broad trends that we’re following. We’re all just overwhelmed with options these days, so use this list as a filter to keep yourself focused on what’s really important for tomorrow.

1. The shift to real time news and information. Dave Winer wrote recently that Twitter is a dress rehearsal for what’s coming, and I think that’s true. During my interview with Kevin Kelly for the book, he noted that THE most important trend to follow is the move from a static Web to “the real time flows and streams” inherent in the living or “Live” Web. Let’s not think of real time as necessarily replacing that which is “finished, vetted and complete,” but rather as a new entity that is evolving before our eyes. Journalists must consider a commitment to real time as a part of doing their jobs, because the stream is the process of gathering news itself. It’s also important to understand that the stream is bigger than anything we put into it. Monetizing the stream, we believe, will come from curating the fire hose for individual consumption and from organizing separate streams from merchants wishing to get messages out to existing or potential customers.
2. Portability. This is the year that analysts project more portable computing devices will be sold than those that are hard-wired to an Internet connection. 2011 is a tipping point, because portability brings proximity into the media equation, and that brings opportunity in the form of hyperlocal relevance, not only for news and information but also for making money. But don’t be fooled into thinking that portability is something other than just the good old Web. It’s not. Magazine apps for the iPad, for example, have been a bust, because the iPad is just a presentation layer on top of the Web. If it didn’t work on the Web, it won’t work via a portable device. Portability/proximity also brings a heightened sense of “local” into the information equation, almost a redefinition of the term and one with which we will have to contend in the years ahead.
3. Unbundled content. In 2004, then FCC Chairman Michael Powell noted that “application separation is the most important paradigm change in the history of communications, and it will change things forever.” Media hasn’t fully caught on yet, because the act of “application separation” means, in large part, the unbolting of media content from the original source in which it was presented. Just as it was with the music industry, so it will be with media, because people not only object to our packaging as inefficient and time-wasting but also as self-serving despite claims of the opposite. There’s an old adage among successful bloggers that “if you send people away, they’ll come back,” which influences many strategic decisions about content, including full-feed RSS and outbound linking. Legacy media doesn’t get this, because it’s counterintuitive to its fundamental need to corral and maintain large audiences. Make no mistake, though, content distribution in the future will be unbundled, and the sooner we get there, the better.
4. Consumers rule. This is perhaps the most overlooked and underestimated new reality for business in the 21st Century. The industrial age was all about a Mad Men sort of “warfare” in which brilliant marketers attacked the minds of people to move them to buy products. How heroic! The problem is nobody asked people if they could play with them this way, and now we have a problem. Consumers can not only talk back, but they can talk to each other, and this is a serious issue for those who need a one-way mechanism to change our minds. How have we responded? I just read in Online Media Dialy of “new video pre-roll units” that will leverage a “variety of targeting methods to deliver high-quality audiences more efficiently than the typical online video campaign.” People as “targets” aren’t really people, so we can put 15-30 second pre-rolls in front of 90-second videos and think that’s tolerable. Everybody knows that the optimum for pre-rolls is 7-10 seconds, but Madison Avenue refuses to believe that it no longer has carte blanche in messing with the lives of consumers. Starcomm’s Rishad Tobaccowala said many years ago that “we’ve entered an empowered era in which humans are God, because technology allows them to be godlike. He asks, “How will you engage God?” It’s a question we should be asking.
5. Video, video, video. By 2014, Cisco projects that the average downbound bandwidth of the Web will be 14.4 megs and that nearly all of the growth in traffic will be video. Much, if not most of that video will be advertising of one form or the other (if you don’t believe this, spend a little time on YouTube), and this is something local media companies are ideally suited to provide. At many local TV stations, we have whole production departments sitting around twirling their thumbs while waiting for the next commercial shoot when they could be on-the-street making YouTube and other videos for online consumption. We don’t see this, because we’re too busy waiting for the next ad agency to come along with a new pre-roll. We’re so stuck on attaching ads to OUR content as the only source of revenue, but a whole new world is opening for us to pursue. Newspapers could (and are) easily steal this right out from under the noses of TV stations. The online video world has just begun, and we’re stuck waiting for somebody to show us the way rather than attacking it head-on today.

What, Terry, no “deals” application? Perhaps. There are many other trends we’ll be examining in the book, in addition to putting it all together for you in a “here’s what it’ll look like” view of local media, circa 2015. Meanwhile, though, if we’ll run anything that’s presented to us through these filters, we’ll be on solid ground for tomorrow. Is it video-centric? Is it pro-consumer? Is it unbundled and free to be passed around? Is it meant for portable Web consumption? Is it a part of the real time flows and streams? If that which is before you provides a “yes” to those, then take it to the bank that you’re on solid ground. If not, you might want to proceed cautiously.

And keep your long-term glasses on.

Posted in Continuous News, Culture, Disruptions, Mobile, Reinventing Local Media, Unbundled Media, Video | No Comments » |

More on the Denton-Gawker view

December 3rd, 2010

My post about Nick Denton and Gawker led to a Twitter challenge from Jake Brooks, and so I want to explain a few things. First of all, to fully understand my view on all this, you’d really have to be familiar with the whole body of my work. I don’t make statements about new media that come from nowhere. I’ve written the book(s) on reinventing local media, so a great deal of thought and history stand behind my views. I say that because, to fully understand what I’ve written about Gawker, I have to go back and restate facts and concepts already in evidence.

Gawker wants to now look like a traditional media website. I get that. I call it a step backwards, because that’s not where the news and information business is heading.

Firstly, all media people are what I call “front end” people. They look at the Web based on what they see. This is understandable for traditional media, because all they’ve ever seen is their finished products, so it’s on that that they base their judgement and value of the product. Ah, our product. We media people are in love with our content. It’s why we live and breathe, but it’s not content that’s in disruption (necessarily); it’s advertising, and a day of reckoning is coming with advertising.

Jakob Nielsen has built his “usability guru” reputation by talking about facts, not perceptions. His “banner blindness” isn’t discussed in media circles, because if it was, people would be very afraid. Madison Avenue certainly can’t bring itself to discuss it, because it would be an end to Madison Avenue, which is based on formulas and the selling of “inventory.” They should, because what’s happening with advertising via the Web is going to kill those who assume that front end displays are the path to prosperity. Nobody “sees” Web display advertising. Nobody, and Nielsen can prove it. Meanwhile, the Web — and permit me to reference “the Web” as a person — rejects all formulaic assertions about the front end. Why? Because the Web doesn’t care about the front end.

When spiders from Google or Bing or whatever pay sites a visit, they don’t send back oohs and ahs about Nick’s enterprise content. They don’t glow with envy over how well it’s sorted and displayed for users and report that back to Google. They care only about what’s new. “What can I report back about the stream and flow?”

So live by the CPM, die by the CPM. Live by the RFP, die by the RFP.

Media companies secretly know this, but there’s still so much money attached that they’re paralyzed. So Nick is taking his company back in this direction, rather than continuing to explore how to monetize his audience, not his content. I think that’s a mistake.

I certainly agree that we’re moving to a video-centric Web, but that will also be a real time stream and flow. Display advertising is not, nor will it ever be, the driver of Web advertising. It’s designed for a one-to-many display, and the Web is a constant, real time two-way connection.

Take a look at the advertising pie, and you’ll discover that traditional media sites capture only a very small share, with lots of competition for that share, regardless of whether it’s growing or not. The real money is in helping the people formerly known as the advertisers conduct commerce via the 2-way conduit that is the Web. Media companies amazingly find themselves unable to move in this direction. It’s Clayton Christensen’s “innovator’s dilemma.”

So let me restate that I think Nick Denton — for all his brilliance — is making a tactical error in shifting from the blog format to one that is more traditional. It’s not that the descending order of items is “better” than what he’s proposing, but at least it’s more in tune with the real time streams and flows. Besides, where we’ve had clients make the switch, wonderful results have followed. We haven’t done research on it yet, but each site has show significant traffic increases and, more importantly, increases in unique visitors.

One of the most “right” guys observing all this is Dave Winer. I agree completely with him that Twitter is a news system. Does Twitter give a crap about how anything looks? Dave, of course, had a big hand in inventing RSS, which is the unbundled, real time distribution system for news and information, you know, the one that makes such a lovely handshake with the back end of the Web. RSS has gotten lost, because media hasn’t supported it, because they’re always defaulting back to how their content looks. Actually, they don’t like the unbundled nature of RSS2, because money flows from the bundle, those display ads that nobody sees in the first place.

Can you see the perfect storm brewing? Can you see why I believe Nick Denton is wrong?

Posted in Advertising, Continuous News, Disruptions, Media 2.0 | 2 Comments » |

Why Nick Denton is wrong

December 2nd, 2010

When I first read Nick Denton’s apologetic for moving away from the blog format for his Gawker empire, I thought I’d misread the whole thing. I spend a great deal of time convincing traditional media companies to embrace the blog model, so it’s more than a little surprising to read that one of the pioneers of blogging wants to do the opposite.

Denton is a smart fellow, but I think he’s made a decision that will ultimately cost him, for in turning his whole online bloggy magazine consortium into one, giant traditional media display, he’s assumed the role of disrupted instead of disruptor.

In his post announcing the decision — with the cleverly spun headline “Why Gawker is moving beyond the blog” (beyond the blog?) — Denton lists seven reasons for the move, but it’s really all about featuring what Gawker feels is important and monetizing that. In so doing, he’s making an unspoken confession that traditional media has it right, while the real time stream and flow made available online is wrong. His sites will keep the stream evident, “but subordinate” and moved to a sidebar with largely headlines and links.

This is a mistake on many levels, that I’ll get to in a minute, but first, here are his reasons.

1. The power of the scoop, rediscovered…One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: scoops drive audience growth…
2. Aggregate or die… Our strength as an aggregator remains editorial curation; but we’re limited even in that by the blog format. The more short items we run, the more rapidly our high-value scoops are pushed off the page…
3. Demonstrate a rounded personality…An undifferentiated blog column is such a poor showcase of our talents. We would laugh at any marketer that scrambled its message with such a random assortment of content, dozens of points to a page…
4. The web is a visual medium…I used to think that our expertise was text; that TV companies would have an unmatchable advantage when it came to web video. But what is increasingly evident is that traditional media companies are encumbered by old formats in video as much as they are in written journalism. Gawker bloggers, once they’re as familiar with iMovie as with cut-and-paste, can beat them…
5. The growth of video advertising…A growing proportion of web advertising too is built around video. Already, some 30-50% of agency RFPs indicate that the client has video assets, typically a 15-second spot…
6. Appointment programming…The editorial calendar will remain for event and seasonal programming such as CES and holiday shopping. But many topics are less time-sensitive and they will be moved to a programming grid which owes more to TV than to magazines. For instance, Lifehacker’s personal finance coverage is popular with both readers and advertisers; like much of our more helpful content it is often lost in the blog flow. From next year, it will be showcased at a regular time, say Fridays at 3pm, a personal finance hour…
7. Gawker is a branding vehicle…Gawker Media has already put distance between our properties and those of the commodity ad networks. We booted them out from our titles five years ago; they were cheapening the sites and devaluing the brand benefits to our directly sold campaigns. Today, a large proportion of our sales depend on those “roadblocks” which offer a marketer an exclusive presence on a front page for the day. These are branding opportunities which the ad networks cannot easily match.

Did you catch the assumptions? Scoops drive growth? Scrambling their “message?” Gawker bloggers can beat TV companies? Helpful content gets lost? Most of the reasons Denton cites relate not to news but to what the company feels is editorially important to display to everybody. It assumes that people come to their site once a day and need immediate guidance as to what’s important or what should be seen or viewed, as if they need and want such guidance.

This is the same process traditional media has followed forever in crafting a finished product out of the stream that is news. The New York Times commented that this is the same thing the newspaper industry discovered over a century ago.

… if you pick up a New York Times newspaper today you will see only 6 main story headlines, all carefully chosen and placed on the page.

This change happened at The Times—and simultaneously to other newspapers—over a number of decades as designers and editors figured out that readers didn’t want more news, but instead wanted a more concise culling of news.

And what have readers done to this model? They’ve rejected it, but Nick thinks this is the way to go.

It’s actually quite a colonialist insult, because it questions the competence of the audience to figure things out on their own, and it puts the real time digital stream of news and information into the same category of headlines on a printed page.This is exactly what Denton is doing with this move, and it doesn’t suit the advances technology has given us in the last two decades. Moreover, the 6 headlines referenced by the Times do nothing to help people find anything through search. Google alerts, for example, LIKES lots of new updates to ongoing issues, which the blog format does exceedingly well. This is one of the problems we have with clients who don’t fully understand the concept of Continuous News. The blog format was created by the Web, for the Web, and the back end handshake is what’s so critical for digital news ventures. No amount of re-organizing the front page is going to help with that.

In response to the Times commentary, Dave Winer noted via Twitter, “Fine, but Gawker isn’t a blog, it’s a professionally edited news site.” A professionally edited news site, indeed. That’s what Nick Denton wants to be considered, and in so doing, he’s not advanced anything.

He’s taken a giant step backwards.

UPDATE: Here are more of my thoughts on the subject.

Posted in Blogging, Continuous News, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media | 4 Comments » |