PR and its hopes for an online future

Written by Michael on September 17th, 2006

Small is nimble. Small is friendly. Small can get by on the seat of its pants. Newsrooms that can be walked across in less than a minute will continue to see smaller internal benefits of IT innovation than bigger papers. So why bother keeping up with the bleeding edge of Web standards?

How about this: so you can spend less time retyping your damn press releases?

Over in the PR industry, the fight is on over press release 2.0. This week, the heartbreakingly idealistic Social Media Club (they’re trying to establish standards among social Web practices) formed a Media Release Working Group with the goal of introducing a common set of tags to separate the traditional parts of a release: 5 W’s, CEO headshot, self-congratulatory quotes, and so forth.

Once that information’s organized, it can be distributed to reporters, who’ll be able to quickly or automatically arrange the raw information in the release and slap a lede on top.

Enhancing the 75-year-old (?) “release” format, if you will. See my last post on the need to chunk up the data in our own stories.

I’m extrapolating here from one of the group’s members, Tom “my son found lonelygirl15” Foremski, who called for these changes back in February. (But see Kevin Dugan’s response, noting that markup standards won’t solve all the problems with press releases.)

Of course, this’ll only clear the way for robot journalists. (Tx Romenesko.) The presence of two members of the working group — Market Wire and BusinessWire — make it clear which reporting sector has the most to gain here.

But seriously: new information standards will give newspapers both external and internal efficiency gains. And that’s a few more minutes we can invest in the work that really matters: finding out how the hell the release might affect our readers.

 

Posted in databases, standards | Click to comment »

Holovaty: We're building databases for the future, not the present

Written by Michael on September 7th, 2006

As you may have heard, a fellow named Adrian Holovaty has a Big Idea, and it’s a really good one: newspaper information needs to be updated for the digital age by storing it not only in the hundred-year-old “story” format, but in little database chunks. What’s the business model? He’s quick to say he doesn’t know, but his answer this week to one concern should be comforting to data compilers with small audiences.

Here’s Adrian’s line: if you’ve lifted a few words out of your story and flagged them in a way that a computer can recognize — if a computer can indentify your story’s “who” and “where” — then you’re setting yourself up to someday ask a computer to map all those “who”s against, say, a database of political donors, or real estate purchasers, or sources. It’s the difference between Fisher-Price and Lego.

His most visible work at the Post has been stuff like the wonderfully nichey political ads database. But in a long blog post this week, he reminds us that mere newsy databases aren’t the endgame — the greater purpose isn’t serving today’s reader, but laying the ground for future remixes of the data.

If you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it’s a problem of lost opportunity. … That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.

That’s a bit of encouragement for small papers considering similar projects in the face of minimal pageviews. (Squint. You see that? Wagging in the distance? It’s the long tail!)

It’s also some motivation to keep that data well-scrubbed: more’s at stake here than Saturday’s paper.

 

Posted in archives, databases | Click to comment »

Inky fingers, sandy toes

Written by Michael on September 7th, 2006


(Photo courtesy jonofpob)

Well, Labor Day is gone, and that means it’s the end of The Medium Run’s, er, unannounced summer vacation.

Honestly, it’s an old story: expectations too heavy, news consumption too low, distractions too many. We’re rolling out a two-pronged strategy for changing the story this fall, gentle reader:

1) More ad-hoc updates (with news pegs!) during the week. See the VERY NEXT POST for such an effort.
2) Below the fold, I dare to lay out a long-term schedule for future weekend posts.

This weekend (9/9): the long-awaited conclusion of my Poynter notes.
Next weekend (9/16): the unique ad economics of print, broadcast and Web, and why they matter to content.
After that (9/23): the brand, and why local newspapers need it so.
After that (9/30): a comprehensive look at business models available to local newspaper sites.

As for 9/37 and on beyond Zebra, we’ll see.

Welcome back.

 

Posted in metablogging | Click to comment »

A subscription model that won't compete with print: the blindspot

Written by Michael on June 17th, 2006

Tear down the wall? At the Times, too early to say. But in the next few years, small papers should build their subscription strategy around this question: what on the Web is a substitute for print, and what’s not?

A model I like, but have never seen, is actually the inverse of the most common one. Instead of a permanent archive wall, it’s an ever-advancing blindspot.

For the next ten-to-15 years or so — until computers become almost as portable/cheap/comfortable as newspapers, that is — small newspapers should prioritize new editorial Web features with the following checklist:

1) Can it be done with information we already collect?
2) If not, can it be done with information whose collection is easily automated? (either through user contribution or computer algorithm)
3) Can it be presented in a way that is only possible or convenient online, so as to avoid substituting for the print product?

From this angle, charging for archives looks like the dumbest possible formula. We’ve all got colossal electronic archives. All we need to make them useful is a good search feature. And here’s the thing: archives don’t substitute for print at all. What subscriber saves two-week old newspapers for use as reference material? Online archives only add value. A free, well-ordered archive for a local newspaper would take it a long way toward its eventual goal: becoming the primary information site for its community.

Yesterday’s news is different. In most cities, you can get yesterday for 50 cents in the newspaper, or on the Web for free. Print and Web become substitute products — and get moreso with every redesign.

Okay, what about today’s news? I lean toward the Spokane model — breaking news and comment should be free. They’re dynamic. They can’t be done in print. They’re dealing with radio and TV competitors.

You can see by now what this all means: the sensible place for a subscription requirement is content from, say, the last three days. Farther back than that, it should all be free again.

I’ve never seen it done. I’d love to hear why not.

(Also: Yes, yes, I know, I should be preparing and posting my own archive of three-quarters-written entries instead of making a new one. Sorry, chum.)

 

Posted in archives, tips | 2 Comments »

Department of Broken Dreams, vol. I

Written by Michael on May 30th, 2006

Incidentally, if the Tribune does in fact sell the Tower, I’m gonna have to start punchin’.

Dennis FitzSimons? You’re on notice.

 

Posted in pessimism | Click to comment »

What if the AP had cut off Google News at the pass?

Written by Michael on May 30th, 2006

My extensive notes from the epiphanic third day of the Poynter seminar are on the way, honest. (I spent the weekend joyously buried in Django, if you must know.) Meanwhile, here’s a neat think piece from Forbes’s Paul Maidment, who’s out for some counterfactual fun:

There were attempts by newspapers as long ago as the early 1990s to pool news services and classifieds online in the face of a common enemy. But they were felled for the most part by old rivalries and narrow minds. CareerBuilder.com … being a notable exception.

What was missing then was audacious imagination. The U.S. industry already had a national news co-op, the Associated Press. Could it have held the space now occupied by Google News and Yahoo! News and done the job better as it both creates and aggregates news? As well as the stories written by its staff, one-fifth to one-quarter of the stores carried on the AP wire come from its owner newspapers but remains within the gated community of its members.

There was no call to throw open the gates.

(Tx Jon Dube.)

I assume we can all balk a bit at the idea of letting the nation’s nonprofit news collective mutate into an online megaportal. (Though something similar isn’t such a far-off dream, I’d add.)

 

Posted in collusion, portal | 2 Comments »

Sun Tzu says: social networks before A/V

Written by Michael on May 17th, 2006

A chorus of my peers yesterday afternoon failed to overturn a pet iconoclasm of mine: unless they’re affiliated with radio or TV stations, most local newspapers should not be dumping lots of money into audio and video. It doesn’t dovetail with our current work, and it dovetails perfectly with the work of our biggest news competitors’ — local radio and TV stations.

Video is more compelling than print, no question. And newspapers have the dominant local Web sites. (I desperately hope we retain them.) So why shouldn’t we introduce video in order to serve and retain our visitors?

Because, in short, it’s not our specialty. We’ve got newsrooms of word reporters. We can find a bunch of great ways to reorganize those words for the Web. We can arrange data in nifty graphics and tables — numbers are a lot like words, really. We cannot, without a lot of training and capital investment, put up a short video of reasonable quality.

If video, like interactive graphics, were a new medium, that’d be different. Nobody has yet institutionalized the delivery of infographics for profit. But video and audio are hugely profitable and masterfully done by very close competitors.

And yet — those competitors aren’t simply better than us. They’re better at different things. The customizable print experience (more on that soon) has given us a newsgathering depth that broadcasters can’t match. We should build on our strengths, not push to provide redundant video services that local broadcasters could do better if they merely lifted a finger on the Web.

I’m not saying that no newspapers should be experimenting with this stuff. But smaller local papers, working with smaller scale economies, have higher priorities, like catching up on search, organizing data into parcels and improving social network functions.

One powerful counterargument that wasn’t quite enough to bring me around to video: our competition here isn’t really local TV; it’s the rest of the non-local-news media landscape.

There are surely times when video, especially, is so compelling that it demands to be included. But we should remember that we can’t, as they say, deliver all things to all people. We should pick our battles.

 

Posted in conference, iconoclasm, social, video | 2 Comments »

Tips from Poynter, day two

Written by Michael on May 17th, 2006

Four neat things I learned today:

1) The Roanoke Times has a kick-ass javascript bug above every story, popping up options to email the story or post it to various aggregators. Geek cred for including ma.gnolia.com. Just one problem: to the reader, del.icio.us and ma.gnolia aren’t “sharing” services. They’re storing services. Sharing is how we dream of using them, but that isn’t their primary value to readers.

2) Online purchasing correlates to wealth and broadband; not so much to age.

3) Guidelines for user-content submissions should be written aspirationally: “we will do our best to.” Laying this out may actually help us in libel cases, since their very existence helps verify our regard for the truth, etc.

4) Soundslides is apparently everybody’s favorite $40 slideshow editing app. Two problems: it outputs in Flash and only runs on Macs.

 

Posted in conference, data, tips | 1 Comment »

Poynter, day two: pageviews per daily unique user

Written by Michael on May 17th, 2006

These come from the March and April traffic reports of most of my fellow attendees. The biggest site is washingtonpost.com; the smallest, newhampshire.com.

Oregon Public Broadcasting: 9.2
Chicago Tribune: 6.9
The Press (Canterbury, New Zealand): 5.2
Stuff.co.nz (The Press’s parent brand): 8.5
Tampa Bay Online: 1.1
Orange County Register: 5
San Diego Union Tribune: 10.8
Roanoke Times: 3
Arizona Republic: 1.1
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: 5.8
Boston Globe: 9.3
NewHampshire.com (Manchester Union Leader): 10
Winston-Salem Journal: 6.8
NewRiverValley.com (Roanoke Times): 48.6 (!!!)
South Bend Tribune: 2.9
Providence Journal: 12.9
WATE-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.): 3.3
Washington Post: 5.7
Rockford Register-Star: 18.3 (!)

I’m reluctant to post raw numbers because a) they might be confidential, and b) I’m sleepy. Two takeaways, though: small markets like the New River Valley, Manchester, Rockford tend to the high side (read: exclusive content, dedicated users, low ratio of drive-by traffic), as do respected, expensive operations like the ProJo’s, WaPo’s, and Boston.com.

Finally, let’s all remember: excepting Rockford and the New River Valley, these figures are dwarfed — dwarfed by the “clickthrough” rate of practically any reader of our print editions.

Online publication won’t support our newsgathering until it can hold eyeballs for more than four minutes.

 

Posted in data | Click to comment »

Poynter, day one: Bundling and portals

Written by Michael on May 16th, 2006

The biggest question I have about the local news business is the extent to which we can preserve the bundles that have worked so well with our print product. For example: Jane buys the Longview newspaper for its real estate ads. Jim for its movie times. Julia for its op-ed page.

Between them, Jane and Jim subsidize Julia’s op-ed page, and vice versa, keeping the quality on all three high even when one goes through a slack period. This has always been the case. See what I mean?

Offering and promoting RSS will surely accelerate the destruction of our portal. But can unbundling be slowed? Stopped? Nope, says Jay Small, one of Poynter’s teachers this week:

“The new newspaper.com should therefore be maybe 50 different products, instead of one bundle. And even if you lump all 50 together, they shouldn’t combine and bake up into what we know as a newspaper.

“Which 50 products make sense? Ah, if I knew that, I’d have them out there already. The one thing I know is the same 50 won’t work in every newspaper market. And we better get started figuring out which 50 we need, one or two at a time.”

I’m sure we’ll return to this issue soon.

~~~

In related news, Jupiter Research found that most young folks start looking for news from portals like Yahoo. (Tx Will Sullivan.)

 

Posted in bundling, conference, portal | Click to comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »