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 →
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
BATTLE | What We Need, Is a Plan
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.
My battle this week stems from a series of emails exchanged between myself, the IT staff, and the Business Director that originally stemmed from the ad department securing online sponsorship for a weekly print feature: Thirsy Thursday — a beer (mmh… beer) reviewing column.
The effort has devolved into a struggle to get the new IT staff up to speed, launch a new blog for Thirsty Thursday, and even redoing parts of the main website. My suggestions on that front were:
- decisions about web design by non-web designers is usually a poor choice.
- unilateral decisions about the structure of an editorial site by business staff is not a good move
- I'd strongly suggest that many of our design issues are centered around college publisher inadequacies.
The Way Forward
This whole process lead me to realize that what the DO needs more than anything else, is a planned approach to the Internet, which until this point, has been haphazard at best. We have no plan for forward growth, and that means that we're likely going to continue to be frustrated with each other and with our own efforts. At this point there are plenty of other colleges out there that have easily surpassed our own efforts to both make money online and leverage it as a platform.
BATTLE | Google Juice Your Blog (Repost)
What is BATTLE?
I've challenged myself to battle the management at my school's newspaper The Daily Orange with a new 'new media' topic every week.
I've been doing this for a few weeks now, and have a bit of a backlog of posts on the subjects we've been talking about.
The following is a post that I just published at copress, that was originally intended for BATTLE. Expect to see more of these posts.
Bloggers are the anti-journalist.
Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among "true" journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of... blogging: consistently producinggood content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.
The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.
