Building reference material into news sites
Two recent posts dealing with building static (or relatively static) reference material into news sites to augment the flow of day-to-day news … and, yes, this is one of those posts that’s more for my own future reference than anything else:
Robin Sloan writes at Snarkmarket about the economics concept of stock and flow and relates it to media:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Ryan Sholin writes at Invisible Inkling about how this relates to online news:
“Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers.
But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. …
Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours.
For a lot of sites, it probably wouldn’t take more than a few hits per day for a piece of “stock,” over the course of a year, to yield just as much traffic as the average “flow” story.
Why my new year’s resolution is to learn about programming
I’ve found myself quoting Steve Buttry a lot lately, particularly his posts about innovation in the news business. In an August 2009 post titled “Newspapers’ original sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate,” he wrote:
The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.
We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.
For a long time, the way much of the newspaper industry handled the Web made about as much sense as trying to run a TV news broadcast by sending a newspaper reporter out to write a story, then feeding the text into an Amiga and making people watch as it scrolled across their TV screens. Or trying to make a TV commercial by pointing a camera at a Sears circular and filming as someone turned the pages.
But was this due to a failure of imagination on our parts — or was it something else?
Here’s what I keep coming back to:
If somebody in our building comes up with a unique idea in print — whether it’s for editorial, advertising or both — there are at least a half dozen people in the newsroom, and a half dozen more in the composing department, who know how to make it happen. But if it’s a unique idea for the Web … well, none of us are developers. Maybe we could make it happen, but maybe not.
The first newsroom I worked in after college had four full-time people in the newsroom. Every single one of us knew how to use QuarkXPress; every single one of us could lay out a page. I imagine it’s the same way at nearly every small paper: Working there and not knowing how to design a page would be almost unthinkable. But the chances of a small paper having a Web developer on staff are slim to none.
Most newspapers, regardless of size, are equipped to try new things in print. We have the tools, and we know how to use them. Online, not so much.
So this is my goal for 2010: to become as proficient with HTML and CSS — and Flash would be great as well — as with the tools of the print medium. I don’t need to become a programmer or developer, any more than I can currently claim to be a graphic designer. (I can’t, because I’m not.) But I want to reach a level of basic competence, enough so that if somebody says “Hey, can we experiment with this new way of doing something?” I can confidently say “Yes, we can make that happen.”
Further reading:
- How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News, by Leah Betancourt. Mashable, Dec. 11, 2009.
- The programmer as journalist: A Q&A with Adrian Holovaty, by Robert Niles. Online Journalism Review, June 5, 2006.
- 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers, by Paul Bradshaw. Online Journalism Blog, Aug. 29, 2008.
- A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, by Steve Buttry. (With related posts.) Pursing the Complete Community Connection, April 27, 2009.
Confessions of a curmudgeon: Why I used to mock Twitter, and what changed my mind
I admit it — I can be a curmudgeon sometimes.
I’m rarely the first to jump on a technological bandwagon. I didn’t own a CD player until 1995, nor a DVD player until 2002. I didn’t register a Twitter account until June 1, 2009, after one of the school districts I cover started using it to distribute information, and I didn’t make a single post of my own until July 27.
Here are a few of the reasons I dismissed Twitter at first — and a few of the things that changed my mind.
REASONS I DISMISSED IT
1. The name. No, this wasn’t a big factor, but it probably didn’t help that “Twitter” sounds less like a serious communication tool and more like a group of sixth-grade girls giggling in a hallway.
2. The initial concept: that people would use Twitter to answer one question — “What are you doing?”
“Look,” I said. “If what I’m doing right this instant is even remotely interesting, I’m going to be doing it, not ‘tweeting’ about it. Therefore, by definition, anything I ‘tweet’ about will be dull.”
Or, expressed in pictures:
3. Seeing it misused. I think the first time I saw Twitter used in a news context was one afternoon in the newsroom, catching bits of a CNN newscast out of the corner of my eye. Rick Sanchez was covering a plane crash, and underneath the heading “OMG! PLANE CRASH” was a scroll featuring such insightful commentary as “I once twittered from a Bon Jovi concert” and “I once twittered from the shower.”
Rick Sanchez on CNN might be the most egregious offender. As someone always balancing the fine line between being an adventurous news professional and circus geek (”Okay, Taser me!!”), Sanchez has breathlessly turned his daily broadcast into a clearinghouse of meaningless shorthand, from his desk at Twit Central.
“Let’s go to our Facebook page and see what they’re Twittering on MySpace. Here’s what FlannelGuy21 says about our story on Iraqi military strategy- ‘Rick, the Iraqis can’t control their own country.’ Interesting thought, FlannelGuy21. And ChiChiChi in Elko sent this about our story last hour on Octomom – ‘Rick, she needs a lobotomy.’”
… When I’m watching the news, I don’t care what the viewers have to say.
If I wanted to hear what others have to say when I’m watching the news, I’d call up my friend Myles Berkowitz and listen to him yell at his TV screen.
And before anyone gets up in arms thinking that’s elitist – if I sent my own 140-character Twitter comment into a news show, no one should care about my “Tweet” either.
… When I watch a situation comedy, I don’t want it interrupted every few minutes with “Great joke! – CarpetBlogger186″ scrolling by. I expect no less from a newscast.
THINGS THAT CHANGED MY MIND
1. A post from one of my favorite bloggers. In this post from July 27, 2009, Doug Fisher took a writer in the Chronicle of Higher Education to task for complaining that 140 characters isn’t enough to convey more than the bare basics of a story:
Why do we have so much trouble getting our heads around the idea that you use the best tool for the job you need to do? If you want a hole, use a drill, not a screwdriver. Other businesses get it. Why do journalists continue to cling to the idea that all they have is a screwdriver? The problem with that, of course, to continue the metaphor, is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thus, to too many journalists, everything has to look like a “story,” instead of acknowledging that much of what they do is not story but factual exposition, and maybe if they stripped those factual expositions down, they’d actually have time to do stories — you know, those things that people really do like to read, with natural, not forced, beginnings, middles and ends, and usually with some kind of complication and resolution that gives insight to the human condition or is just a “good read.”
… And, no, a news article can’t be crafted in 140 characters because it is not a news article! It is a Tweet. Nothing more, nothing less. A basic version of the facts. Stop confounding the two.
In other words: Complaining that a 140-character tweet can’t possibly convey a situation in all of its complexity is like complaining that a photograph can’t do the same thing. Sure, a photo can’t explain the city budget or analyze competing claims in a political campaign. But do you completely dismiss photography as a worthwhile medium because of it?
2. Actually starting to use the service — and realizing what people are doing with it. I haven’t found that many people who tweet about every mundane minute of their lives, and while I’m sure they’re out there … I don’t have to follow them.
I’m pretty selective about who I follow. If I look at someone’s feed and see page after page of tweets about their cornflakes, I’m not going to follow them. As a result, most mornings, I can go to TweetDeck, check everything that’s been posted since the last time I looked, and probably find at least a few links of interest.
3. Getting good story leads. Like this story, which I first read about on the @adrianmaples feed. Or the time a few weeks ago when a fatal accident happened during one of the rare periods when our newsroom is unstaffed, and the only reason I found out about before Monday morning was that I had a TweetDeck search constantly running for the word “Lenawee.”
Hearing about things via Twitter before I hear them through any other medium … for a reporter, that’s a clincher.
Footnotes:
- “News for Twits,” by Robert J. Elisberg. Huffington Post, March 17, 2009.
- “Twitter – angst over ‘is it journalism’,” by Doug Fisher, Common Sense Journalism, July 27, 2009.
(Cross-posted to Wired Journalists.)
What if we ran a news site on PhpBB?
News sites seem to fall into two main modes of organization. The most prevalent is the one you see at CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com, and my own employer. Conceptually, this layout more or less mirrors the front page of a print newspaper. OK, chances are everything on the front page is relatively recent, but it’s also the result of a conscious effort by editors to rank the news in order of importance. (The homepage of lenconnect.com, for instance, does display in reverse chronological order by default, but it only displays the stories for which we’ve checked the “homepage” box in our content management system, and we have the option of manually ranking stories as well.)
Then there’s the blog model, which can be seen on sites like AnnArbor.com and The Batavian. Stories run in reverse chronological order by default. Whenever you visit the site, you don’t see what its editors have decided you should see first — you automatically see whatever’s newest. (Although, again, this isn’t absolute — some things show up on the main page and some don’t.) For more, see Scott Karp, who’s a fan of the model, and the author of OnlineNewsDesign.com, who’s not so crazy about it.
I’m pretty much agnostic on this front; I figure both models have their ups and downs, and different consumers will have their own reasons for preferring one over the other. Which is why it’s probably a good idea, as plenty of sites do, to offer the news both ways — for example, for a conventional hierarchical having a “most recent posts” block in your sidebar for those who really want to know what’s new since the last time they checked.
But those aren’t the only ways of organizing content — so, back to the title of this post: What if we ran a news site on phpBB?
It wouldn’t have to be phpBB. It could be vBulletin, it could be UBB.Threads … whatever. Any software originally designed for discussion forums. Bulletin board sites can be broken down by category, but within the category — with the exception of pinned or stickied threads — the thread you see on top is the thread that’s been added to most recently. The thread at the top of the list might not be the newest thread, and it might not be the one with the most comments, but in general, the more interest a thread generates, the more time it will spend near the top of the list.
One big plus to this kind of format: If you want a platform that really emphasizes the importance of comments and reader participation, this would do it. First on a psychological front, since it’s a system that was built from the beginning for the purpose of creating discussion communities, and second because of what it emphasizes — not what we think is most important or what we added most recently, but rather what the community has been discussing the most.
I can also think of plenty of problems with using this presentation for news. For one, unlike a “Most Popular Items” list, it’s pretty easy for one person to game — if you’re a partisan who wants to keep an unflattering story about an opponent in the spotlight, all you have to do is go back every eight hours and bump the thread.
Honestly, I think this probably isn’t the best format for a news site. Certainly not as a default. But some systems already allow people to view a site either in a conventional newspaper.com layout or in a blog-style “river of news” layout … what if a site allowed users to choose a format mimicking a discussion forum as well?
If nothing else, it’s interesting to think about.
First impressions of AnnArbor.com, Part 2 (Web edition)
Two key ways AnnArbor.com differs from most newspaper Web sites:
1. Presentation of news. While most news sites to some extent copy the basic concept of the front page of a newspaper — the editors choose the most important or interesting stories to showcase and put them front and center — AnnArbor.com more closely resembles a blog, with news presented as more of a reverse-chronological stream.
As Ben Cohen at the Nieman Lab notes, “[t]he main limitation of such a format are obvious: namely, that a big story can be washed away by a torrent of small ones.” But Cohen also reports that chief content officer Tony Dearing says a solution is in the works — down the road, it’ll be possible to treat a given story differently if it deserves extra attention.
2. Advertising format. Instead of a more conventional banner approach, ads appear alongside editorial content, and they behave like blog entries — you see a headline, and you can click on it to go to a new page with more details. The ads are separated from independent editorial content by being given a different background color and a little red flag off to the right that says “Deal.”
One thing I’m curious about: Is the “Deal” branding going to appeal to every advertiser, or will it eventually turn out there’s a demand for a different way of labeling things? I can picture a high-end luxury retailer saying “You know, this ‘deal’ thing doesn’t really make sense for my marketing plan … my stuff is expensive and there’s a reason for it, and that’s what I want people to think of when they see my name.” Of course, that’s probably not a big problem to change if the need arises.
Three things I especially like about the site:
1. It’s easy to crunch the news however you like it. The first couple of times I scrolled through the main page, I thought “You know, there’s not a whole lot on this page that I want to read.” Then I clicked on the “news” tab, and suddenly there were a whole lot of stories I wanted to read. (It’s not just the standard news/sports/entertainment divisions … see next sentence.) If you experiment for a couple of days — “What does it look like if I click on News / Featured Posts? How about News / Most Popular? News / Everything?” — you’re likely to find the mode of presentation that most often gives you things you’re interested in. You can also view by neighborhood (although I’m not in a good position to test that feature in any meaningful way, living 45 minutes away from Ann Arbor and not being too familiar with the neighborhoods).
2. Commenting feels like an organic part of the site, not an afterthought. On the individual story page, there’s a large “Your Voice” header at the bottom of the copy with comments below. On the index page, each story lists the number of comments currently posted on it. A “Your Voice” section is featured prominently on the main page with an excerpt. One additional thing I’d like to see is a “Recent Comments” block in a sidebar — on other sites, I find that a list of recent comments is a good tool for discovering stories I otherwise would have missed, or stories that I read a few days ago and didn’t realize had sparked an interesting discussion.
3. They’re not reluctant to link out. For example, this link to a CBS News report on a camp at U-M for kids with disabilities.
“The people formerly known as the audience”
Ryan Sholin has a good discussion going on over at IdeaLab (and also here) about what to call your readers when they are actively engaged in creating the news, rather than simply being consumers.
A few of the possibilities so far:
- Community. A good word for the readers and participants on some platforms, but not necessarily on others. Howard Weaver says, “Community implies a kind of unanimity that I don’t think you can assume from readers of news. … If we define that word broadly enough to encompass a group who shares only its interest in news (eg readers of a mainstream news site) it has become vague to the point of uselessness.”
- Users. It’s suitably nonspecific, but it seems a little cold. As Ryan puts it, “we’re talking about human beings consuming and sharing information, not people who downloaded a piece of software.” Plus, it can have vaguely negative connotations. (”I’m a user and a loser, so I don’t need no accuser…“)
- Readers. That is one thing that all of the people being described have in common, no matter how active their participation level. And “Readers” doesn’t necessarily imply passivity in people’s minds — we’ve had columns titled “Readers Write” and captions saying “Reader John Doe sent in this photo of …” for years. But if you want to help bring about an attitude shift, continuing to say “readers” isn’t going to push you in that direction.
- Participants. The problem with this, I think, is that even on a news platform where everyone is encouraged to engage in the process of newsgathering and reporting, there’s a good chance that the majority of people will still want to be passive consumers most of the time. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We all have only so many hours in the day, and we can’t be active participants in everything we’re exposed to.
- Members. It works on discussion boards, but on a news site, it might keep people away by implying a level of exclusivity.
- Something site-specific. Dan Pacheco cites people at Bakotopia.com referring to themselves as “Baktopians.” DailyKos has Kossacks, Free Republic has Freepers. But like “community” in a way, it seems like it would work better on sites where people have a strong degree of commonality.