Let readers see (and edit) their own data

Written by Michael on October 24th, 2006

Work’s been heavy lately. Tomorrow, a post on triaging limited programming resources. (As if there’s some other kind…) Today, a quick suggestion for winning trust: let readers access their own usage data.

Job one, of course, is to start collecting readers’ usage data. Seriously. Let readers know about it, tell them how they’ll benefit, let them opt in or out, but start it right away and do it any way you can.

Job two is inspired by this Fredshouse brainstorm (courtesy Lifehacker): Google should create a digital privacy tool for all its users that would let them view, delete and set expiration dates for all data that’s collected about them.

We should do that, too.

 

Posted in competitors, things we should do better, tips | Click to comment »

Not the feed you were looking for?

Written by Michael on October 2nd, 2006

Move along; move along.

If your feed’s been acting up in the last week, it’s not your fault or imagination — I’ve been upgrading to the new Blogger Beta in order to add features like topic tags (below every post), improved archives (at right) and peekaboo summaries (rather than always sending you to a separate page to read the full post). Thanks for your patience.

 

Posted in metablogging | Click to comment »

Newspapers should be classifieds clearinghouses

Written by Michael on October 1st, 2006

Everybody and his brother’s startup has a free classified service these days. Even if you’re ignoring all but the bigger players — Craigslist, Base, Edgeio, eBay — who can keep track?

Hint: they’re black and white and read in large but ever-decreasing quantities.

For the moment, newspapers in the smallest markets should probably still be trying to minimize the content that leaks onto competitors’ sites. But in mid-size markets (and, before long, in the smaller ones) papers can keep offering value to classified advertisers by offering a service the big boys don’t: syndication of your ad throughout the Internet. Anybody who pays for a classified should get it listed on all the free sites in addition to the print edition and the newspaper’s Web site.

Three startups called Mpire, vFlyer and Postlets are trying to make this service into an entire business, the
New York Times reports today. (While they’re at it, they check your spelling and suggest an effective layout.)

It’s not clear whether these guys are going to make money for such a relatively simple service. But if newspapers can seed their ads into both the Web-savvy and Web-illiterate markets, they’ll be saving their clients a lot of time.

No time for the staff to do all these postings, you say? Well, I happen to know of three fledgling Web sites who might make great partners for your classified department…

 

Posted in classifieds, competitors, tips | Click to comment »

Closing the software gap

Written by Michael on September 29th, 2006

Can newspapers maintain competitive software on a smaller, less Soviet scale than Tom Mohr would have us believe? Here are two signs that a few folks still think it’s worth a try.

1) Reviewing the API’s Newspaper Next study, Susan Mernit name-checks the two bits of software small newspapers probably need most:

- a self-serve ad platform
- a simple local listings service

And she wants it done in open source, so we can all share & improve. Right on, sister. (Tx Will Sullivan.)

2) The Des Moines Register is searching for a local search editor. Bully. A dozen such “editors” won’t do squat until the software is in place, but once it is, no set of editorial duties need more attention at mid-size metros, I think. (And nobody is better poised to see the benefits of that software than Gannett. Let’s cross our fingers, k?)

 

Posted in search, software, things we should do better | Click to comment »

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 »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »