by JCM | 24 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
* assuming you don’t read anything else about clickbait today
This article focuses on content produced by content marketers, but applies just as much to regular publishers who are constantly trying to ride the latest wave of social media fads to suck in a few unsuspecting punters with low-rent, instantly-forgettable clickbait. Short, cheap, trend-driven / fast-turnaround content may well help you hit short-term engagement metrics, but will long-term kill audience retention:
“The internet is ballooning with fluff, and bad content marketing is to blame. In our obsession with ‘engaging’ our ‘audience’ in ‘real-time’ with ‘targeted content’ that goes ‘viral,’ we are driving people insane… When a publishing agenda is too ambitious, people can’t afford to shoot anything down… They’re under too much pressure to fill… slots”
I particularly like the concept of “click-flu” – the sense of annoyance and disappointment you get (both with the content and, more importantly, with yourself) when you click on a clickbaity link, and the page you end up on fails to deliver on its hyperbolic promise. The resentment builds and builds – and over time, leads to hatred of the people who lured you in time and again.
If you make a big promise, as so many of these “This is the most important thing you will see today” clickbaity headlines do, you’d damned well better live up to it.
by JCM | 21 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
People are starting to fully wake up to this now – in the mobile-first age, competitors are no longer just other publishers, it’s *everything*, so we all need to start thinking bigger. Good piece as ever from Mathew Ingram on Gigaom:
“very few news apps take advantage of the qualities of a smartphone — things like GPS geo-targeting, which could use the location of a reader to augment the information they are getting, the way the Breaking News app does. Or the brain inside the phone itself, which could compute how long it took a reader to get through a story, how many times they returned to it, what other news they’ve been consuming, and so on”
A number of sites and apps have started to do *some* of this, but very few have managed to pull it all together. Give it a couple of years, and we may finally have a *properly* disruptive news delivery system that combines the best of everything. Combined with increasingly intelligent algorithms and reams of data on individual user preferences, this could get rid of the need for editor selecting stories altogether. But despite ongoing experiments in code-written stories, to do this really well will still take humans producing the copy and vetting the info. The journalist isn’t obsolete yet.
by JCM | 20 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
Worth a read: “the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade”
by JCM | 6 Jul, 2014 | Marginalia
There’s a perfect quote in this piece that I’m surprised doesn’t appear more often in discussions of online journalism’s monetisation potential: “Ultimately, the problem might be one of unrealistic expectations“
by JCM | 5 Jul, 2014 | Marginalia
We still don’t know why, though…
“There are many more listicles of length 10 published compared to other numbers. This is primarily because BuzzFeed is selling the 10-length listicle to partner brands, such as the Michael J. Fox Show, Nordstrom Topman, and Buick. The second most popular length is 15, followed by 12. Listicle length drops off quite rapidly in the 20’s, although surprisingly, lengths 11-21 are far more popular than those under 10…
“If we look the bar chart by audience score we see a completely different picture — odd number length listicles… tend to have a higher audience score on average, where in our dataset, the number 29 tends to have an advantage over the rest.”
by JCM | 4 Jul, 2014 | Marginalia
Lots of good stuff in this about how journalist types need to get less prissy about monetisation, and how they can learn from the PR/marketing industry to make journalism better – this is opportunity, not dilution of the purity of a noble profession. And there’s a whole bunch of transferable skills to pick up along the way…
(Title stolen from Kevin Anderson on LinkedIn)
by JCM | 28 Jun, 2014 | Marginalia
I usually hate tips for writers – writing, to me, should be a natural thing. But having seen a lot of very bad writing, more concerned with showing off the writer’s linguistic skill or subject-matter expertise than enlightening the reader, this approach strikes me as vital to keep in mind at all times:
Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else’s attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? “When you write,” Pinker says, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.”
Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. How else could anyone write? Yet much bad writing happens when people abandon this approach. Academics can be more concerned with showcasing their knowledge; bureaucrats can be more concerned with covering their backsides; journalists can be more concerned with breaking the news first, or making their readers angry. All interfere with “joint attention”, making writing less transparent.
This isn’t a “rule for writers”; it’s a perspective shift. It’s also an answer to an old question: should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is “for an audience”. But not to impress them. The idea is to help them discern something you know they’d be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place.
by JCM | 14 Jun, 2014 | Marginalia
This obsession with measurable outcomes from online advertising – something it’s impossible to do with TV or print or billboards – is idiotic. Advertising is about brand/product recognition and building familiarity/trust as much if not more than direct sales, and always has been.
This is a solid overview of the issues. Maybe, one day, the industry will wake up to its idiocy. Yes, detailed data is useful – but just because some things are measurable doesn’t mean everything is. A sale may be a long time in coming.
by JCM | 11 Jun, 2014 | Marginalia
A great set of guidelines.
A few I especially like – largely because they apply far more widely than just in the newsroom – partly paraphrased:
- gather data relentlessly, but learn how to use it (and when to ignore it)
- evaluate fads, don’t chase them
- reward good failures
- ask “why would anyone see value in this?”
- you can’t judge success if you don’t know what it looks like
by JCM | 10 Jun, 2014 | Marginalia
Some great charts here – the overhype of social has been increasingly grating in recent years, a repeat of the 2003-5 excitement over blogging as the future of everything journalism, or the great SEO craze of approximately the same period, where the right combination of metadata and keywords were seen as some kind of magic bullet that could take any site to the top of the first page of Google.
Thankfully, everyone’s woken up to the limitations of both blogging and SEO. We’re now hopefully now coming to the same realisation with social, with more and more myths about clicks, engagement, sales, and all sorts being shattered left, right and centre.
But what we really need is the backlash to the backlash will hopefully follow soon after. Because although neither blogging nor SEO were quite the massive game changers they were made out to be, both have had (and continue to have) a huge positive impact on both the online world and the media as a whole. We simply now have a better understanding of their limitations as well as their strengths – which puts us in a much stronger position. Add the same rational approach to social (an approach that anyone with a Twitter addiction as bad as mine could have told you about years ago), and we should end up stronger yet again.
