Objectivity: The Mortal Ethic That Started The ‘Quest for Innocence’
Couldn't resist this photo of Prof. Rosen. Seemed apt.
While newspapers, TV journalists, and news radio bemoan the internet as an attack on journalism, Jay Rosen’s excellent piece, The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism explores the failures of journalists themselves. In an attempt to cling to the standards of an obsoleted era, journalists, not the internet (read: those of us who use the internet) are failing as the Fourth Estate. The 'quest of innocence,' that stems from the need for objectivity seems to run counter to the mission of reporting facts. This leaves Prof. Rosen to end with a question: “How the hell could this happen?”
There are of course, far too many reasons to answer the question succinctly, but let me posit a few observations in an attempt to respond:
The need to remain relevant
If “sources are going direct” then one of the roles of the traditional news institutions, to report fact, has become obsolete. To remain relevant, newsorgs are left with three possible methods of covering the news: a) present an opinion on events, b) cover parts of the story the sources themselves will not reveal, c) curate the sources into a digest. Traditional journalists feel the need to remain objective (more in a bit), which eliminates opinion and leaves only a combination of behind-the-scenes reporting and factual curation as a means of covering news. Since access is the easiest way to cover what the sources won’t self-reveal, newsorgs live in fear of angering any one party and cause them champion the shield of objectivity.
Objectivity means detachment
If the only way newsorgs can provide value is to gain access and curate, the desire to use the blanket of objectivity has never been so strong. Seemingly, only objectivity can persuade sources to provide access to a reporter. A strong reputation for only reporting facts … and who a fear of reporting any facts that might run counter to the source’s interest is always best. The ethical tenant of objectivity is perhaps the greatest hinderance to reporting ever conceived.
Dear US Senator for Silicon Valley, Please Help Fix the Mobile Phone Industry
Today, I received a response from my senator, Dianne Feinstein to a canned email form I had sent to her about mobile carrier practices. The following is her response and my reply.
Dear Mr. Baker:
Thank you for writing to me about exclusivity agreements in the wireless market and your support for legislative reforms. As a wireless phone customer myself, I understand your concerns. I welcome this opportunity to respond.
Although the market for wireless phone service has become increasingly competitive, some consumers have not seen the kind of efficient, reliable, and fair service that they want. Rather, according to the Better Business Bureau, wireless phone service has become the Nation's most complained-about industry.
I appreciate hearing your support for open access to wireless networks. I understand the frustration of purchasing a mobile phone that is locked and then not being able to use it with a different carrier. There have been multiple lawsuits filed by consumer advocates to prevent wireless carriers from locking their mobile phones, or at least to force carriers to find ways to guarantee interoperability of locked phones between networks.
How the courts resolve these cases will impact what practices are allowed and whether legislative action is warranted. With our State's large business sectors and diverse communities, any change in our telecommunications laws needs to take into consideration a variety of competing concerns since it will have far-reaching effects.
Several states, including California, have enacted or are in the process of enacting laws to protect wireless phone subscribers. Nonetheless, federal legislation may become necessary so that all Americans are treated fairly. I believe that any workable solution for telecommunications reform should focus first and foremost on consumers and the public interest, while also balancing the needs of the network, service, and information providers.
Please know that I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind as the Senate works to address these issues in the 111th Congress.
Once again, thank you for writing. If you have any further comments or concerns, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.
Best regards.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
A Response
Senator Feinstein–
Thank you for your response. I appreciate you giving some thought to this matter.
It's clear from your email that you've decided that wireless exclusivity is not an issue that deserves to make it into your portfolio. As the senator representing the Silicon Valley, and my representative, I must urge you to reconsider.
Mobile carriers in this country have taken advantage of consumers for far too long. There are a long string of examples where legislation, not court cases are called for.
- As covered in the New York Times last week, mobile carriers are making the us pay extra for simple services like voicemail. A bill to force carriers to allow users to set their own voicemail greetings, or one that forced them not to charge for listening to their service messages would go a long way toward controlling this out-of-control industry.
- In most other countries, customers are only charged for outgoing calls – much the same way landlines have worked in this country. In the US however, we're effectively double charged – for both outgoing and incoming calls. This practice, effectively allows mobile carriers to make twice as much off of each phone call. Legislation that enforced a "one charge per call" policy would go a long way toward straightening our backwards industry.
- As you may have heard, the FCC has just began an investigation of AT&T for potentially unfair exclusivity arrangements with Apple to the exclusion of Google and other VOIP providers. The issue is one of Net Neutrality: can AT&T control what data is allowed over its network? Users pay for access to "unlimited" data rates over the AT&T network. For them to disallow certain types of data because it competes with another aspect of their business is not only anti-competitive, it's censorship. I urge you to support the FCC in this investigation and take a strong stance on Net Neutrality.
Dear Bill Keller
Dear Bill Keller,
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I had hope. I’ve been to the new Times newsroom, I’ve seen your awesome web infographics, I’ve talked with your developers, I’ve watched videos of your futurism department. There are many, many, smart people working for you.
When I asked one of your employees, why he had given up a well-paying job to come work for you he told me “…when the Times calls, you answer.”
I was emboldened when I read your byline from Iran. You, a manager, reported from the heart of what continues to be the world’s biggest story.
You sir, are in control of one of the finest journalism producing institutions in the world. Yet, people like you are pissing it away.
I was heart broken when I heard that the New York Times, which I have a deep respect and love for signed it’s intent-to-file-chapter-11 forms.
Nonetheless, I have a deep appreciation for experimentation, and I hope that your endeavors will teach the rest of us a thing or two about how to make money on the web.
Then, I read a Q&A that you did in TIME magazine. Even though the copy had to fit on one page, and your answers are brief, I’ve never seen a journalist sound as much like a politician as you did in that article. (And I use the word 'politician' that in the out-of-touch, slimy, refusing-to-be-held-accountable sort of way.)
Apologize for your mistakes. Transparency is all it’s cracked up to be.
You admitted that journalists in this country had failed as the Fourth Estate. The flat-out bad reporting when ex-President Bush took this country to war against Iraq was in-excusable. The argument for war was based on lies. To this day, the media hasn’t made a resounding statement saying as much.
You didn’t apologize.
You blamed us, the people, for creating “conventional wisdom” for you to ‘float along’ with.
If you want us to trust you, we’ve got to have an honest relationship! Tell us when you get something wrong. We’ll be mad, but we’ll trust you more because you came clean.
The smell of ink doesn’t justify its cost.
You said that print still has “a lot of life left in it.” I’m not sure if that was the diplomatic answer but I think most of us would have been more impressed to hear that you were actively looking for ways to move your operation digital; that print was on its way out as the foundation of your business.
Make a commitment to doing journalism online because the myth that, “the best of online journalism is rooted in mainstream media,”
won’t last long. I’m not sure what you define as “mainstream,” but you ought to consider re-evaluating your premise. The MSM isn’t the only group of people capable of doing journalism. Read the rest of this post →
Signed and Released: Side Projects Are So Good
Common thinking in the photography industry is to always have a side project going in addition to your main job. Work, even photography work, is tough. You've got to have a personal project going to keep you sane.
Turns out having a side project can lead to some really good work too. Just ask Google about their 20% rule.
After a long time of not following this sage advice, I am now fortunate enough to announce two.
The Vancouver Project
A good friend of mine, Andrew Burton, and I have been talking for a couple of months about the rise of DSLRs with video capability and what it the implications for sports photographers.
Andrew had the foresight to see that this new technology would come to head in the very near future – namely the coming winter Olympics in Vancouver. Exploring thought, we also realized that this Olympics would be the first since the rise of the real-time web, live video broadcasting from cell phones, Google Wave, and, and, and.
Our realization lead to a plan of action which we're calling The Vancouver Project. Stop by and check us out.
Shameless plug: if you're in a position to help by spreading the word to the right people we'd love to hear from you.
Linked Photographer
In other news, I'm writing a book.
That is a very weird sentence for me to write. I write posts, tweets, cutlines… not books. But, apparently, that's happening :)
An excellent friend of mine, and phenomenal fashion photographer, Lindsay Adler, approached a few months ago saying that she was looking into writing a book, would I be interested in co-authoring?
Today, I signed the contract. We'll be writing a book that's got the tentative title Linked Photographer. It will be part treaties, part howto, and part reference on how photographers can use social media for business. It's a bit more than a for-dummies book, but
We'll be launching linkedphotog.com soon, so stay tuned!
A Web Design Critique of Google News
I recently critiqued the redesign of Newsweek, and was pleased to see the positive response. I sorta promised that this would become a regular feature for me, so I'll try to hold to that.
I'm only looking at homepages. Critiquing a whole site is a lot of work. I'll do it someone wants to pay me though :]
After leading a webinar for CoPress on homepage design, I've done a lot of research into mainstream homepages – what works and what doesn't. For the second go at this, let's look at Google News.
Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web
There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.”
I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.
HTML5
The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages.
Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale.
Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?
Newsorgs Should Offer Freemium Live Interviews
Through Steve Outing’s blog I discovered a video interview of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. The interview is a short seven and half minutes long, but is insanely interesting. So interesting in fact, that I’d be willing to pay to see the full, unedited interview. Especially if paying meant I could have watched it live and asked questions during the interview.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Which lead me to the following idea – newspapers are very good at interviewing people. Further, their brand recognition can get them access to folks that the typical blogger doesn’t have access to.
Interviews of industry leaders talking about things they don’t typically present in public is certainly premium content that people would be willing to pay for – especially if they can write it off as a business expense.
What a great application of freemium to newspaper online content. Offer a shorter video like the one above for free, and then charge a monthly rate if people want live access.
Of course, there’s a major problem. People are already doing this and providing the content for free. This Week in Startups (TWiST), started just a few weeks ago by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.com . The show concept is very cool: he uses ustream to livestream an hour long interview with founders and CEOs of interesting startups. He uses a Twitter hashtag as a backchannel to the whole show, allowing people to converse and ask questions. Best of all, this is free.
If Calacanis, who is undoubtedly a busy man, can do this, for free. There must be countless other examples of the same. Just check the iTunes Podcast directory for more.
Mark another lost opportunity for newspapers.
TWiST Episode 1
Whiteboard of Mindmapping: ‘New Media’
I'm a visual person, so over the last month or so I've been trying to map out the state of the new information based industry. This is part of a massive post I'm working on, but I figured I'd toss my visual up on this blog and maybe start a conversation. (If anyone can read my chicken scratch.)
Mindmapping on a whiteboard
A Web Design Critique of the Newsweek Redesign
Newsweek’s redesign/relaunch today revealed a much cleaner, more web friendly site. Many improvements have been made, and you can tell that they’re thinking hard.
However, there’s still room to improve. The essential problem with the site is that it still feel liks a newspaper site, not a online newsorg. Check out the embedded PDF for a look at the annotated homepage of the site and a few quick, overall notes below.
- The design is nice and clean with a solid red motif, but the widgets are sorta hard to tell apart, they don’t really have a bottom.
- I know that Newsweek is a partner of MSNBC, but promoting that connection so heavily may not be so smart. MSNBC should get equal billing (see: Slate and WaPo), or be totally integrated.
- The choice to push the blogs so heavily is interesting (They have a widget and a nav bar). Not bad, just interesting. I’m curious to know if that works out.
- Serious Fun is all kinds of UI hell. The side arrows to mean neutral is just down right confusing , and it’s got very prominent placement on the F pattern of user reading. I’m all down for turning polls into something more of a game, but rethink the UI here.
- Props for having links to other newsorgs. That’s a valuable service that Newsweek is developing. The fact that you get to the other site through a frame is, again, interesting. Cheers to experimentation.
Paid Content = Paid Wifi
- Image via Wikipedia
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for WiFi access. Like most geeks, I pride myself on being able to find free internet access wherever I go. If I can’t find it, (like some airports) then web access nearly always goes into the “it can wait” column of my todo list.
Taking a step back, a service that I can find for free elsewhere is not one I’m likely to pay for, and I’m willing to sacrifice timeliness to save money.
This will be the a huge problem for newsorgs who want to go the paid content route.
Actually, the phrase Paid Content is flawed. It presumes that you’re paying for a product. Paying customers of the WSJ, aren’t really paying for the content, they pay for access to that content. You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a service.
Let’s call Paid Content what it really is: Paid Access.
An Economist Approach to the Newspaper Industry
You should really hear my brother and me argue.
It sounds sounds a lot like we disagree on everything, but sit and listen to us, and you realize that we often have the same point of view, just different ways of expressing it.
My brother is the guy who got me inspired/angry enough to write You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce. Phill Baker (who has no online profile to link to), who studies economics and engineering at UPenn and was assigned a massive project – to write a 80 page paper on an industry effected by technological change.
I’m pretty certain that his decision to write on the newspaper industry was in part to piss me off, but in reality, I’m glad he’s doing it. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches the industry from a macro perspective.
He’s asked me to publish the paper when he’s done, mostly to see what the “industry insiders” think. I’ve agreed, so look for it in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, we're in the process of another email exchange, in which I play futurist and defend us blogging “ilk.”
What follows is excerpts from his email (small edits), interspaced with my responses. Any emphasis or links are my own.
Uh, yea, definitely, as to the last point you made. It's interesting b/c this is a 'classic' example of how success breeds failure under the pressure of technological change. There's some fascinating literature in that topic, but the poignant example is Kodak: they were so focused on being a film camera company, that they completely missed digital. They thought they were in the business of film (they were a pretty sophisticated chemical engineering company), whereas they should have seen themselves in the photography business.
Where we differ is the extent of the change. So the business model has lost its exclusivity and newspapers missed the boat. Now they're facing established competitors in their markets with serious competitive advantages and the benefits of network effects through first mover status (e.g. if the NYTimes had been craigslist, we wouldn't be hearing of the end of newspapers).
Newspapers are not going anywhere. Print will not disappear, there's simply too much demand. 15% profit margins (20% is a bit high, actually the industry average is about 17%), should disappear (they can be maintained at the cost of cutting everything in the paper, but that'd be stupid). Circulation will likely stabilize in the next few years as the cannibalization of the print edition by the internet edition faces diminishing returns.
What's fascinating is that their business model has been co-opted by search. I don't think, and the research backs me up here, that display advertising online will ever come close to replacing the lost advertising revenue that was enjoyed in print. The 'national' papers, or those that are big enough to scale and aren't trapped under burdens of debt due (some serendipity comes into play there), will likely find stability first as they can portray themselves as the replacements to the four TV networks. At the head of long tail, they'll be able to differentiate themselves from commodity news through designer websites, cool visualizations, (hopefully) good journalism and (hopefully) their brand names.
- Agreed. Ads will very likely not be able to fund the entirety of a newsorg in the future. I can say this with maybe… 90% certainty.
- Newspapers enjoyed a profit margin of 20% and higher.
- The issue here is largely mindset. Newspapers are used to thinking of themselves as …newspapers. As they realize that they are really just a specialized subset of the tech sector, they'll come to have a revenue model that is more inline with the industry. Which is to say, one that relies on multiple sources of revenue.
- We really agree on your last three points here. Newsorgs need a great UI, ability to inform using data, and to maintain a solid reputation.
The Wall Street Journal Has Their iPhone App All Wrong
Alan Murray is executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online. This interview was taped on April 4, 2009 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
This is the first video in this series great series by Nieman Labs where I've really disagreed with Alan Murray. His logic that "when you're done, you're done" with a newspaper just doesn't hold. Especially with a paper like the Journal that is intended to have a huge depth of information. I'd predict that very few people actually sit down with the paper for 45 minutes to get that 'completed' experience.
Further, regardless of either of our opinion on print, the iPhone is a different medium as Mr. Murray points out. It's not a blackberry, but it's certainly not print! With constant web access and push notifications coming in full force with iPhone OS 3.0, why limit your app to the 'you're done' feeling?
Instead, recognize that a cell phone, and an iPhone in particular is a uniquely customizable experience. Especially for a paper like the WSJ, which is trying to follow the freemium model, that want for customization is something that can be capitalized on.
Allow users to select what kind of business news they want to receive, maybe even allow them to pick stocks to have news alerts on. Heck, you could even micro-charge for that feature, 15 cents for every company you track, 3 bucks for each industry. Then, deliver them the news on that particular topic, instantly. Use push, use the notification system of the phone to alert them of the most important stuff.
Utilizing the iPhone medium the way it's intended to be used (it is opinionated design after all) is really the only way to have good odds at a successful app. Mobile is and is increasingly a huge deal for the media industry. It would be great to see someone get it right.
BATTLE | Planning a Budget ‘New Media’ for Feature
The Daily Orange Feature Editor Kelly Outram wants to create a special section of the paper for the Summer. The idea is to have something online that would be relevant all summer while the paper isn’t publishing new content.
I’m supportive of the idea, but just don’t think that the DO has the tech talent to really pull off the interactive graphics and code work required … yet.
More importantly though, was my fear that the proposed budget didn’t follow the ‘do what you do best, link to the rest’ rule. So much of the content was general, and not even timely. I’ll share my the gist of my response to the budget below in the hopes that it might give some guidance to college media.
The A1 main story would be about summer jobs/internships in this economy. What students are doing since many places (seem) to not be hiring, any odd jobs, prospects for the future so its newsy/feature. Ideally, we would like a pull-out where each part (decibel, splice, spice rack, tech, health) would be its own section, where it would get into text to what it was.
Use Facebook to generate data for you. You can do a series of searches on Facebook for Syracuse students by major, and find what they’ll be doing this summer. I presume many folks will update their profiles to have this data very shortly, if not already.
The more I think about it, the more I realize you probably don't need to have someone who can code. Being able to pull data off the API might be faster, but I imagine much of this will require manual work anyway. You can just do a lot of Facebook searches etc, and make the data static. Not quite as cool, but still very useful. It would be a major project, but a real 'new media' clip of sorts – 'specially if you can present it in a cool way online.
LIVE | D.O. Palooza
D.O. Palooza is a conference put on by The Daily Orange of Syracuse University. I'll be livestreaming the event throughout the day.
You can watch here, or on my newly launched Mogulus Channel.
You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce
My brother sent me an email tonight after he heard, Peter Fader speak. Fader is a professor at Wharton School of business at UPenn “doing datamining - they call it marketing.” Apparently, my brother found this talk inspiring, ending his first email in our resulting exchange with:
…he made some damn good points about the subscription model. b2c already is doing ok (campfire, github, etc.), it's time for consumers to pony up. His bottom line: if facebook decided to charge you $10/month, you'd pay it. No questions asked.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or know me, or have listened to some of the top minds in this ‘new media’ business, you’ll be pretty easily pick out how totally my brother has drunk the kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.
First there was the stone age
Deep breath.
Let’s try to break this down: We are now in the information age. Where once the pinacle of technology was an iron sword, the new tech is information.
Our economy is based on the trade of IP, and yet, paradoxically, the internet has made information practically infinite. Therefore, attempting to make money by controlling the amount of information is doomed to fail.
Put another way: controlling the scarcity of something that isn't scarce can't work.
History is not a good guide here: The internet is a fundamental shift from anything we’ve experienced before. It’s as revolutionary as the printing press and as radical as the written word. It’s both asynchronous and instant two-way communication.
Rev2oh | Classifieds: Use a Tiered Selling Strategy
RevenueTwoPointZero is a new group of very smart folks who are trying to rethink the business model behind journalism. After their conference last weekend, they've published a series of blog posts on their brainstorming sessions. I'll be responding to many (if not all of them) with the rev2oh slug.
A mockup from the rev2oh team.
The rev2oh team came up with a really solid plan for how newspaper platforms can redo their classifieds sales online. I was really please to see them include aggregating craigslist as one of the goals. After all, why should newsorgs try to create a new social network when a perfectly good one already exists?
The one concern I had when reading their plan was that the premium content is very much a micro-payment model. This does work, (see: ebay), but it's not very user friendly.
In part, this response is applying Jeff Jarvis’ question: “what would Google do?” Or, more appropriately, “What would Apple do?”
Apple is the master of simplifying their offerings. You can’t buy options for an iphone to get a brighter screen, bluetooth, extra data every month, and a fingerprint-proof backing. That many options is confusing. iPhone comes in two versions that differ in just one way: memory. A customer only has one decision to make, and that simplifies their experience.
And that, after all, is what this entire proposal hinges on: a better user experience.
Newsflow: How Journalism Is and Will Be Generated
The News Ecosystem according to Steve Johnson. Click for a larger version.
Steven Johnson, co-founder of outside.in, gave a very good, well thought out, speech at SXSW on the state of the news industry last week. In the transcript on his blog, he shares a slide on how he envisions the future of the news industry.
Steven has a good, albeit simplistic break down of how this new paradigm is working. I'm sure I agree with the flow of the information News → Commentary → Curation → Distribution. Seems to me that you'd have to distribute before you can get comments back, and that you'd need to curate the commentary… Forget it, the the chart is simplistic.
Steven does have the right context for this though:
Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever.
I agree whole heartily with his point and I like the broad strokes of his chart. But, I suggest that this diagram far too simple to describe the new paradigm.
As Steven says, “The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” What his model is missing is the intricacies of linking, how data will be distributed to not only the customer, but among all of those gathering and generating news.
Hypothesizing on the new newsflow
Licensed under Creative Commons. Click for a larger version.
Yea… not as easy to understand right? I’ve got arrows going all over the place, and there’s not clear rhyme or reason to the way information flows. My apologies, these relationships are chaotic and often have many nodes. Let me make the key points:
Data is key. As Tim Berners Lee has predicted, the future of the web is “linked data.” This is is something that Steven addresses, but only briefly. As the semantic web becomes reality, displaying and accessing data will become the important role for journalism to fill.
ESPN Shouldn’t Use Their Monopoly to Take Advantage of Students
- Image via Wikipedia
ESPN.com has me angrier than TIME.com right now. They've sent an email to the sports department at The Daily Orange asking them to contribute content to ESPN.com for the NCAA tournament.
I'll go ahead and quote portions of their email in two quotes. I'll break in between for analysis.
Here’s what we’re interested in:
- Cross post opinion and campus reaction/color during the NCAA Tournament in the ESPN profile space (description below). Could start with Final 4 picks.
- Send an e-mail to me and removed for privacy once you’ve posted
- Include URL of the post on ESPN.com with brief description
- Include any related URLs
Break: If you’ve read that carefully, you’ll see that ESPN is trying to crowdsource their reporting. They’re asking college journalists to write about the topic they know best, their campus, then package the content with a neat little bow, and send it off to them to be used…
Here’s what I can do with your content:
- Posts considered for the P1 box below the poll on the front of ESPN.com
- Best posts included in campus roundup file
- Best posts shared with our college basketball editor
…no where important.
Newspapers Should Repurpose Craigslist to Save Their Classifieds
Craigslist has totally changed the way customers approach classifieds. We now expect to get free ads with an unlimited runtime. They must be searchable, and easily browsable. Print newspapers can’t hold an candle to the easy of use, or the price.
RevenueTwoPointZero, a new consortium (@rev2oh) that aims to invent new business models for the news industry has stated that one of their goals is to "build a better Craigslist." I suggest that this is an exercise in futility.
Craigslist is an established social network. Trying to take them on is a bit like saying you want to build a better facebook. The idea that you can build a website, no matter how much better that doesn't use the old social paradigm is ludicrous. No one is going to use both sites, and no one is going to move to a new site that doesn't have all their friends on it. Same applies to a new craigslist.
But, in looking at newspapers as a platform, a portal to their community, there becomes an obvious way to utilize Craigslist to the mutual benefit of the customer, newsorg, and Craigslist. Read the rest of this post →
Gut Punch: TIME Experimenting With Paid Content
I've had a long time love affair with TIME.com . I'm constantly impressed with the quality of their content, and they have made many progressive steps to move into the online space in a meaningful way.
Today, buried in a press event to announce some new mobile apps, they announced that they would start experimenting with paid content.
My gut reaction was very similar to Zach Wise
WTF! Goodbye Time.com…
But, then I watched the video, and regained some hope for my favorite online publisher. They're not just going to enact a paywall. They've given them selves 8 months to "experiment" with making portions of their sites paid content.
REPOST | Defined: Newspaper Platform
This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.
– Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen
Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online. Simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template website and saying, “There, we’re online.”
But, they’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the web. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a website, but their still using a print mentality to maintain it.
I propose that this is because news organizations still haven’t realized that the internet has changed the definition of a journalist. During this week’s #collegejourn chat I proposed that:
“journalists, at least in the new media sense, are nothing more than experts in a field that have the ability to create mass media based on that expertise.”
Based on this definition, journalists should be viewed as community leaders, people that know a lot about a topic, and therefore are respected enough by the community to inform others. This makes them something of a mixture of a columnist (read: blogger), a reporter (read: blogger), and a content creator (read: photographer/videographer/designer/infographics-maker/databaseminer/developer).
If we extrapolate this out to the newspaper as a whole, the future might very well be an organization that consists of many journalists that can provide mass media to a relevant community.
Newspapers are used to being limited to geographic communities because they were limited by their physical product that never could reach outside that demographic. The Internet gives us a publish button that puts content up for the whole world to instantly see. The word “community” is no longer limited to geography, it can now apply to any niche of information.
The company Gawker Media, has taken advantage of this new definition. They host nearly a dozen websites that cover a specific niche. From tech news to celebrity gossip, each site has it’s own coverage of a particular niche of information. This includes both original content and aggregation. Anything, just so long as their site gives a complete picture of the niche they’re covering.
A Geographic Niche
With that model in mind, let’s get back to newspapers, who are best at covering the geographic niche. There are ways for newspapers to turn their websites into first class web citizens and stop re-purposing of print content, that doesn’t do a good job of serving their community.
Rank Your Links! A Publish2 Community Proposition
I love publish2.
It’s a service that is very similar to delicious in that it allows for social bookmarking, but it’s restricted membership: only journalists can join. It also has slightly more formal tagging regulations and greater integration with other sites (including, delicious).
It’s a service that lets my not only bookmark sites that I like, but index them in a way that makes them eminently searchable for future writing/reference.
However, it’s missing one critical component that we get out of services like digg or reddit or iTunes: a ranking system.
I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to my iTunes library. I can proudly boast that I own 80.4 days of music. That amount of data requires a certain amount of … OCD attention to detail.
Part of my 'attention to detail' is keeping track of what music I actually like. Fortunately, iTunes has a way to do this ranking 1-5 stars — just like the movies!
What the feature might look like if Publish2 adopts it.
★★★☆☆
When I got back and do research for a blog post, quality is one of the first things that I try to remember about a link in my publish2.
I never bookmark complete trash, but when I’ve got hundreds of links related to advertising (for example), it would be great to have the most important ones popup first.
So, I propose a solution. From now on, I’ll be adding asterisks to my tags in publish2, as a way to star rank the quality of the post on a scale of 1-5. Just like iTunes. Just as easy to do.
I invite you to join me in this endeavor. If we all start doing this, it will become an effective way of raising the best links to the top of the pile.
I've created a Get Satisfaction feature request, please weigh in there.
What the feature might look like if Publish2 adopts it.
Micropayments Lead to Piracy
Since the TIME cover story that re-rose the micropayment debate last week the topic has been beaten to death across the web, but I want to raise just a few more points that I haven't seen elsewhere.
Information wants to be free. No matter what, people will find a way to get it online. We’ve proven this time and time again with music, movies, software, and video games. No, don’t laugh – video games are a multi-billion dollar industry, that represent some of the greatest achievements in technology in the past decade.
These three heavy-weight entertainment industries have proven that charging for content online leads to … quasi success. Yes, iTunes, Netflix, and Steam have been able to deliver paid content to a mass audience, and they do if far easier than if you try to pirate download the same, but piracy is still rampant.
Make it free, or the pirates will. The TIME article, and others like it, refer to the 'iTunes model' when the talk about micropayments for news. Yet, this analogy is flawed:
- Music, movies, software, and video games are content that has ‘repeat use’ value. News is read once, then mentally file away.
- Music, movies, and video games are entertainment, a luxury good that carries a far different intrinsic value than an essential good like news. Software isn’t a luxury good, but it is a productivity tool that also doesn’t have the intrinsic value that news/information has. Besides, software doesn’t really have the micropayment model either.
- It’s easy to preview content on iTunes, it’s near impossible to provide an accurate preview of information without providing the … information.
I’d be willing to bet that if a news service tries the paid content model people will find someway to get around the pay wall. If they’ve found a way to steal entertainment goods, trust me, they’ll find a way to steal the news.
And that sure doesn’t sound like a Fourth Estate to me: a system where the people have to steal their information!?
Better to let the traditional newsroom die, or run a smaller operation. You can’t tell me that every reporter in a current newsroom actually earns their keep.
If micropayment schemes ever actually gain traction, people will opensource the news. We can mashup twitter, youtube, blogs, and aggregators to get a reasonable approximation of the information that we get now. Granted, it would be much shorter form content. But since we mostly skim the news right now anyway, the user wouldn’t see much lost.
BATTLE | What We Need, Is Infastructure
I’ve challenged myself to battle the management at my school’s newspaper The Daily Orange with a new ‘new media’ topic every week. BATTLE look at the struggle of a college paper trying to evolve to succeed on the Internet.
Eight reasons why College Publisher is a problem
- I'm worried that other universities that produce a product inferior to our own, are so far ahead of us in the online space. This is ass backwards, and cannot be allowed to continue if we expect to keep bragging about the great tradition of the DO. It very well might become the 'once great tradition'
- College Publisher has ceased development of their next generation of software – CP5. No future growth does not bode well for their continued success. I'd be wary of thinking of College Publisher as a platform that will always be there.
- Online is both the future and the present reality. Every newsorg needs to exist online in a meaningful way. Many don't get it right, but we blatantly get it wrong.
