Some new posts of note over at my PrezVid vlog/blog:
* My interview with Loic Le Meur, adviser and vlogger for conservative French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, about the amazing video action happening in the campaign over there. For all the attention American candidates are getting in our YouTube election, the video scene in France’s election is far ahead, moreso on Sarkozy’s site than on that of his liberal opponent, Segolene Royal (you supply the accents, please).
* John Edwards tells WNYC’s Brian Lehrer that this is, indeed, the YouTube election … and he’s not bothered by all the hair jokes.
Kinsey Wilson, the editor who built USAToday.com into the powerhouse that it is, gave me a sneak preview of their redesign and rearchitecting, coming out next week: a big, five-month, 50-person effort that will continue in a rolling redevelopment effort. Inside, they called it the “networked journalism project” (and I’m proud to have contributed to their jargon, Kinsey tells me). It entailed new design and organization but also social-media tools and an effort to link out — to triangulate the news, in Kinsey’s word. They’ve even appointed a network editor whose job it will be to find opportunities to bring the audience in to elevate the journalism. Here’s an image of the new front page.
On the mockups (keep in mind that they were put together by designers, who sometimes needn’t bother with dictionaries) you’ll see on the top of the home page a quote from the comments the site has under its articles (note that they don’t have forums — and their unruliness — but do have, Kinsey said, civil and valued discussions around articles). They want to emphasize interactivity and put the commenters out front. I said it will be interesting to see whether these out-of-context quotes will be compelling (I had trouble doing this with forum quotes in my prior life). Kinsey said it’s as much about valuing the commenters as it is about the quotes themselves. Much of this redesign is about such cultural change.
On this page, you’ll see the On Deadline blog front-and-center. It has been “enormously successful,” Kinsey said, for USA Today. I do like how papers have discovered that the incredibly light and easy content management tool called a blog enables them to publish faster and easier. On the lower left, they — like other papers — are now promoting lots of their own blogs.
Here they expose the most popular stories as determined by readership, commenting, emailing, and recommendation — note the Diggification. (I look forward to most-linked as well.) In their effort to link out to other sources, even competitors, see this example of on-page external RSS feeds, powered by Newsgator.
Here they begin to use tags (these are machine-generated; given the biorhythm of news, I wonder whether a folksonomy can take hold in time). We’ll be seeing much more of that on news site, I’ll bet, as they move away from strict (USAToday-like) taxonomy to an all-roads-lead-to-Rome structure to give you many paths to relevant news, via links, tags, and search.
And one of the cooler features is a personal page that is populated with, among other things, the comments you leave around the site. It is an effort to enable a social network on the site built around content, theirs and ours. (I said that I hope they will make this portable; I’d like to put up on my blog a feed of the comments I leave on a news site with reviews I leave at Amazon and so on: my distributed identity.)
It’s a good design and all the steps are in the right direction. That’s especially important because USA Today is, indeed, a powerhouse. I was amazed when Kinsey told me that a majority of their readers come back every day — multiple times a day, in fact. That is quite unusual for newspaper sites. Elsewhere, the daily habit has been broken. But not here. With the addition of social elements and the valuing of commenting and the willingness to link out to other sources, I suspect that they will increase their frequency even more.
From an uber-view, what strikes me is that we are seeing a coalescing among the news sites around a roughly common aesthetic. Look at the Times, the Times, the Telegraph, and the Post: They’re all less-cluttered with more white space (and, as a result, more scrolling) and they share an affection for the same shade of blue. I think that’s a good thing: We are establishing a visual grammar for news.
But I also think this means that someone can break out and push to a next generation of news sites. In fact, since most visitors to most news sites I know don’t even go to the home page in a day, I think the next frontier of design will be about exploding home pages and sites in a looser network of distributed content. But more on that later.
: LATER: Here’s the USAToday.com announcement, just posted.
When CBS and Viacom split, CBS got the smarts about the future of video. The Times today writes about the network inviting people to put up their videos. And here’s Les Moonves talking about the benefits of putting the network’s stuff on YouTube: “It’s hard to do an absolute cause and effect, but we know it absolutely is helping. We are looking at every single outlet there is for our content.”
* Steven Johnson’s Outside.in has launched some new features and announced funding from, among others, Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham (who write about it here) and Marc Andressen. I care about local and, like Fred, see huge swaths of unclaimed territory there online.
* Andrew Tyndall has long been the authority on network news coverage, but it was hard to get to his stuff because it was a newsletter. Now it’s an impressive site with a grid that lets you view and compare the nets’ coverage of top stories.
(Disclosures: I was asked to join the advisory board for Outside.in and was on the board of one of Johnson’s earlier companies, which created Plastic.com. And I gave Andrew my two cents on his plan in return for a free lunch.)
I just watched the third part of Frontline’s News War and found it utterly unsurprising and profoundly disappointing. It delivered the obvious narratives it wanted to deliver: a war between mainstream media and the rabble of citizen bloggers, a cultural and quality line between old media and new, and a moral battle between the business and editorial sides of the news business, as illustrated by its lionizing of deposed LA Times editors John Carroll and Dean Baquet and its demonizing of Tribune executive and now LA Times publisher David Hiller. I was part of it, briefly, to fulfill their blogger-v-MSM storyline; here is more of what I said to them. I remain disappointed that they didn’t investigate the future of journalism, the opportunities and possibilities. Instead, they played the themes we have heard again and again, as if on a Top 40 radio station: tsk-tsking the tackiness, fretting about the news that the big guys are sure we need, evil Wall Street, looney citizens. I could sit down and fisk, as we say, all its cheap shots and lazy analysis and incomplete reporting but, frankly, I don’t find it worth the effort.
I’m supposed to be on part III of Frontline’s News War tonight on PBS. They were insistent on finding a war in media and I kept arguing with their premise, so I’m not sure how this will turn out. We’ll see.
Faith Salie has the most endearing voice on radio. Click below and listen to her on Fair Game, a new show aimed at a younger audience, and you’ll want to propose.
It’s not a voice or, for that matter, a personality we hear on public radio news shows, where the tones are stentorian and authoritative (hear: Nina Totenberg). Salie is relaxed and funny — though, as her radio bio emphasizes, she’s not dumbing down NPR stations; she’s a Rhodes scholar and Harvard graduate. I’ve been listening to her on my iPod, fascinated by the show’s attempt to liven up public radio (especially after visiting NPR last week). So I was delighted when a call came to appear on Fair Game and doubly delighted that it was to talk about my new endeavor, PrezVid.
Before I got on, they were talking about the Jesus bones, not afraid of rattling the cultural safety latch, doing a shtick about a Jesus Jurassic park with cloned Messiahs and speculating with a theology professor about how hard it will be to get Jesus DNA (Salie guesses that a communion wafer probably won’t do the trick).
It was daring without acting daring and what I liked best was that the intelligence comes out in the wit.
I wanted to video the interview but with Salie as a TV personality, that caused complications. So here’s just a snippet from the control room below. And here’s the interview.
I say we need to create a million C-SPANs made by us, the citizens, using video to open up government to inspection by all.
C-SPAN itself is, oddly, one of the most jealous protectors of copyright anywhere. That’s why they demanded that Stephen Colbert’s speech before the press corps of Washington be pulled down from online. That is why The Times writes today about confusion in Congress about what representatives can and cannot put on their blogs. The short answer is: government feeds belong to us all, C-SPAN feeds belong to them. So Nancy Pelosi was in her rights to put up speeches from the floor on her blog; that came from the taxpayers’ cameras. Yet as The Times points out:
But last week, as it happens, C-Span did contact the speaker’s office to have it take down a different clip from her blog — one shot by C-Span’s cameras at a House Science and Technology Committee hearing on global warming where Ms. Pelosi testified, Mr. Daly said. . . .
“We are structurally burdened, in terms of people’s perception, because we are the only network that has such a big chunk of public domain material,†said Bruce Collins, the corporate vice president and general counsel of C-Span. He estimated that 5 to 15 percent of C-Span’s programming is from the House and Senate floor, and thus publicly available.
“It is perfectly understandable to me that people would be confused,†he said. “They say, ‘When a congressman says something on the floor it is public domain, but he walks down the street to a committee hearing or give a speech and it is not public domain?’ â€
Thus the work of our government is being trapped by C-SPAN’s cameras and business models. That may be their right but it doesn’t serve our rights. So we need to blow this up.
If Firedoglake could go and liveblog the hell out of the Libby trial, so can more of us go and tape meetings of our government and distribute that online, around C-SPAN.
We can do this not just at a national but also at a state and local level. I suggested that this is a role for local public radio (here and here) and also for local newspapers: Unleash an army of us with audio and video recorders to capture public meetings and then host what we come up with and give us the tools to edit these recordings down to their essence.
The next time you go to your school board meeting, take along a video camera and put it up on YouTube. And watch how your elected representatives behave then.
NewTeeVee shares Hitwise’s report that traffic on YouTube surges even after Viacom pulled its precious content: “According to research from the fine folks at Hitwise, YouTube visits are up 14 percent3 since Viacom’s cease-and-desist order, showing that maybe it’s not just people watching Daily Show and Colbert clips after all.” As I said the other day, the big guys better be concerned that taking their marbles and going home only leaves more space on the playground for the rest of us.
Mark Glaser attempts to start a memegame getting us all to make comparisons between the way the news business was and will be. I’ll argue that we’re in the present tense in some cases. He includes one of mine and asks for more. Play along. Here’s Glaser’s start (with my notes in itals)…
The way it is: Editors assign stories to reporters.
The way it will be: The community helps with story generation through special online forums, blogs and other interactive mechanisms. The way almost it is: See NewAssignment.net and Chris Anderson’s efforts to transparently edit Wired.
The way is: Editors choose which letters to print in the Letters to the Editor section.
The way it will be: An online forum allows all letters to be posted in full. The way it almost is: See the Economist’s new effort to put up all letters for all to see and Anderson’s plan, again, to have the public vote on which letters to publish. I’ll argue, though, that the letter to the editor is an outmoded form. Who wants to speak to editors? We want to speak to the audience. Replace the letter to the editor with the letter to the public.
The way it is: A story runs in the newspaper and is posted online on the newspaper website. Perhaps another day, the reporter files a follow-up story.
The way it will be: The story runs in the newspaper and is posted online, and then is constantly updated by editors, the reporter and the readers in the community. The way it almost is: The Guardian and other papers start publishing stories that were destined for print online. That opens the door to corrections and improvements from the public. We’re not seeing a lot of that yet. But we will.
The way it is: Newspapers are printed and delivered to homes and businesses.
The way it will be: Newspaper content is beamed to special reader devices that are lightweight, flexible and use low power. Not the way it is: I’m not a member of the epaper, eink cult. I already have a lightweight device: my phone. There will be others. But I think it’s a mistake to try to replictate the form of the newspaper in another gadget. That has almost been newspapers’ downfall online — replication. Instead, we need innovation. Who cares about the gadget. Get me the news.
The way it is: Breaking news happens in a community, and a reporter is sent to the scene.
The way it will be: Breaking news happens, and the editors and reporter scour the neighborhood for people on-the-scene who might have taken photos, videos or can write up a citizen reports on what happened.
link.
The way it is: We consider paid reporters and editors to be professional journalists and everyone else is an amateur with questionable skills.
The way it will be: We consider everyone to be potential journalists, and there are shades of gray between who is a pro and who is an amateur. Ditto that.
The way it is: Newspapers are all things to all people.
The way it will be: Newspapers do what they do best, which is usually local (see above).
The way it is: Newspapers are products.
The way it will be: newspapers are networks.
The way it is: Newspapers have deadlines and editions.
The way it will be: Newspapers are never done. (See NPR’s effort to start the show that’s never over.)
The way it is: Newsrooms are temples (with reporters and editors as a priesthood holding onto what they think are unique skills).
The way it will be: Newsrooms are classrooms (where it is in their interest to improve the journalism done in their larger networks).
Six Apart is grappling with the inherent conflict in providing a platform (MovableType) and a service (TypePad). A most unhappy post from Suw Charman dissecting with a rusty scalpel SixApart marketing messages versus her experience with the company — and a defensive response from the company and a response, in turn, from its chief competitor — make this clear. And I think there are lessons in this for other platform companies — potentially even for the news industry as, I believe, journalism begins to look more like a platform .
You can’t be a software company and a service company under one roof, for you will inevitably end up competing with your customers. And that will not work. So I suggest that SixApart, the software company, divest TypePad, the service company, so that each can serve its customers optimally and so that each can become as profitable as possible.
The issue then was the limitations Six Apart put on Movable Type, the platform software, so as not to enable others to compete with Typepad, its service company using that same software. The issue today, in Charman’s post, is distraction: Who is being served first and best, platform or hosting customers? Doesn’t matter how the problem erupts, the cause is the same. There is an essential channel conflict here when you want to provide a platform for all to use and then when you use it yourself.
I said all this back when then in my blog post and I said it again when I advised one of the VCs who invested in WordPress.com (without pay, sadly). They could have put the platform and the service in one company but I advised strongly — among others, obviously — that they should be separate. The platform now resides with the open-source WordPress.org and WordPress.com, the VC-backed and for-profit hosting service, is merely one of any number of companies that use that software. The fact that WordPress.org is open-source has the benefit of motivating a community of developers to contribute to the platform. Back in 2004, again, I wrote:
I’ve seen other companies go through this and the answer is either to drop one line of business or to divest. I suggest divesting. Then SixApart, the software business, will come up with licenses that serve its customers well and will sell as many as possible. Rather then having your entire customer base scream in protest — as they are now — they would beat a path to your door to pay for your mousetrap (whenever your customers are screaming in protest, you know you are doing something very wrong). Meanwhile, TypePad — a licensee of Movable Type software — would offer no-hassle and reasonably priced hosting and would compete with other licensees. Competition would lead to more business for the two companies and happier customers and probably market dominance for Movable Type and its standards (e.g., TypeKey and Trackbacks). . . .
There is another advantage to divesting: The management of each company will not be distracted as the management of this one company is. I’m not a VC, but I have seen this in many companies as a corporate investor, board member, and corporate customer: Startups always try to do too many things and that means they will end up doing nothing extremely well. SixApart started by developing a damned fine product in Movable Type but it has neglected that product (as I’ve whined) as it built its hosting business at TypePad; now it is handicapping the software company to advantage the hosting company; and when the protests get loud enough, it will surely neglect the hosting company in turn. The company is small with extremely limited resources and management focus and trying to run these two very different businesses is difficult unto impossible.
I’m not linking this to beat up on SixApart three years later but to see the larger lessons in this. Being a platform is a powerful position but it also means that you will find yourself necessarily serving rather than competing with those who use you. That, I believe, is why Google has been smart enough not to be a content site in any meaningful way — contrasted once again with Yahoo — and even its announcement today about distributing content companies’ video inside advertising units on a distributed network of sites is a stellar example of creative platform thinking.
As I noodle around with the notion of a new architecture of news, I wonder whether news organizations start to look more like platforms and less like closed content compaies, enabling news to be gathered and shared across a wide network of contributors, owners, and distributors rather. And so you start to ask whether you are a platform or a creator and you ask whether it’s possible to be both.
Just noodling.
: LATER: In email exchange, Fred Wilson responds:
Is youtube a platform or a media property?
Is flickr a platform or a media property?
Is feedburner a platform or a media property?
In my view, the best way to create value is to be both, but give away the platform to any and all takers and monetize the resulting media property that is created in the process.
He asks whether I agree and I say, uncharacteristically, I’m not sure. Perhaps media is different from technology: You get to use one to build the other. But still, you have to be careful not to fall into channel conflict. Yahoo created that conflict by becoming a media
destination using others’ stuff. YouTube became a media destination by enabling others to distribute their stuff, eh?
Dennis Kucinich presented himself to a meeting of AFSCME as the candidate with no strings attached as he went flying around the stage. So how could we at PrezVid resist setting that to music? Watch our choices below. What’s your soundtrack for Kucinich on Broadway?
