Start making sense

Common to both Gina Chen and Megan Garber’s recent calls for incorporating the Wikipedia aesthetic into newsrooms is the timely idea of giving readers what they need to empower themselves and make sense of the world.

In her look at the hyperlocal upstart WikiCity, Chen sees a potential model (and perhaps partner) for news organizations wanting to tap into hyper-niches in their communities. In previous posts, Chen has advocated for a reinvention of news websites so that they place more emphasis on giving readers what they want — not just in terms of news, but a whole host of interests.

I think Chen is right in wanting news organizations to play a bigger, more comprehensive role in being a “one-stop-shop” for readers, via curation, in their geographic area. After looking the WikiCity sites for Tampa and St. Petersburg, (I live in the Tampa Bay area), I can see the potential for fulfilling Chen’s vision, though there’s some work to be done, as neither site is arranged in a way that I would dare call “intuitive” and the content is generally very thin.

Garber, who writes for Columbia Journalism Review, has a piece on health care coverage and Wikipedia that is in sync with my own appreciation for the “wikification” of the newsroom.

Garber contrasts the lurid drama of the “death panels” narrative that has “proven irresistible to reporters” with the well-organized, comprehensive Wikipedia entry for “Health Care Reform in the United States.”

Indeed, what Wikipedia provides, ultimately, is information, pure and simple. And, perhaps just as significantly, it provides the implicit assumption that ‘information, pure and simple’ is enough. An encyclopedia entry has no mandate for a ‘colorful lede.’ It has no instinct for conflict. It assumes its audience’s attention, rather than feeling compelled to earn it, painstakingly—word by dramatic word.

And, because Wikipedia is crowdsourced, it has no implicit mandate, ethical or economical, toward ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity.’ It thus has no vested interest in the kind of he said/she said approach that has, to this point, so sorely compromised the mainstream media’s health care narrative.

Ad sales. Without the sales staff.

Writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, Michael Andersen looks at Flyerboard, which offers online publishers and businesses self-serve advertising. Click over to Boston.com’s Your Town page for Newton and see an example of Flyerboard’s handiwork on the left rail. The image in this post is from the Houston Chronicle website, Chron.com.

Bringing the news to readers, one app at a time

Writing about the popularity of mobile news and the New York Times‘ iPhone app, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Martin Langeveld suggests that ad sales don’t have to be the only source of revenue for newspapers:

One implication of the small screen, when it comes to news: we may be less inclined to work hard for news by searching, surfing and visiting aggregators, and more inclined to let the news come to us, by whatever means. The challenge, then, for publishers, may be to create apps that deliver custom-tailored news to fit preferences and interests of phone users.

Perhaps the figures Langeveld provides will be the nudge newspaper execs need to focus less on setting up pay walls and more on providing their readers with the kind of value they want, and building revenue streams upon that.

It would appear some are doing just that. Editor & Publisher reports that the new iPhone operating system will give publishers the tools they need for specialized content delivery and advertising:

The new technology has the ability to deliver user-location information at the browser level. For example, when a user accesses a newspaper Web site, the browser knows the user’s location. The newspaper can send relevant content and, more important, relevant targeted advertising within 2 blocks on a person’s location. “This makes local advertising on mobile highly potent with high CPMS,” Howe said.

Second: There is a new capability for publishers to charge for subscriptions or micropayments through one application. For example, a user could be reading about the new quarterback in town and with one click can purchase premium content like an exclusive video interview the quarterback.

Thoughts on journalism's future

Martin Langeveld took notes during a think tank in Washington, D.C. called “The Future of Context.” For the occasional wonky speak about “future-pointed contextual journalism” and “ecosystems,” here are a few observations/commentaries that struck me as fruitful for the future viability of the news industry:

• Advertisers can add context: blogs, newsletter to engage customers in conversation.

• Commenting needs to evolve into conversation.  This can be done by having reporters and editors step in, add context, ask questions, and moderate the discussion flow.

• It’s not the race to be first that counts — its who can become the convenor of the conversation around the story, and can make that conversation solution-oriented.  A collaborative beat blog is in fact a continuous conversation.  Again, we need to turn commenters into contributors and commenting into conversation.

• Radio has always been good at having conversations with its audience.  We are hardwired to learn best through conversations.  Newspapers in the past couldn’t tap into conversations very well, but now we can.  By focusing energy on making people part of the conversation and building community, we raise demand for our product.  (Steve Yelvington, Cox)

Behind newspaper website traffic numbers

Martin Langeveld pours some cold water on the Newspaper Association of America’s report that traffic to newspaper websites accounted for 43 percent of all Internet users in the first quarter of 2009, a 10 percent increase over last year:

Newspaper page views at 3.5 billion per month are less than one percent of total U.S. page views (386 billion in February). …

… As NAA does note, 43.6 percent of that audience visited a newspaper web site, but given that newspaper site traffic works out to only about 1.6 page views per reader per day, many of the newspaper site uniques are clearly represent one-time-only traffic. …

… In the light of the data as seen in context, it is ludicrous for them to be considering a tollbooth to make readers pay in some fashion (other than for carefully selected premium content) — any simple paywall barrier would serve to reduce their online audience share even more.  Similarly, any effort to prevent or restrict Google and others from aggregating content will backfire, since newspaper sites would lose substantial traffic in the absence of traffic driven by aggregator links.

Google News Timeline

Mathew Ingram looks at the brand new Google News Timeline and wonders: Why can’t newspapers exhibit this kind of creativity?

Google News Timeline is very impressive, offering users the abililty to look at news by days, weeks, months, years and even decades in a visually appealing column format. You can also refine your search according to a particular news source.

Ashton Kutcher, king of Twitter

At Nieman Journalism Lab, Mathew Ingram looks at criticism of Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN to become the first with a million followers on Twitter. And he concludes that “Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself,” Kutcher has something to teach us about the evolution of media:

As a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.

 

In his video discussion with Oprah about Twitter, for example, Kutcher says he believes that “we’re at a place now with social media where a single person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network — that is the power of the social web.” (although obviously it helps if that one person is a celebrity). He then talks about how his life is “somewhat on display anyway, and not always by choice… so instead of them publishing pictures and videos I don’t like, I can publish pictures and video of myself… that I’m happy with. If there’s some sort of fallacy that’s out in some magazine or that some blogger has written about, you can respond to it, and you can actually respond to it in a genuine way, directly with your fans, as opposed to having to go through the whole rigamarole of publicists and so on.”

The danger of comparing print to online

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to Martin Langeveld’s assertion that only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. Dan Thornton counters with a compelling argument that the comparison between print and online readers isn’t very useful. And that the numbers Langeveld uses as the basis for his calculation may be way off:

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

The numbers don't lie. Or do they?

Well, something doesn’t add up. When Martin Langeveld crunched the numbers, he found that newspaper Web ads were yielding an absurdly high CPM (cost per thousand page views) of $80.28.

I knew that number couldn’t be correct, as I recalled an instructive post by Ethan Zuckerman:

While highly targeted ads (an ad for roofing services in Pittsfield, MA) might be worth several dollars a click, most ads sell for a dollar or less a click, often much less. An ad that sells for a buck a click and gets 1% clickthrough is functionally a $10 CPM ad, which suggests that lots of ad inventory (the nickel-a-click stuff) selling at sub-$1 CPM.

Ryan Chittum agreed the number was ridiculously high and endeavored to come up with an explanation:

Poynter Institute weighs in on St. Pete Times' Mug Shots

Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins for his take on the St. Petersburg Times‘ Mug Shots website. Poynter, in case you didn’t know, owns the Times. Tompkins was critical of the site and brought up some pertinent ethical issues:

I think there’s some serious concerns this kind of coverage raises … How do you make it right for those who are found to be not guilty? … Maybe we don’t have an obligation, but I think we do.

Tompkins explained that he isn’t opposed to posting an individual’s mug shot. However:

I just want to make sure there’s a reason to post it, and not just do it because we can. That’s never a good reason to put something on the Web, just because we can.

Poynter also has archived Thursday’s chat on the ethics of posting mug shots online. Matt Waite, one of the developers of the Mug Shots site, explained to Poynter’s ethics faculty Kelly McBride its function as journalism:

The main journalistic purpose of this feature is that we’ve given transparency to the grinding wheels of the justice system. The jail population is no longer an abstraction. You can look at them, as they come in. These people are your neighbors. The jail, the deputies that run it, the courts that have to deal with these folks, you pay for it. So there is a purpose to showing that to people. I would also add that people have said they found great value in being able to look at people who said they lived in a specific ZIP code because they only know their neighbors by sight.