by JCM | 21 Aug, 2014 |
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 |
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 | 17 Aug, 2014 |
Well worth a read on the Feguson riots, and how different social media sites (notably Twitter vs Facebook) served up news about them:
“Now, we expect documentation, live-feeds, streaming video, real time Tweets… [Ferguson] unfolded in real time on my social media feed which was pretty soon taken over by the topic…
And then I switched to non net-neutral Internet to see what was up. I mostly have a similar a composition of friends on Facebook as I do on Twitter.
Nada, zip, nada.
This morning, though, my Facebook feed is also very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson. Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now?—?seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more.
But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure.
Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?
Would we even have a chance to see her?
This isn’t about Facebook per se—maybe it will do a good job, maybe not—but the fact that algorithmic filtering, as a layer, controls what you see on the Internet. Net neutrality (or lack thereof) will be yet another layer determining this. This will come on top of existing inequalities in attention, coverage and control.”
It’s a continual worry – how to ensure we see what’s important? Though, of course, the concept is nothing new – the algorithm is just an editor or an editorial policy in a different form. It’s something I’ve written about before when it relates to the EU, focusing on a BBC editorial policy that fails to cover EU affairs in mainstream news most of the time, and then serves up extremes.
This kind of human editorial determination of the appropriate news agenda based on perceived audience interests is arguably no massive degree different from a Facebook algorithm determining what is important based on how it interprets user interests. If anything, there’s a strong argument to be made that Facebook knows its audience better than any editor on any publication or TV show ever, due to the sheer quantities of data it possesses on its userbase.
But then what of *importance* – who determines this? Who overrides the algorithmic or standard editorial policy assumption? Is there a chance that an important story will get buried because a bit of code doesn’t see it as significant? Yes. But the same is true of any number of important news stories that human editors don’t pick up on, or choose to bury on page 23 because they don’t think their readers will be that interested.
As so often, the web may be a bit different, but there’s nothing that *new* here.
by JCM | 16 Aug, 2014 |
Nothing new, but this is worth a read on web writing and hate-reading – that old trick of being as controversial as possible in order to get an extreme response, purely because extremes get more attention, and in a pageview-driven business model, controversy is seen as good purely because, based on the metrics, it’s the controversial stuff that’s driving engagement.
This infantile attitude of provocation to get attention is increasingly being combined with ream upon ream of cheap content, because the more content you’ve got, the more potential PVs you can attract. We end up with the most depressing (and false) equation of online publishing:
Cheap content + Controversy = Clicks = Cash
It’s an attitude that’s lazy *and* massively short-termist in thinking – over the long term, quality can and should trump quantity. But even if it doesn’t, cheap, crappy content is a turn-off for audiences. The more sites that start to rely on hastily-produced, poorly-checked copy, or lazy semi-plagiarisms of things that desperate teams of poorly-paid hacks with deadlines and quotas to hit have found elsewhere, the less distinctive sites get, and the fewer returning visitors you’ll get. As that linked article puts it:
“With a business model based on a ton of cheap content, Web publishers can rely too heavily on acid-reflux-style aggregation, in which young writers destroy the savor of interesting stories and an interesting world by constantly regurgitating the news with added bile.”
There’s also an interesting point made from John Waters in the Irish Times (now behind a paywall), on the impact of comment sections under online articles: “Because everything written specifically for online consumption is written in the expectation of addressing a hostile community, the writing process demands, as a prerequisite, either a defensive or antagonistic demeanor.”
Having learned my online publishing trade in the realm of message boards, chatrooms and blogs, I’m incredibly aware of the vast levels of bile that exist in comment sections. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With careful community management, it’s perfectly possible to build online communities that are supportive, friendly, and constructive, rather than the supposed default of objectionable and offensive. Check out the likes of b3ta, imgur and Metafilter for some prime examples of sites with vast *positive* communities of commenters. And then contrast those with the comments sections of pretty much any national newspaper site – packed with trolls and maniacs.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
by JCM | 6 Jul, 2014 |
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 |
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 |
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 | 22 Jun, 2014 |
Upworthy have released the code they use to track user engagement, with a nice bit of methodology explaining what they’re tracking and why they care:
“In the age of ever-present social media, our collective attentions have never been spread thinner. According to Facebook, each user has the potential to be served 1,500 stories in their newsfeed each time. For a heavy user, that number could be as much as 15,000. In this climate, how do you get people to pay attention? And, more importantly, how do you know they’re actually engaged?
“Clicks and pageviews, long the industry standards, are drastically ill-equipped for the job. Even the share isn’t a surefire measure that the user has spent any time engaging with the content itself. It’s in everyone’s interest — from publishers to readers to advertisers — to move to a metric that more fully measures attention spent consuming content. In other words, the best way to answer the question is to measure what happens between the click and the share. Enter Attention Minutes.”
by JCM | 15 Jun, 2014 |
“Know your enemy” – the first rule of everything competitive. But we’re mostly doing it wrong – speaking with my MSN hat on, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of assuming that our main competition is Yahoo, Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post, and base strategy on what they are/aren’t doing to get ahead of the competition.
But if you’re in publishing, no matter what kind, your competition isn’t other publishers – it’s anything and everything that competes for your audience’s time and attention. And this is only getting more obvious for anyone in the online world now that mobile is one of the key entrypoints for news.
What do we use mobile phones for? Communication, obviously. Information, naturally. But mostly? Proscrastination. Have a few minutes to kill waiting for a bus, for someone to turn up for a meeting, for the line and the checkout to run down, and what are we all doing? Pissing about on our phones. Some read ebooks, some play games, some do work, some watch videos, some learn a language, some catch up on the news and lastest gossip, look for lifestyle tips, browse recipes, check holiday destinations – all the other stuff that broad-catchment websites like the one I work on offer up to attract readers.
Even news itself is as much about wasting time as it is about getting information – because, let’s face it, most news doesn’t directly affect most people. Even the most horrific news – terrorist attacks, mass shootings, kidnappings, wars and natural disasters – only directly affect the tiniest fraction of our audiences. They are effectively entertainment to readers – macabre entertainment, perhaps, but entertainment nonetheless. Diversions from their daily lives. Time-wasters.
It’s obvious once you realise it, but it still seems strange to hear the managing editor of the Financial Times name Candy Crush as the paper’s main competitor.
So we as news publishers need to think about how we make *our* product the most attractive time-waster:
– Is it snackable enough?
– Is it engaging enough?
– Will it keep me coming back for another hit like those addictive game apps?
– Do I get any rewards or points or prizes?
– Does it give me things I can share with my friends to show off or entertain them?
– Is it respectable enough that I wouldn’t mind the people behind me on the bus seeing what I’m looking at?
– Is it always fresh?
– Does it have depth to dig deeper if I want to, or does it simply finish and leave me with nothing to do?
– How long will it entertain me for?
These questions are the same for games as they are for media. As everyone carries on catching up with the concept of mobile first, we need to keep reminding ourselves that the questions are the same no matter what kind of mobile product you’re creating.
by JCM | 14 Jun, 2014 |
Fascinating, thought-provoking piece – another of those ones you come away from thinking “damn, that’s so obvious – why didn’t I make the connection before?” A few highlights:
Quality doesn’t mean popularity:
every single newspaper that I talk with. They are saying the same thing, which is that their journalistic work is top of the line and amazing. The problem is ‘only’ with the secondary thing of how it is presented to the reader.
And we have been hearing this for the past five to ten years, and yet the problem still remains. There is a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry that, just maybe, part of the problem is also the journalism itself.
Instead, they move the problem out of the editorial room, and into separate and isolated ‘innovation teams’… who are then charged with coming up with ideas for how to reformat their existing journalistic product in a digital way.
But let me ask you this. If The NYT is ‘winning at journalism‘, why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers?
If its product is ‘the world’s best journalism‘, why does it have a problem growing its audience?
Newspapers (and all-in-one-place sites) are an outdated concept:
No matter how hard they try, supermarkets with a mass-market/low-relevancy appeal will never appear on a list of the most ‘engaging brands’, or on list of brands that people love.
And this is the essence of the trouble newspapers are facing today. It’s not that we now live in a digital world, and that we are behaving in a different way. It’s that your editorial focus is to be the supermarket of news.
The New York Times is publishing 300 new articles every single day, and in their Innovation Report they discuss how to surface even more from their archives. This is the Walmart business model.
The problem with this model is that supermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do. That’s why we go to supermarkets. In the physical world, visiting 40 different stores just to get your groceries would take forever, so we prefer to only go to one place, the supermarket, where we can get everything… even if most of the other products there aren’t what we need.
It’s the same with how print newspapers used to work. We needed this one place to go because it was too hard to get news from multiple sources.
But on the internet, we have solved this problem. You can follow as many sources as you want, and it’s as easy to visit 1000 different sites as it is to just visit one. Everything is just one click away. In fact, that’s how people use social media. It’s all about the links.
One of clearest examples of this is how Washington Post is absolutely failing to engage people on YouTube. Every single day, they are posting a bunch of news videos about random things. Each video is well made (great production quality), but there is no editorial focus.
The result is this:
Here we have a large US newspaper that is barely reaching any people when it uploads a video to YouTube. And it’s not that the videos are uninteresting. There is one about iPhone cases that you can buy at the 9/11 museum (and the controversy of that), with only 687 views. There is a motivational speech (usually a popular thing to post on YouTube), with only 819 views. We have social tactics, like “5 awkward political fundraising moments”, with only 101 views.
Then we have a video by the super-popular George Takei that we all know from Star Trek. This is a person with millions of fans, but his video on Washington Post only attracted 844 views… in two weeks! If this had been posted by any Star Trek focused channel, this very same video would have reached 50,000 views, easy!
What the Washington Post is doing can only be described as a complete and total failure. It cannot get any worse than this.
