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Join us in the Poynter On Media
News Update.
| Can Informal, Explanatory Videos Increase Engagement on News Sites? |
| When I look up a word on Merriam-Webster OnLine, I'm usually in a hurry. But I've stumbled across something that could get me to stick around longer.
A few months ago, I noticed a video player labeled "Ask the Editor" in the top right corner of the site. It seemed interesting, but not enough to slow me down, until I noticed one day that the video was entitled "Slang." I'm always interested in slang -- who isn't? -- so I watched it.
The video is what you'd expect: An editor explains why the dictionary includes slang. Interesting enough, if you're into words.
But in the process, the editor explains how the people at Merriam-Webster approach their work. She describes how she horrified someone by saying that she was in the process of defining the word "props" -- gasp! She goes on to say that the dictionary should reflect how language is used and offers examples of common words that once were lexicographical stepchildren.
That video changed a transactional visit into an exploratory one. At first, I was like the person who comes to a news site through Google, spending just seconds on a page as I looked for a piece of information. When I clicked on the video, I became the person who thinks, "This looks interesting. Let's see what it is." (I also became captive to a 15-second pre-roll ad.)
My curiosity now piqued, I found all the Merriam-Webster videos (there are just a few) and watched one about Michael Jackson. In that one, an editor describes how you could track news of the superstar's death by the words people searched for on the site. When the news first broke, the most popular words were "stricken" and "resuscitate"; later, it was "emaciated."
News organizations have tried in various ways to educate people about how they do their work. Top editors write columns providing the back story about major news. Ombudsmen inquire on behalf of readers and write their own columns. Sometimes, editorials explain coverage decisions. Sometimes reporters use audio or video to explain how they reported a particular story.
What drew me to Merriam-Webster's videos was the placement -- near content that I sought out -- and the format -- quick, one-to-one, instructional and informal. There are plenty of instructional videos out there, but I wouldn't expect to see them on an online dictionary. Or a news site.
I could see how a news org could use such videos to address people directly and informally and pull back the curtain on its journalism. Editors and reporters could describe general tactics (why some stories are covered and others aren't) and explain key terms in the news (preferably, a term in the story on that page). Or they could tell people what their search terms say about what they're most interested in. (News sites already can capture such information.)
Such videos would fit with other trends in media literacy and explanatory journalism. YouTube features how-to videos in its Reporters' Center. Many have praised the creative, straightforward way that the radio program "This American Life" broke down the financial crisis in "The Giant Pool of Money." Jay Rosen has been promoting a new way of looking at explanatory journalism with a site called ExplainThis.org, which would enlist journalists to answer questions about the news. And let's not forget Slate's Explainer column.
All sites, news and otherwise, are on a quest to get visitors who arrive via search to see something they find interesting and stick around. Maybe we should speak directly to them.
03/09/2010
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| Gearing Up to Build an iPad App? Consider a Mobile Web App First |
| The iPad is being heralded as both a savior and enslaver for newspapers. It may finally provide the kind of futuristic, multimedia newspaper experience so often depicted in sci-fi. Unfortunately, playing with Apple carries heavy restrictions on what code can be used to build native applications, a significant revenue split, and serious, perhaps capricious, content restrictions.
For most news companies, getting a native app on the iPad will mean:
- Hiring an outside firm to do the application development because nobody in-house works in the Objective-C language used on Apple devices
- Giving away 30 percent of revenue
- Not knowing if your application will be approved or approved and later removed
- Ignoring the majority of smart phone (BlackBerry) owners
There is another way: Use the people and skills within the newsroom to build Web apps that mimic the look and functionality of native applications.
It depends on the platform, but you can deliver a experience comparable to native code by using a Web app paradigm and relying on HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the front end. The big difference is that the Web app will not be able to access the device's hardware the same way a native app can. But with HTML5, Web apps can store data, share content via social networks and work offline similar to native apps.
If you build a Web app, the fundamental code stays the same across all devices, and it is relatively easy to customize the design and UI to mimic native applications.
"You have a single codebase. You can deploy across all those platforms reasonably well without going through any approval process," said Jonathan Stark, a mobile and Web application consultant who (literally) wrote the book on building iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
A perfect example is Googles decision to release Google Voice as a Web app. When Apple would not approve a native Voice app, Google built one with HTML5 and released it outside the App Store. A user can visit the page via the iPhones Safari browser and bookmark the site to the home screen. From there, the user can launch the app from a cute icon that looks native and works very similar to a native app.
There is no compiling. It's just a Web site -- a Web site that can reach more users on more platforms, more easily, than a native app. "Do you want to have this beautiful [native] app that will only be on the iPad, or do you want to have [a Web] app that works really well on all of these different platforms?" Stark asked.
Fortunately, there are some interesting tools that can help you code for both worlds. PhoneGap is an open-source toolkit that allows developers to build Web apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and package them as native apps for specific devices. PhoneGap provides a similar wrapping process for BlackBerry and Android. (Palms webOS already uses HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and allows access to device hardware.)
PhoneGap's packaging process allows the native app to tap into device hardware (which is not accessible via a straight Web app) and be sold in the App Store.
You can release the Web app while you're waiting for Apple to approve the native app. The two versions share 90 percent of the same codebase; the additional code in native apps enable access to device hardware like accelerometers and cameras.
"You can put the app in the App Store, maybe sell it in the App Store for premium customers or people who want to have those extra warm and fuzzy features, and then maybe release it for free as a Web app," Stark said.
With this approach, the development team can make quick changes to the Web app and then push a bunch of changes through the App Store approval process in a single update. If you are building a native app, even a small change like a typo might require another App Store approval.
A common misconception is that only native apps will give users an offline experience. Not true.
HTML5 enables a Web app to work offline through a combination of a local database and storing of static resources such as images, CSS and JavaScript. Although the HTML5 spec wont reach full recommendation by the W3C for at least a decade, that hasnt stopped the big browsers from implementing most of the core features. The built-in mobile Web browsers for Apple and Android support HTML5 today.
And CSS3 enables transitions and animations that can be used to mimic the Apple-esque slides, spins and swipes.
No doubt, you will be able to deliver the best experience by using native code, but the costs and risks can be high. Web apps are a compelling alternative, providing much of the functionality and tapping into the skills newsroom developers already use.
03/08/2010
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| News Orgs Challenged in Covering Live Events Like Health Care Summit with Immediacy and Depth |
| A Flickr image of a dual-screen setup at a Superbowl party this year shows the game on the big screen and a second screen for the Twitter conversation. The headline: "This is the future."
Now, let's look at the present: online media coverage of President Obama's health care summit last week. Many news sites streamed live video of the summit, and some created innovative presentations that added value and context and engaged audience via social networking.
Here's what I saw as I surfed around some sites covering the live event: Yes, video quality and the online social space have come a long way since the '90s, when I cobbled together tiny RealMedia G2 streams and Java chat appliances.
Still, news orgs find it a challenge to present live events in a way that fulfills the Internet's potential of providing the immediacy of broadcast, with the depth of print.
Many sites are trying to improve user experience for live hybrid interactive video events, but the organizations that covered the health care summit most creatively were not the ones with the biggest budgets, largest audiences and deepest technology departments. Independent new media, using embeddable tools and widgets that anyone could grab, provided context and gave voice to their audience.
Broadcast media: still talking
The big broadcasters and cable news networks all had live video streams on their sites, and most went about it as business as usual.
ABC offered the stream in its usual player, with no bells and whistles and no interactivity. It was all lean-back viewing on the lean-forward platform.
CNN.com used its standard video player. The pop-out player was linked from the left rail of the front page, next to a rotating center main story. The CNN live player page linked out to the @cnnlive Twitter account.
But on a separate page, CNN's iReport had a health care "assignment" that gathered at least a hundred user-generated video contributions by midafternoon:
Fox News also linked to its player on the home page (which on first launch tries to get you to install a desktop app as it offers the option to stream live in the browser). Fox News' coverage was split among several pages, including one that offered a Demand Media-embedded chatroom where the FOX community vented together. The site also offered a casual level of quick opinion interactivity with a nonscientific poll.
Msnbc.com also ran the stream in its usual rainbow curtain player, but overlaid the left rail navigation with a Twitter widget. Of the broadcast nets, msnbc.com was the only one to prominently tap into the social media zeitgeist as the live event was happening, offering users a single place to watch the event and the conversation about it.
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Msnbc.com paired its live stream with a Twitter widget to show what people were talking about. |
Big media and broadcasters can't give lip service to social media and focus on business as usual because their audiences aren't even listening with half an ear anymore. Instead, they're increasingly talking amongst themselves as the tools for conversation and interaction become commonplace and easier to use. (And that audience is having a conversation that may be painful for traditional news directors and producers to hear.)
Legacy media weighs in with depth, but no conversation
The New York Times, the NewsHour and NPR all live blogged the event, driving the coverage from the journalist/expert-out perspective. Topped by the video player, the NewsHour blog showcased a roster of heavy hitters weighing in with commentary, interspersed among the straight-shooting news updates.
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The NewsHour featured commentary by heavy hitters below its video player. |
NPR used the CoveritLive tool embedded on its Shots blog, without the video stream.
The New York Times used its Prescriptions blog to cover the event. The video player was placed at the top of the page, but readers of the excellent commentary and coverage couldn't see it as they scrolled down to read. Clicking on the context and background took the user away from the video.
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The Times offered excellent commentary, but to read it, users had to scroll away from the video player, visible at the top of this image. |
The scroll is one of the user-experience killers of presentations that blend video and text. It has vexed news sites for years -- and it plagues multimedia storytelling in templated content management systems. People read faster than the video and have to scroll away from watching.
Some have argued that it is OK to keep listening as they read down, but how does that affect lower-third or interstitial advertising opportunities available to streamers? While the pop-out player has kicked around (and been kicked around for years), it does allow readers to scroll and surf while watching -- even though it does not offer an integrated user experience.
With professional design staff at pro media shops, one can hope we'll finally get a decent floating player that moves as we scroll and surf around. This is another one of those reasons why journalists should design and code and not outsource development. We must advance the user experience as an integral part of effective storytelling.
New media offers streaming, conversation and context
The Huffington Post took the vox populi approach, surrounding a video player with three Twitter List widgets: one on the left that pulled tweets about health care and two on the bottom, one for conservatives and the other for liberals. The conversation flowed around the live video of the summit in an engaging and successful presentation, fitting for the site's socially networked audience that is very generous with comments.
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The Huffington Post focused on the conversation surrounding the event. Two more Twitter widgets like the one on the left were placed below the video player. Each widget pulled different types of content from the conversation. |
But it was interesting that as I was watching their page, I was also monitoring the Media Consortium meeting hashtag on TweetDeck client, where Aron Pilhofer (@pilhofer) editor of newsroom interactive technologies for The New York Times, was being quoted as saying the primary job of journalism is filtering.
How do we filter the ocean of data that is produced in commenting and live discussion? The challenge is to create a user experiences that allow people to peel back layers of the onion instead of drinking from a firehose, to mix metaphors.
The best job of doing this with the health care summit, in my opinion, was done by the Sunlight Foundation. (I'm not alone in thinking this.) Even though Sunlight had video stream issues (eventually switching to NBC from the public White House feed), it supplied the best real-time context from its authorities and offered a window into the Twitterverse with a simple widget. Below the video, Sunlight used CoveritLive to provide running analysis of the summit, linking out and conversing with chatters.
I was impressed with the info box to the right of the video player that instantly showed the lobbying money and relationships of each lawmaker, and even the president, as they appeared onscreen.
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Sunlight offered different types of context in real-time, including a widget displaying political donors (upper right), a live blog with commentary and analysis (lower left) and a Twitter widget that pulled out tweets with certain hashtags. |
Of course, being the transparent organization it is, Sunlight has shared a "how we did it" post describing how they built their interface. Technically, the page is nothing fancy and it didn't require any special programming. CoveritLive, the Twitter widget and even the video feed are all simple, embedded elements that anyone with minimal Web skills could cobble together.
But the immediate depth and context provided by Sunlight's investigative journalists should be noted by big news companies, and so should the audience reaction to it, as Sunlight noted on its blog: about 43,000 viewers, 1,300 tweets linking to the presentation, 2,800 replays of the live blog.
Maybe the gross viewership isn't large enough to challenge a cable or broadcast news operation, but the percentage of viewers who engaged and participated -- nearly a quarter -- says a great deal.
The takeaway: User experience is key to this conversational viewing pattern and to keeping it productive and valuable to users. If media providers do not innovate how they present these events, upstarts will build their own media consumption and conversation platforms.
Though Sunlight needed NBC's feed this time, direct feeds from sources will keep improving. And these distributed coverage services -- created by Internet companies, not media companies -- will increasingly threaten mainstream media audience share.
03/04/2010
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| 'Hybrid' Models the Rage Among Execs at paidContent Conference |
| If there's one thing media bigwigs agreed on in hours of discussion at the paidContent conference in New York on Friday, it's that to make a profit from media you shouldn't ask whether or not to charge for it. Instead you should ask when to charge and when not to, and you should consider e-commerce, events, apps and anything else that can add to your revenue stream.
Devin Wenig, CEO of Thomson Reuters' Markets Division, summed up the sentiment when he told an interviewer on stage that Reuters.com, now ad-supported, will in the coming months include a mix of advertising and paid services, "just like, I suspect, just about everyone you're going to talk to for the next day."
He was just about right. Advertising execs, the publisher of The New York Times, entrepreneurs, journalists and many others talked about mixed, or "hybrid," revenue streams. They seemed eager to point out all the different ways they're earning money through unconventional means.
KC Estenson, CNN.com senior vice president and general manager, noted that CNN's iPhone app costs $1.99. (The app is ranked 66th in the iTunes store as of this writing.) The app itself has a second revenue stream: It carries ads, which has spurred some complaints among customers in the iTunes store.
New York Times Company publisher and CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr., in a discussion about the company's plan to limit free access to its online content beginning next year, noted how much money the Times has made selling wine through its wine club and by selling "distance learning" with a partner company. "We have permission from many New York Times loyalists to do many things," Sulzberger said. Interviewer Staci Kramer of paidContent noted that she paid for an app that lets her do the Times' crossword puzzles on her phone.
An audience member at the Times session said the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper made some 20 percent of its online revenue from e-commerce. Jeff Price, president and publisher of Sporting News, announced that in April, the company would start charging $2.99 per month for content "across all devices."
And an executive from the Financial Times said money earned from advertising on FT.com increased after the site went to a metered model, charging for access after a user looks at a certain number of stories in a month. (I have seen cases in which limiting access to a page has allowed publishers to charge higher rate for ads because the audience was considered more "qualified" and less random.)
"It is all about hybrid models," said Amanda Richman, executive vice president and digital managing director of media buying agency MediaVest USA. "Not one vs. the other, but multiple streams, and what works, based on audience insights and research."
Finally coming around
I found it gratifying to see media execs talking this way, though surprising that it took them so long to get here.
The mixed model has been the rule in business-to-business media for decades. A publisher attracts a loyal customer base in a targeted niche and services them in several ways, continually gathering information on customers and constantly tweaking the mix of subscriptions, events, publications, databases, advertising, reference books and anything else.
This can work beautifully:
- The publisher becomes less beholden to advertisers and to swings in the ad market and economy.
- Subscription revenues tend to be more consistent through downturns.
- Income from subscriptions and events is realized before one has to deliver the goods. The publisher can use the money to finance ventures and avoids having to raise capital or spend money getting advertisers to pay on time.
- And the publisher can use the data willingly provided by customers to further cement, advertise to and "upsell" a loyal following. Through it all, customers give feedback that leads to new products and services and can create still more revenue streams.
Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online (which I wrote about here), argued that all news and information companies these days need to behave like they're in the B2B market -- a field in which he has a lot of experience as the founder of American Lawyer magazine.
"Online, everybody is, in effect, a trade publisher," Brill said in response to a question from Poynter's Bill Mitchell. "They have to be tightly focused on what [their community] would see as valuable. I'm sure we have 1,000 people who in this room who would -- God forbid we had to pay for Poynter Online -- would pay for it. Those people would find value in that."
As to the right mix for your individual publication, TV show, movie, blog network, social media presence or whatever else you may produce, it depends on what you do and what your community is telling you. "It's the traditional angst and creative process," Brill said, "followed by research and everything else that determines what everyone does."
Not, of course, that it's easy or that success is guaranteed. The executives at the conference also seemed unified in agreeing that there are multiple avenues to revenue.
They also agreed that revenue does not necessarily equal profit, or that all these offshoot streams can sustain the business today. But they said it's crucial to keep trying to get it right and expressed hope they would find ways to make it work.
"There is no magic formula," Estenson said. "If there were, we'd all do the same things and be rich."
02/22/2010
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| 5 Strategies to Lower Your Site's Bounce Rate |
| There are lots of ways to draw users to news sites. The trick is figuring out how to keep them engaged enough to stay on your site once they land there.
Some news sites, including Forbes.com, The Huffington Post and DailyMe, have developed strategies to increase engagement and decrease bounce rates -- a metric used to describe the percentage of single-page site visits, often traffic referred by search engines.
Here are a few examples of their strategies, along with some additional tips that could help keep people on your site. I hope you'll share your ideas, too.
Collect data about what people are looking at on your site and show them more content like it. The folks at DailyMe, a site that provides a roundup of the day's news from various media outlets, has created a new technology called Newstogram.
The cookie-based technology, which is being marketed to various news organizations, does a metadata analysis to identify keywords, names, places and other relevant information in the stories that users read. Based on the results, the technology finds stories that a user is likely to be interested in. Links to these stories appear in a module that news organizations can embed on their sites. The technology can also tell when a person already has read a particular story, so it offers new content.
Neil Budde, president and chief product officer of DailyMe, said that when DailyMe tested Newstogram on its own site using a personalized headline display versus a default set of top headlines, the personalized headlines had 25 to 35 percent more click-throughs. The Boston Globe and The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., are testing the module, he said, and others have expressed interest in the analytics it provides.
"The reason that we think this is important is that basically the game online is a matter of real estate," Budde said. "You have all these people who come once, twice, to visit news sites and don't look at them much. How do you get them to look more and come back to your site? Offering them a more personalized, relevant experience will help you."
Linking within stories to your own related content is another way to help lower your site's bounce rate. (Bounce rates vary from site to site, though Anil Batra, a Web analytics consultant, has suggested that the average for news sites is about 55 percent.)
"I think the best way to prompt people to click through into other sections of the site is to have highly relevant, contextual links within a story," said Eric Ulken, a former editor of interactive technology at the Los Angeles Times who has studied Web analytics. "I'm not talking about links to topic pages, but actually human-curated links in stories to previous stories on certain topics."
TechCrunch, he said, does a particularly good job of promoting "stickiness," or a reason for people to stay on your site. In this recent TechCrunch piece about Facebook, for instance, there is a link to another TechCrunch story in nearly every paragraph.
Link to relevant content at the bottom of a post. Many news sites place links to their "most e-mailed" or "most blogged" stories on one side of their pages. But placing relevant content or links to most e-mailed stories at the bottom of a story may be a more effective way to expose content to readers, said Ulken, who's now a visiting professor in the graduate school of journalism at the University of British Columbia.
He noted that the Los Angeles Times used this strategy while he was there and found it to be effective. "We were focused on the bottom of the story because it was clear that's where people were ending up and then not finding anything and leaving," Ulken said. "We figured if they'd gotten to the point where they were at the bottom of the story, they were at least somewhat engaged."
Mashable does this well. At the bottom of its recent "8 iPhone Apps for the Perfect Valentine's Day" story, for instance, there are links to six other Mashable stories about iPhone apps.
Improve your headlines so that humans and search engines find what they're looking for. Often, a high bounce rate means that people found content on your site via search, but it wasn't really what they wanted. So they hit the "back" button and kept looking.
Ulken said a rise in inbound traffic from search engines and general-interest news sites such as the Drudge Report tended to increase the bounce rate at LATimes.com because casual visitors from these sites were less likely to be engaged in the content. Visits that originate through links in social networks or the home page tend to be stickier, bringing down the bounce rate.
You can attract people to your site and increase the likelihood that they'll stay there by making sure your headlines are both SEO-friendly (so that search engines find those pages) and that they describe the content well (so people read it).
The Huffington Post, Ulken said, seems to do a good job of this. The site uses A/B testing on some of its headlines, offering users two versions and seeing which one gets the most clicks. Social Media Today reported that the Huffington Post's chief technology officer, Paul Berry, said the constant tweaking of headlines has improved the site's bounce rate.
Mario Ruiz, vice president of media relations at The Huffington Post, said employees don't discuss specific strategies like this, but he noted, "Finding ways to surface related content near stories has been a very important part of the bounce rate picture for us. A key part of the process is to test features using both stats and user feedback to make decisions."
Use the search terms that bring people to your site to mine for additional relevant content. When people end up on Forbes.com after searching for something on Google, they see a "Welcome Google User" overlay at the top of the Forbes.com article page. The box contains links to two Forbes.com stories that are related to the terms the person searched for, as well as a link to "all related stories."
The feature, which has been used since January 2008, picks up the user's search query from the referring URL. The query is passed into Autonomy, Forbes.com's internal search engine, which generates additional results, explained Jeff Bauer, product and creative director for Forbes.com. Bauer would not give specifics about the site's traffic, but said the fact that the search overlay is still in use after more than two years is a good indication that it's working.
Forbes.com also uses its internal search engine to generate its "Related Stories" feature. Bauer said he's found that providing people with related content tends to yield better results than directing them to "what people also read" features.
"We know that we get a lot of users from the search engines, so we wanted to help make their search experience better when they get here," Bauer said. "Since they're in the search mode already, they can continue with that on our site. ... By delivering a better experience to that segment of users, they'll come back more and they'll dig more deeply into your Web site."
What strategies does your site use to lower its bounce rate?
02/22/2010
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| Thoora Shows How Publishers Can Use Real-Time Audience Data for Editorial Decisions |
| To the list of companies that say they measure audience sentiment to help publishers' editorial judgment, add the name Thoora.
The Toronto-based startup promises to gauge how well individual news stories are doing by analyzing and calibrating real-time data from blogs, mainstream news sources and Twitter. Thoora's software uses more than 100 attributes to determine not only the most popular content but also the highest quality, using measures such grammar and spelling and the authority of sites that link to the content.
The company said the data could be used to figure out, for example, where to position an article on a page (aiding internal data from Web logs and analytics), how to apportion resources to cover a developing story or even how to follow up on offshoots that you might not have considered. It could help a news organization determine where its individual story ranks against competitors covering the same thing.
CEO Mike Lee said this is the first time that a tool has approached audience sentiment for news at the story level rather than the topic level. For example, after Serena Williams lashed out at a line judge at the U.S. Open, Thoora spotted a tennis pro in upstate New York writing quality stories about tennis rules -- stories that ranked in quality and authority with any of the larger news services and covered the topic in a way they hadn't.
"We notice there are disparities between how specific stories are dealt with, interpreted and continue to drive reaction and conversation, where it may have dropped out of the news cycle itself," Lee said. Thoora could see that after President Obama mentioned funding of high-speed rail in his State of the Union speech, conversation persisted awhile after traditional news coverage had trailed off.
Thoora, chosen last September as one of the TechCrunch 50, is part of a growing trend of attempts to measure audience sentiment, though Lee said his company is the only one that focuses strictly on news. Demand Media has gotten a lot of coverage for using algorithms to gauge popular search terms and matching them with evergreen stories such as "how to" articles. AOL is basing a large part of its editorial strategy on a demand algorithm for its dozens of sites. Aggregators like DayLife are pushing news stories to the fore based on measures of what's most popular or important.
But, Lee said, many aggregators push to the top whichever stories are about the most popular and current topics, using recency and volume as a proxy for what is valuable and worthy of attention. "We hope to not just be a quantity aggregator but to actually drive quality to the surface," Lee said.
At the recent OnMedia conference in New York, Thoora showed off Web-based charts and graphs representing its real-time data. Lee said Thoora uses subject-matter experts to vet and hone its computer selections, much as the site Pandora does with its Music Genome Project to group songs with similar characteristics.
Thoora does not yet have any clients, but Lee, a co-founder of the company, said it is in talks with a major Canadian news organization and a Canadian sports publisher. After the TechCrunch 50 presentation, Lee said, the firm got many publisher inquiries and decided to position itself as an enterprise solution, offering data to publishers rather than focusing primarily on the consumer news aggregation site at Thoora.com.
The consumer site allows people to browse stories based on similar algorithms. Lee says the company may at some point release its APIs or a free version of its platform to enable people to input their stories and see how they match up against others.
While it's impossible to say if Thoora, which is backed in part by the Canadian publisher Rogers, will succeed, I believe that editors and publishers need to be increasingly comfortable with using all the data at their disposal to make editorial and business decisions.
Journalists are finding sources and story ideas through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps their editors can use data from those networks and others to help decide whether and how to position a story on a home page, even as Web analytics may indicate a different action based largely on page views.
To those in the industry who would complain that the ever-shifting sentiment of the crowd is replacing editorial judgment, I would say they should look at these as an adjunct to our judgment. The better we can learn to use the data, the more we enhance our input into decision-making.
News organizations that are in a fight for their lives are going to have to use every tool to attract and hold audiences that are enticed -- via their own RSS readers, friends' recommendations via social networks and guidance from aggregators like Google News -- to rely on something other than editors' picks.
No longer do geographic or distribution boundaries allow news organizations to offer the same story as everyone else and expect users to remain loyal. In another era, "people could not pick up a Denver Post so easily" if they weren't in the Denver area, Lee said.
"Now you have to spend a lot of time thinking of how different you are," he said, "and you have to communicate to your customers why they should come to you rather than XYZ news outlet or feed. But it's impossible to do that unless you start to understand the underlying data of how you are measured and used relative to others."
Or put it this way: Editors and publishers must figure out how to provide something for their products that major consumer brands have had to grapple with for years: differentiation. How are my automobiles, my sodas, my pairs of pants -- or my individual news stories -- any different, better and more satisfying than anyone else's?
02/12/2010
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| Creeping Costs of Connectivity Could Confound Pay Wall Strategies |
| How much media could you buy for $1,189? That's the first-year cost to own the top-of-line 3G iPad before buying any content to view on it.
That's 60 books or DVDs (at an average of $20 apiece), 119 movie tickets ($10), 238 magazines at the newsstand ($5 apiece), or 24 AAA games for the Xbox 360 or a similar console (at an average of $50 apiece). Sure, you could economize by going for the lowest model at $499 with just Wi-Fi, or by buying the $15-a-month data plan, but wouldn't it be nicer if you could simply tether your iPhone data connection and get more value for that expensive service?
With each new device, and each new connection to the grid, the consumers are coming to the marketplace with less money in their pocket, because the cost of simply being on the grid has skyrocketed in the past 10 years. This should be a concern for all content publishers, whether The New York Times, MediaNews or any one of thousands of local news operations, that think each new device is a silver bullet that will make a magic pay wall strategy work.
We all know a lot has changed since the '90s, as Howard Kurtz documented in a year-ender on the evolution of media in the "aughts." Angry Journalists are coming to grips with a new media environment and are bantering about business models.
But there is one change over the past decade that I haven't seen anyone address adequately: Personal and household connectivity charges have quietly and steadily increased by as much as 4.3 times over the past 10 years. There is one notable exception to this lack of reporting: those who have noted the costs of the iPhone to consumers and profits for the players.) And I think this has a major impact on any chance of success for paid content strategy.
The New York Times recently picked up on the high cost of data and entertainment subscriptions. Here's my own personal accounting: In 1999, I paid $19.99 a month for dial-up Internet access, about the same for a land line, and my analog cell phone -- though picked up by my employer -- cost $19.99 a month. My extended analog cable package was $12.95.
Flash forward to 2010. My high-speed home connection is valued at $54.99 a month, my land line is priced at $39.99 a month, my extended digital cable package is $89.99 (not including premium channels) and my cell phone, with an unlimited data cell phone and the lowest available voice package, is a whopping $129 (though I pay a bundled rate, not the sticker prices).
The monthly connectivity charge in 1999: $72.92. In 2010, the comparable service level now is priced at $313.97, an increase of about 430 percent.
Yes, I am a hypercommunicator and an early adopter, but my story is not at all unique. A GigaOM report puts the average cost of the networked household now at $2,942 a year. That's a pretty big chunk of the median U.S. household income of $50,233 in 2007.
Granted, since 1999 our data and communications services have improved greatly, with widespread broadband penetration and mobile functionality. But the basic cost for a consumer to be connected -- the customer's barrier to entry -- is a major consideration for an organization considering a pay wall or membership plan for its content.
Ten years ago, I offset the high cost of long-distance calls (billed by the minute) by communicating with faraway friends via the Internet. Today, how much media could I buy with $240 a month? That's a lot of books, movies, CDs, MP3s, newspapers, magazines and iPad apps, folks.
I asked TechTalk columnist Michael Berman for his thoughts on this: "Consumers are already demanding a lot more for their hard-earned bucks by dropping additional services they don't need," he told me via e-mail. "We're especially seeing this in the so-called smart phone category, where providers are forcing folks to purchase data plans for $30 or $40 extra per month. This is forcing the average consumer to rethink whether he really needs that BlackBerry, iPhone or Droid."
User surveys show that most people don't want to pay for news online. (It's not really a surprise that people want something for free.) But people will pay for service.
They paid for delivery of the newspaper or a magazine. They paid for the convenience and freedom of buying a single copy at the newsstand. They paid for better television reception when cable emerged. They paid for faster Internet performance when broadband was introduced. They paid for more functionality with smart phones. But they only pay for content when it is exclusive and of a certain quality.
Steve Safran, editor of LostRemote.com and hyperlocal media expert at AR&D, told me that the disconnect between service and content signals big trouble for media companies who are failing to connect the connectivity dots.
"The expectation that people will pay for The New York Times online is shortsighted and looks at the concept of local news the wrong way. People are spending plenty for connectivity," he said. "Yes, they'll pay a little more for a premium brand of entertainment, but this is news. The New York Times plan is akin to local newscast deciding it wants to charge me each time I watch it on cable. If anything, its play should be in the mobile and hyperlocal spaces, where business models are still evolving."
Have no doubt, the mobile marketplace is huge. Some analysts expect that mobile data revenues will surpass $1 trillion by 2013, and the next 10 years are going see a lot of changes. Savvy insiders knew the value and potential of the the mobile app marketplace, but many more have seen the light after the outpouring of SMS donations for Haiti. And it has been shown that broadband expands local economies, which is critical for hyperlocal startups and Main Street mom-and-pops.
Since wages have struggled to keep up with the cost of living and we have been financing lifestyles on consumer debt for years, we must recognize that consumers consider value of service as the critical component in the content equation. If they are paying connectors for service, they will expect savings elsewhere. But connectivity companies are fighting tooth and nail to stop efforts like Broadband for America that would bring consumers to the digital marketplace at a lower or no cost, with more money in their pockets for product.
The primary mission of journalism is to empower the public. As Bill Moyers -- who for the past decade has been the champion of independent journalism and David to the Golliath of corporate media and telco providers cozying up with government -- retires, we need to fend for ourselves and remain ever vigilant to the truth.
Increasing numbers of citizen journalists, both as passionate storytellers and skeptical readers, offer great promise to play an important role in the future of news and newsgathering. But only as long as they can afford to be on the platform -- both as consumers and creators.
Maybe those overall cost increase numbers are hard to find because the companies who profit from them don't want us to realize just how deep into our pockets we've gone in the past decade just to get on the grid and stay there?
How interesting that we started the decade with concerns about the digital divide, and we end them with few even considering the critical importance of the Net neutrality debate or the creeping costs of consumer connectivity that create an even wider gulf of haves and have-nots -- or informed and uninformed -- and take money off the table for content creators everywhere.
Connectivity providers know what side they're on. Do the people? And as we watch mergers and acquisitions like Comcast and NBC, do we really know where the news media business needs to be?
02/11/2010
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| What Journalists Need to Know About Google Buzz |
| Google announced its new social media product, Buzz, on Tuesday. While still in the early stages of development, Buzz marries many tools Google has created over the years and could be significant to journalism.
Based on the YouTube video explanation, Buzz is kind of a Facebook-foursquare-Twitter-FriendFeed competitor, but could be much more than the sum of the Google products they're integrating with it, including Google Profiles, Google Gmail (its Contact list gets integrated automatically), Google Picasa photos (it can also incorporate feeds from other multimedia tools such as Flickr and YouTube), Google Voice & Talk (SMS and voice posting capabilities have high utility in this tool for status updates) and Google Wave (real-time updating, commenting, sharing and collaboration tools).
For those in the journalism business, here are the most interesting applications and implications I see, especially for breaking news and mobile advertising.
Google Latitude
On its own, Google's live GPS location tracking tool is not very impressive, but with an active audience of participants through Gmail Contacts, this technology makes Google Buzz much more interesting and relevant, especially if those participants are contacts you know.
Google Maps
Much like Latitude, the integration of Maps makes Buzz unique, and at this very early stage, it was the most interesting experience because it visually displays what we're used to seeing in long linear lists on Twitter and Facebook.
Going through your local map and seeing what people in your very near proximity (down to the city block level) say was a different experience. While Twitter and other social media apps have moved into the geo-location arena, this is the best, live implementation I've seen of a real-time geotagged social media experience.With detailed user profiles, their social network and precise location, Google could do what futurists have been dreaming about: offer relevant, interest-driven mobile advertising, geo-targeted down to the micro level.
I downloaded the updated Google Android Maps App on my Nexus One, booted up the Buzz layer on the map and the first Buzz status bubble I clicked on proclaimed, "Best strip club in St. Louis" from a Mr. Elia about a certain establishment in East St. Louis. There was also already a comment on the posting from a Mr. Roche, "Lol. Attach pictures"
Google finally brought the experience of the Internet to mobile phones. :)
But seriously, exploring what folks around the Post-Dispatch's downtown office (where I work) were talking about was somewhat fascinating. I couldn't help but feel like I was looking into the future, thinking about how this could be used in breaking news situations to reach people who are physically located near news events (as well as getting their contact info easily).
Google Search / Relevance algorithm
Google became king of the search business for developing superior algorithms that organize information and return relevant results. In the Google presentation announcing Buzz, the company said the social tool will use customized algorithms to learn your personal interests; users can also hide or approve of news and social content that interests them (like on Facebook).
Buzz could help filter and call out personally relevant information for you based on its knowledge of you, your network and your location information, so over time, it will understand your interests better. If its algorithm is effective, this could be what really differentiates Buzz from most social media news streams.
Google AdSense
Perhaps the most dangerous element for media organizations is the threat Google could pose taking their micro-payment and highly-targeted advertising model to the local level.
With detailed profiles of users' likes, dislikes, their social network and precise location, Google could do what futurists and journalism advertising techies have been dreaming about, but no one has really pulled off on a large scale yet -- offer relevant, interest-driven mobile advertising, geo-targeted down to the micro level.
So you and your friends could be bee-bopping down the street after a late night out dancing and the local pizza joint a block away could target you (and everyone in a three-block radius) to come down for a hot slice of pie, half off if you mention the mobile Buzz ad.
Google didn't explicitly speak of this example at Tuesday's presentation, but did say there's an "Enterprise" version of Buzz coming out which could offer very valuable tools like this when paired with Google's stockade of applications.
Buzz is rolling out to Gmail users now and available in upgraded versions of the Google Maps mobile phone application as a new map layer.
The full launch presentation from Google is available here (56 minutes).
02/10/2010
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| Shut Off Google? C'mon, Mark Cuban |
| I can understand why Mark Cuban said newspapers should keep "blood-sucking vampires" like Google from indexing their content. But his argument falls short in a few key ways, I believe.
Cuban said newspapers have to understand that there is real value in what they do best, which is to "go out and find news and create good content." "Aggregators and search engines think there is no value to that," the Internet entrepreneur, HDNet co-founder and owner of the Dallas Maverick basketball team said at the OnMedia conference in New York last week. "They think there's an unending supply of necks."
If publications shut off their sites to the Google spiders, Cuban said, people who can't find that content via Google search or Google News might simply type "Forbes.com" or "NYTimes.com" in their Web browsers. He implied that if the great news brands refuse to be indexed without compensation, aggregators eventually would have to pay them to get their material.
One problem with Cuban's argument, though: There is a nearly unending supply of "necks," to use his analogy, for aggregators and search engines. Even if newspapers close off their sites to Google, their content will be found elsewhere, on other sites that pick it up under fair use.
True, there are great news brands that people may find even if they're not in search results. But there are also many growing brands that are pure Web plays and have learned how to make a profit while using aggregators to their advantage. They have structured their businesses for the Web. If other news outlets remove themselves from search, those Web-native companies will use the opportunity to capture more of the traffic.
Cuban said that once a newspaper removes itself from search and aggregation, "The worst thing that can happen is you turn 'em back on" and resume indexing. But in my experience, once you turn off a spigot of traffic in digital media, it takes time -- often much more time than it took to lose the traffic -- to restore the previous level.
He also said that people who come from search and from aggregators don't "convert" to sales, likening the situation to a restaurant where a lot of people walk in and out but nobody sits down and buys a meal. But is the answer to move the restaurant to a back street with less foot traffic?
Or should those restaurants find a way to entice those passers by to sit down and buy a drink or dessert, maybe even a meal? Or if that doesn't work, to give away a little food and entice them to pay for something else that will make their visit more enjoyable and make them want to come back and buy again?
In digital media, unlike in a restaurant, the incremental cost of serving one more customer is essentially zero. If you can convert even a fraction of those visitors, you can help support the business.
Rather than block Google's access, newspapers need to use that traffic to create multiple revenue streams that incrementally add up to profit. They need not just exclusive content that people will pay for, not just ad spots that squeeze out as much value as possible, but also other revenue streams -- whether apps or events or, yes, going from Web to print. They will have to constantly adjust price points and subscription mixes, as The Wall Street Journal has done and continues to do.
I asked Cuban after his speech what he thinks of such a model, which some call "freemium," in which you give away your content to, say, 95 percent of visitors and have the loyal 5 percent cover costs through subscriptions and other revenue streams. In such a business, you would want to attract as many potential customers as possible; the more visitors, the larger the fraction who will pay.
Cuban told me that it doesn't work -- and seemed to peg his answer on advertising. "The only time it really works is if you just happen to hit a vein, and you just happen to be the hot content," Cuban said. "But more often than not, particularly on the Web, you might be hot for awhile, and the advertising might be hot for awhile, but then someone else can come in and do it a little bit cheaper, and itll be a little bit harder."
Well, that's business, Mark, whether you're selling media or cars. You have to differentiate your product and your brand, and create at least the perception that you offer something different and valuable. It may not be easy, and it's certainly not an easy adjustment for news organizations that came to rely on wire services mixed in with ads. But it's hard to see another way.
There may be one set of tools that will help Cuban's cause. Social media like Twitter, Facebook and others are starting to challenge Google as recommendation engines. As more traffic comes to news sites via social media and less through search, it is possible that publications online can balance what they'd lose by not being in Google against what they would gain by being in social media.
But in my analyses, I have been surprised to find that traffic from social media is not necessarily more engaged or more valuable than what comes in from search. So while I would advocate aggressively building audience from social media, I wouldn't stake everything on that approach without proof that it would make up for what I'd lose by not being linked by aggregators or search.
02/08/2010
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| Licensing Delay Complicates Decision Between Open Source and Proprietary Video Players |
| In at least a short-term boon for HTML5 proponents, the consortium of groups that own the patents for the H.264 video-encoding codec announced Thursday that it will not seek royalties for another five years on videos that use the codec and are free to end users.
"Gack!" you say (justifiably). "Thank goodness I don't need to know about this H.264-HTML5-Ogg Theora mumbo-jumbo." Unfortunately, if you are in charge of encoding video for your Web site, if you design video players, or manage those who do, then you probably do need to pay attention.
Blame it on YouTube and Apple. Though they didn't start it, their recent moves have brought the debate about open-source video codecs from niche blogs to a wider audience.
First, the back story: H.264 is a very efficient video compression/decompression system. You find it a lot of places, and it's becoming more popular. MPEG LA, a group of 26 organizations, holds patents related to the codec, but the group allows anyone to use H.264 on videos that are free to end users -- for now. If the video isn't free, video creators and distributors must pay license fees for both encoding and decoding.
Before Thursday's announcement, the current royalty-free period was set to end in December.
The licensing issues behind H.264 are tied to HTML5, an upcoming HTML standard, because it uses the H.264 codec to play videos without Flash. HTML5 can use H.264 codec or others, such as the open source open-source Ogg Theora. The vast majority of online videos use Flash-based players.
When Apple's iPad was unveiled without Flash support, pro open-source/anti-Flash folks trumpeting this as a good reason to dump Flash video players and use HTML5 instead.
Meanwhile, others have been experimenting with alternatives to Flash-based video. In January, YouTube launched a beta version of an HTML5 video player, followed a day later by Vimeo. This week, the Swiss design firm Jilion released a demo of an HTML5 video player that produced a lot of drool in my Twitter crowd. But all of these alternatives function only in Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers (or Internet Explorer if you have installed Google's Chrome Frame plugin).
There is one major obstacle to HTML5, however: Mozilla, the open-source developer of Firefox, doesn't support H.264 because it's a proprietary codec. (Mozilla and others in the open-source community prefer Ogg Theora. And Google is looking to buy On2, the company that owns yet another proprietary video codec.)
Thursday's announcement clouds the battlefield a bit. If H.264 will be royalty-free through the end of 2015, is that enough for Mozilla and others to sign on? Or will they still hold back, fearful that they will adopt a standard that will end up costing them (literally) in the long run?
Now let's bring this home for those of you who handle online video.
The licensing announcement doesn't settle the question of whether news sites should move away from Flash video to HTML5. If you choose to go with H.264/HTML5 and you put that video behind a pay wall, you could end up owing the licensing fee. If you embed someone else's video that wasn't properly licensed, you can be liable for their fee.
Confused? Welcome to the crowd. While clearly not fans of Flash, the Linux folks at LWN.net have done a nice job of laying out the issues. Jeremy Allair, founder and CEO of Brightcove, lays out the issues at the corporate level, with a Flash-friendlier tone.
The one thing everyone agrees on: It's a long way from being sorted out.
02/08/2010
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