Here’s what I think is a pretty solid business tip: I wouldn’t back or bet on a company and industry that’s described this way in today’s New York Times (my emphasis):
Like newspaper owners, media moguls are looking for new ways to protect their investment from the ravages of the Internet. And, as with the newspaper industry, the answer remains elusive.
I’d rather invest in a company that will take advantage of the new opportunities of the internet, not seeing ravages in the future but instead growth and profit. I’ve said often that protection is no strategy for the future. An industry whose strategy for the future is built on trying to keep us from doing what we want to do and resist the flow of the internet is an industry that is merely biding time. That should be the lesson they learn from newspapers and music.
Yes, I think that the tactic described in that story, put forward by Time Warner’s Jeffrey Bewkes, of enabling us to watch shows we’ve already paid for online makes sense. Indeed, I refuse to use HBO on demand on cable today because they want to charge me extra to watch what I’ve already paid for. So I’ll rush to the chance to watch my shows without having to go through the bother of recording them or paying for them twice.
But the real future is an on-demand future, an unbundled future. Once freed from the forced march of cable bundles, I will buy only the content I want to buy online, no longer being bribed into supporting the 90 percent of cable channels I never watch so I can get the 10 percent I want.
For that matter, what’s a channel? I was an an event last week with entertainment moguls of various camps and one asked another whether the channel would die. The second exec didn’t think so. At first, I agreed, as I pictured myself on the couch watching one of the channels I do care about.
But then I pictured my kids on the couch. They’re not doing what I do. They never just watch channels (tennis matches excluded). They live on-demand. They watch programming only through the web, Hulu, the DVR, on-demand channels. Some look at that future, our kids’ future, and see “the ravages of the internet.” They’re not long for this world; they’re only trying to delay the inevitable. They’re trying to swim upstream against the internet. But they’re only going to drown there.
Three apparently unrelated items on the shift from valuing the product to valuing the process as the product:
* Trendwatching tells the story of what it calls “foreverism” – that is, that things never end (friendships, news stories, product development) and uses as illustration not only process journalism but also beta chocolate. TCHO is a chocolate company populated with geeks and so they brought betathink to their candy, releasing it as a beta, taking feedback from customers, and iterating it 1,026 times before coming out with the 1.0 chocolate. They didn’t put out bad chocolate to start with; they did their best. But then their customers helped make it better, ever better.
* Experientia.com reports – translating the newspaper La Stampa – that Italians are buying goods less often and renting them more often.
But the real revolution is that renting is becoming a way of life which is changing consumption and society. Car sharing, bike sharing, i.e. quick rentals of cars and bikes, but also dress sharing, i.e. the rental of clothes and handbags. There is toy sharing: children toys, small machines, lego, and puzzles. Even tools for the disabled, wheelchairs, orthopaedic supports, computers, and whatever you might need in the gym, sports or vacation. You don’t need to buy, you can just rent.
I think this ties into the idea of process: You can always rent the latest without having to buy it. You can afford to do so because you are sharing the cost with other users. Companies can find larger customer bases who are likely to be satisfied more because they are getting the latest. We move from a consumption economy to a use economy.
* NYU student Cody Brown delivers a neat take on the discussion about process v. product journalism last week, making distinctions between batch and real-time processing of journalism (read: The New York Times as opposed to blogs). Because The Times’ brand hinges on it as a product that has been curated and edited and checked and polished – note editor Bill Keller’s language on The Daily Show about his package – it finds itself in dangerous territory trying to compete in real time with those whose brand expectations are entirely different.
Brown says that for print, the “gestalt” is “batch processing.” How should it develop its brand? “As the voice of god.” How should it publish information on a developing story? “Cautiously. It should triple check it’s information and call every source involved in the story to give them an opportunity to comment.” How should it produce its product? “Into tight neatly written comprehensive articles … meant to exist as a ‘first draft of history.’” Who should do this? “Professionals. It’s expensive. A finite number of pages means a constant question: what is newsworthy to the most number of people?”
Compare and contrast with his take on online. Gestalt: “”Real Time Processing. Information is processed on the fly.” Brand? “An open platform…. Take the values/tactics that go on behind the walls of a newsroom (’the magic journalism box’) and execute them publicly.” How to publish? “Instantly. When a page is able to be updated at any frequency, corrections can be made just as fast. Rumors and gossip can be used as leverage to get sources, who otherwise wouldn’t, to spill what they know. Publishing incomplete information is the fastest way to get users to contribute to the bigger picture. This is a tactic in effective commons-based-peer production and it is how Wikpedia grew so fast and so well. As Harvard Law Professor, Yochai Benkler, describes, it often looks like a ‘disaster area.’ This is the ’scuttlebutt’ the Times can’t wrap its head around.” How should it produce its work? “API.” Who should do it? “Everyone in the beat. When a website has unlimited pages: there is no excuse.”
Brown says it’s possible for one to produce like the other But “the challenge is in branding.”
The messy, opinionated, incomplete, rumorladen, shit-show that is actual news production is hidden away. If you want a real time news website, it must be brought to the surface. This isn’t a problem for a brand like Tech Crunch, but it puts print news brands in a terribly awkward position. How does The New York Times show the mess under its articles without wrecking the omniscient aura of the brand it has worked so hard for? …
Batch is killing them. Online, it is expensive, slow, and wasteful. It’s not sustainable and it’s a problem that will only get bigger for the The New York Times. … The fundamental problem The New York Times has online is that its brand carries too much weight. The Times stamp means a piece has been packaged, and is no longer in process. If they’re interested in participating in the journalism of the 21st century, they need to shed the baggage of the last one.
They won’t.
Very neat take on the question. It’s not just the standards, tradition, and ego of the legacy press that prevents it from enjoying the benefits of beta, Brown argues, but the perception and value of its practices and reputation. That would seem to argue that it’s impossible for the legacy to update from product to process. I’m not sure I agree, but I do think that Brown put the challenge clearly through one end of the prism. The question is whether the legacy press – for the benefit of its staff even more than its audience – can issue enough caveats to enable it to work real-time. Forget blogs in this discussion. Will The New York Times ever be comfortable working on the standards and practices of 24-hour cable news? Can it afford to? Don’t they have to?
(By the way, the subject of last week’s NYT snipe, Michael Arrington, did well in an On the Media interview on his process with Bob Garfield.)
I’m delighted that the Associated Press is going to distribute the reporting of four nonprofit investigative news organizations: the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica. That will get their work seen in many more print outlets. Print.
Except — and I hate to have another exception with the AP — online that isn’t necessarily the best service to the work. In a search-driven ecology, the better thing to do is to send all traffic to the reporting at its source so that can rise in search. It also means that as stories are updated, readers can get the latest. And it gives these centers the opportunity to raise money with readers who care about their work. So I hope that the papers that print these stories online also link to the source.
After joining in the tweetfire over the NYTimes’ slam on bloggers and bloggers’ slam back, Guardian colleague and friend Charles Arthur took the amazing move – have to try this sometime – of sitting back and reconsidering. And he saw what I was trying, without complete success, to express: the class of cultures, expectations, assumptions, and practices in online news:
OK: now see the publishers of Gizmodo, Engadget, Gawker, TechCrunch et al as the Davids, fighting the Goliaths of the New York Times and, of course, the Guardian and all the other papers. Should they fight on the same terms? If they want to get beaten, sure. They’ll never be able to find the experienced journalists, the experienced sales people, the special something that the papers have been able to build up over decades. The papers have the news process down pat. They can get those stories into paper-sized parcels and out to people so effectively there’s no room left.
So the blogs have to create their own battlefield, their own rules, and fight there.. . .
Such as what? Such as doing stuff that the papers won’t. Post rumours, and declare them as such; copy and rewrite like mad, so that how fast you can get the post up is more important than whether you checked it; let the readers in effect write the news; publish galleries of Photoshopped “is this the next iPhone?” galleries.
All the while, the Goliaths of the news industry stand by, shaking their heads. Hell, they’re doing it wrong! That’s not how you put stuff into a news parcel! It’s like this… hey, doesn’t anyone want it? Funny, the orders have dried up. And the Davids count the money they’re getting from adverts supplied against millions of page views. (They don’t have as many journalists as in a traditional news room, you say? Yeah. Life’s like that sometimes.)
There is one note of relief: unlike war, it’s not absolute. There’s plenty of room for everyone to thrive in this: the Davids and the Goliaths can live alongside each other. But the latter have to adapt so that they can get it right, and trade on the things that have got them where they are – which in effect means their brand reputation – and capitalise on it. Else those Boston Globe cuts aren’t going to be the last.
Right. They have things to learn from each other if they can stop sniping long enough to notice how few of them are left standing on the battlefield. But their culture expectations get in the way. To continue Charles’ war metaphor: It’s the Redcoats vs. the rebels; the GIs vs the Vietcong. When the new guy breaks the rules, protesting that they’re doing it wrong does no good. Learn. That’s what I was trying to say.
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I liked Charles post so much, I left what I think is my best comment ever. Others didn’t agree. It was:
Charles made one more somewhat related point in his post: Where are the publishing side people on Twitter and blogs and all that? What are they learning from the Davids/rebels/Vietcong?:
Never underestimate Google. That should have been my 41st WWGD? rule. Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web – and argued they should buy Twitter - Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave.
In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.
Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.
Here, I speculated about the topic becoming the new atomic unit of news, supplanting the article with wikis that contained a snapshot of what we know now, blogs that treat news as the process it is, links (do what you do best, link to the rest), discussion, and media of all types, some even live (Twitter, Qik.com). Marissa Mayer also gave journalists advice on the new form of news, telling them they needed to maintain updates under a permalink for the story so it could be searched and found.
Wave takes this to the next level. It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki – a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other.
Wave isn’t just the email we’d invent if email were invented today, as was Google’s goal. Wave is what news can be if we invent it today, as we must.
Wave is the new news.
: LATER: I just got email from Jay Parkinson, who is remaking health care at Hello Health. He, too, was impressed with the opportunities in Wave.
Replace news story with “disease you suffer from” and reporter with primary care doc and editor with specialist and photos with lab results, etc, and you can see its potential.
About a week ago, I met with Tristan Harris, founder of Apture, which enables sites to create rich link boxes that display media of all sorts. As we talked, it occurred to me that he had something else in his hands, something I’d talked with the Guardian about over time: the ability to make a newspaper embeddable.
That is, imagine if any content in a paper or news site could be shared on this blog via YouTube-like players that could display not just video but also text, photos, audio, graphics, anything. Imagine if, rather than having to cut-and-paste a quote from a news story, I could quote it here in a box that also delivered the context of the entire story, along with the source’s branding, links, and even advertising.
I’ve argued that newspapers need to think distributed, that they need to go to where the readers are rather than expecting them to be attracted to news sites like magnets; this is a key lesson of What Would Google Do?.
It’s a start. Gillian Reagan in the NY Observer says that perhaps this is a way for newspapers to get distribution and branding from Google; PaidContent agrees.
But I hope for something broader, something any site (even BuzzMachine) could implement to make itself embeddable without having to go through Google’s funnel. That’s what I think Apture might be able to do.
The Guardian, NY Times, NPR, and BBC are on the right road, of course, with their APIs, which enable other sites to embed their content and enables the news organizations to, in the words of the Guardian, weave themselves into the fabric of the web. Daylife (where I’m a partner) also has an API. But the limitation of an API is that it needs developers and that means time. A toolset such as Elements (or Daylife’s new Select) enables mortals such as me to embed content or create pages.
Note well that this is the opposite of locking content behind pay walls. Becoming embeddable is a way for a site to act like Google and go with the flow of the internet, to be distributed by its readers, to take its content and branding and advertising out into the web.
Josh Young writes a fascinating and nicely written essay about the shape of news and competition around it in the Google (read: internet) age, but I think it badly needs a clear lede summarizing his point to prove his point.
So I’ll summarize: He’s saying that Google is causing news to be reshaped so it can be found, now that it has been unbundled from the products we used to have no choice but to buy: our newspapers. He says that news is an “experience good” we can’t really know until we taste it. He says we need a new experience of news and it ain’t Google. I will argue, though, that this very post, the one you are reading now, is the antidote to what he sees, for I experienced his essay and I recommend it to you without Google while also giving you the search-engine-and-browsing-friendly summary – a reason to read – that we now expect before investing in content online. And there’s my point.
Young argues that Google causes the structure of news to change. We agree about the change but we disagree about the cause. Even I don’t think that the all-powerful Oz Google is behind everything that happens on and because of the internet.
In fact, news is one of the areas where Google has little influence – despite the wails and whining of newspaper people – for Google is bad at current content, at the live web, at news. It needs content to ferment with links and clicks and context before it can figure out what it is. There’s no time for that in news. And GoogleNews itself isn’t an answer for it only makes the vastness of news vaster. We don’t find the latest news through search. We find it through recommendations, still, either from editors (going to a packaged site, a [cough] newspaper.com) or from peers (in blogs and RSS for years now and more lately in Twitter; this is why Twitter matters and why Google recognizes that it complementary).
So I’ll argue that we already have the beginnings of the news experience Young wants. Through this quote (which comes at the end of Young’s essay but would have been better as his lede, I think… I often find that to be the case when I write a post), please replace the word “search” with news, for “search” has become synonymous with Google and that’s not what we’re talking about. Young writes:
“We need a What we need is a search [news] experience that let’s us discover the news in ways that fit why we actually care about it. We need a search [news] experience built around concretely identifiable sources and writers. We need a search [news] experience built around our friends and, lest we dwell too snugly in our own comfort zones, other expert readers we trust…. We need a search [news] experience built around beats and topics that are concrete—not hierarchical, but miscellaneous and semantically well defined. We need a search [news] experience built around dates, events, and locations. We need a search [news] experience that’s multi-faceted and persistent. Ultimately, we need a powerful, flexible search [news] experience that merges [automation] and human judgment—that is sensitive to the very particular and personal reasons we care about news in the first place.
I think we’re seeing the beginning of what Young wants in blogs, Twitter, aggregation, better automated targeting, geotagging, and the move to human curation and I hope we’ll see people build other pieces of it in the ecosystems of news that will replace the papers that die (or don’t). I’m working with folks who are trying to build that now – with beats and organization and social recommendation – associated with the New Business Models for News Project. It’s just starting to come together, I think, and Young will be glad to know it’s not from Google; Google’s only a part.
Something like that, Young and I agree, will be the structure of the experience of finding – searching, broadly defined – and using and spreading news. As I said, we also agree that the structure of news will also change – but not just because of Google.
I argue in this post and in slides 6-11 here that the basic building block of news will no longer be the article – a creation and necessity of the means of production of newspapers – but instead the topic or the flow with many elements: process (think: blog), updates (feed), snapshot of current knowledge (wiki), perspective (comments, links), curation (links), and narration (the article still has its place). Yes, it is SEO-friendly. And, yes, Marissa Mayer gave a similar vision to John Kerry’s Senate hearings – of a “living story” that is updated at a permalink – but that doesn’t mean she decreed it. The greater functionality of the internet is shifting news to this structure because it is also link-friendly, blog-friendly, Twitter-friendly, feed-friendly, conversation-friendly, distribution-friendly….
If we invented news today - and we are – this is how it will look, not because Google replaces paper as the medium but because we are not limited to either.
(By the way, I’m probably wrong about Young’s lede. Even without it, because his essay was so deftly written, I read through to the end and took the trouble of reacting to it and recommending it to you here. I’ll also confess that I found it through Google search but only because Young kindly linked to me and mentioned my book. So the link was human, conversational, contextual, targeted, everything Young wants. Google just helped.)
: LATER: Another neat essay today, this one by Kim Pearson, on bringing computational thinking to journalism. I think it stretches the point just a bit (I don’t see how slideshows are particularly compuational) but the larger point is intriguing.
There’s some dangerously wrong-headed lobbying from media lawyers in today’s Washington Post arguing for new laws to protect old media from new technology. Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown of Baker Hostetler argue that Congress should:
* Change copyright law so that “the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement.” This would be downright suicide for not only the media companies that I assume are their clients but for every business that wants to be discovered on the web. Not being able to analyze an entire page would mean that search engines could not reliably send searchers (aka customers) to relevant pages and that would mean that the owners of those pages would not be discovered. It would tear about the very essence of the web. This is so dangerously ignorant of the architecture of our new world and how it operates as to be stunning. It also is ignorant of the new link economy of the web. Why the hell do they think that companies hire SEO firms – so that Google will do a better job of analyzing all their content. (Who hires these people?)
* Enact as law the “hot news” doctrine to protect against “taking the guts of the content.” Today, you can’t protect knowledge. The fact that, for example, GM has cut 1,100 dealers is just a fact and it is spread – all the more efficiently online – via conversation. You can’t sue me for learning that in a newspaper and repeating it. That is key to the functioning of a community, a market, and a democracy. But these guys are following an effort by the Associated Press to call on the so-called hot-news doctrine to argue this knowledge is somehow theirs. Once again, this exposes shocking ignorance of the speed of the knowledge economy. Bloomberg and Reuters understand this: If they can deliver knowledge faster to their clients so they can exploit that knowledge more quickly than others, then they have value. That is, indeed, hot news. But they are well aware that the unique value of that heat expires in moments – seconds – and once knowledge is known, it is a commodity. But these lawyers want to make business by getting Congress to extend copyright to enable publishers to sue for compensation of sites that practice what they call “linkspoitation” (that is, putting ads around links, which could be defined as every decent commercial page on the internet). How long, I’d ask them, is news hot? A minute? A day? A week? How long before others may repeat that knowledge? Incredible, eh?
* Use “tax policy” (that is, tax dollars – i.e., our money) to “promote the press.” Which press, gentlemen? The press you represent or the press we the people are creating? We out here don’t actually need such a subsidy because we’ve been smart enough to take advantage of the new, free press and we are not saddled with the costs of an old press. Why should we then have to subsidize the market failure and anti-strategic stubbornness of the owners of those old presses? “Congress,” they write, “could provide incentives for placing ads with content creators (not with Craigslist).” That’s just plain payola. They also want “allowances for immediate write-offs (rather than capitalization) for all expenses related to news production.” Except we in the new press don’t have capital expenses for presses and buildings and trucks. Can we write off our PJs?
* Give news companies antitrust exemption so they may collude and form cartels to wall off their content and fix prices together. “As noted in the Kerry hearing,” the lawyers write, “publishers need collective pricing policies for their Web sites to finally break out of the expectation of free content that is afflicting the industry. Antitrust immunity is necessary because most individual news sites can’t go it alone by walling off their content for fees — readers will simply jump to sites that are still free.” That’s called capitalism, gentlemen. The market. I’d rather protect that open market than the failed monopolists who are finally losing control of it.
* They also want to take off ownership restrictions on media companies. There, we don’t disagree. Let the dinosaurs huddle together against the cold wind of change if they want. Well, except such a strategy of consolidation hasn’t worked so well for Tribune Company or McClatchy or Clear Channel or Time Warner or The New York Times Company, has it? (Is anybody hiring this firm for business strategic advice?)
Add it all up and their lobbying is ignorant of the architecture and workings of the internet economy and, for short-term gain for dying companies, willfully destructive to fundamental principles of the law.
Somebody stop these guys.
* * *
In the comments under the Washington Post piece, Dale Harrison makes a great response, which I’ll quote almost in full (hoping he doesn’t sue me):
This is a shockingly misguided analysis and set of recommendations!
A lesson worth remembering is at the turn of the 20th century people had a transportation problem…and the solution turned out not to be a “faster horse”…but a Ford.
And one should note that the Ford didn’t arise out of the “Horse Industry Revitalization Act”.
I think the future of the media business will look as different as Ford and Toyota’s operations look from horse traders and blacksmiths.
Imagine what the passage of such ill-conceived legislation would have done to the car industry a century ago.
It would have strangled the nascent auto industry at birth, postponing it’s inevitable rise while sheltering a dying industry, only postponing it’s inevitable demise…doing great damage to both. Newspapers need to be encouraged to adapt to the future, not retreat behind legislative walls hoping the future will go away.
The newspaper industry’s troubles go to the very core of their historical business model.
What’s historically given value to editorial content is the relative scarcity of distribution versus readers. Newspapers have historically enjoyed natural localized economic monopolies that allowed each of them to exercise monopoly control over the amount of content (and advertising) they allowed into their local marketplaces.
Monopoly constraint of distribution and supply will always lead to prices (and profits) significantly above open market rates. Newspapers then built costly organizational structures commensurate with that stream of monopoly profits (think AT&T in the 1970’s).
The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns advertising (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates. The often heard complaint of Internet ad rates being “too low” is inverted…the real issue is that traditional ad rates have been artificially boosted for enough decades for participants to assume this represents the long-term norm.
An individual reader now has access to essentially an infinite amount of content on any given topic or story. All those silos of isolated editorial content have been dumped into the giant Internet bucket. Once there, any given piece of content can be infinitely replicated and re-distributed to thousands of sites at zero marginal costs. This breaks the back of old media’s monopoly control of distribution and supply.
The core problem for the newspapers is that in a world of infinite supply, the ability to monetize the value in any piece of editorial content will be driven to zero… infinite supply pushes price levels to zero!
What this implies is that no one can marshal enough market power to monetize the value of content in the face of such an infinite supply and such massively fragmented distribution. Pay-walls, lawsuits and ill conceived legislation won’t allow the monopoly conditions to be re-constructed.
There are certainly ways to make online news profitable…and many of us are working to develop such approaches…but I can assure you they don’t involve inventing a “faster horse”…
* * *
In Twitter, Howard Weaver asks an excellent question: Wonder who hired them? If newspapers are lobbying Congress, that lobbying should be – must be – transparent.
Dean Singleton’s memo decreeing his strategy for Medianews is unbelievable. I swear it could have been written – hell, I read it and wrote memos arguing against memos exactly like it – in 1996. It’s as if nothing has been learned since then. I was also depressed reading Howard Kurtz’ eulogy to print but not for the same reason it depressed Howie – that is, because papers are dying. What bothered me was that, not unlike Singleton’s forward-to-the-past exercise in self-delusion, it kept all the old assumptions about news and media intact.
If we haven’t learned anything else, isn’t it that the change that has overtaken newspapers (and TV) is radical and complete? Haven’t we at least learned to throw out the old assumptions?
* Newspapers online are still selling scarcity to advertisers: just so many banners presented to just so many eyeballs. Google instead sells performance and that is what motivated it to create AdSense and to get more and more targeted and efficient and relevant ads all around the web. Think abundance.
* Newspapers are inefficient. I spoke with an editor the other day who broke down the 300-person newsroom of yore and conceded that only 50 of those people created journalism. I would add that when working with a much larger network in a new news ecosystem, the news organization can be even smaller and still see as much news reported. That’s what no one ever talks about when whining about how to support news: the other side of the P&L. Think efficiency.
* Newspapers are no longer monopolies. They have new competition. That’s why they can’t set the price for content or ads anymore. The market will. Get used to it. Think like capitalists.
* Newspapers are no longer factories. Not of paper, not of content. The new news organization will add value by organizing news, enabling it to be made elsewhere, helping it to be made better and bigger in a larger ecosystem. Think collaborative.
* Newspapers are stale. The minute – minute – they say anything, what they say can – if they’re lucky – become part of the conversation and then that knowledge is a commodity. The value to the old product disappears. It’s not the product that’s valuable. Think process.
* Newspapers aren’t conversations. And conversations are the new distribution. If you can’t be searched and linked – if you close up behind a wall – you won’t be found. Think open.
* Newspapers can no longer be about control. They have to be about enabling the community to share its own knowledge and succeed doing so. Think platform.
I LOVE this post by Amber Smith adapting the precepts of What Would Google Do? to newspapers.
As long as our industry evolves from newsPAPER to news ORGANIZATION, we’ll survive. And when you think about it, that should be easier for us to do than, say, turn “Dunkin’ Donuts” into a place for great coffee. If Jon Luther can position DD for the future, surely a bunch of passionate journalists can save our profession.
(Well, see the post below about coffee.)
Smith then proceeds to riff on the old and new ways of thinking in news organizations. A few snippets:
Old way of thinking: The newspaper was a product.
New way: News organizations provide a service.
Old way of thinking: Readers became known as “the audience” in the early days of the Internet, describing a one-way relationship wherein readers sat still to observe a performance.
New way: Readers/users are participatory.
Old way of thinking: Newspapers attempted to be all things to all people, serving a mass geographic audience.
New way: News organizations strive to serve a mass of niche communities that already exist, (some geographic, but most based on interests.)
Old way of thinking: Newspapers marketed themselves to a population.
New way: News organizations converse, engage and collaborate with the communities they serve; the population markets the news organization among itself.
Old way of thinking: Newspapers operated in a climate of “scarcity;” news space became tighter when ad sales diminished or the price of newsprint increased.
New way- News organizations have an abundance of space on line. . . .
Old way of thinking: Newspapers that embarked on the Web sought a place to distribute their content.
New way: News organizations see the internet as a 3-D space of reciprocal links. “Every link and every click is a connection, and with every connection, a network is born or grows stronger.” (p. 28) . . .
Old way of thinking: Editors were in charge, choosing which stories to provide to the readers/audience, based on what the editors thought the readers/audience wanted and needed to know.
New way: Readers are in charge. They read what they want, when they want.
Old way of thinking: Newspapers served each reader the same plate of information.
New way: Readers fill their plates with the things they like.
Old way of thinking: Editors decided which beats would be covered.|
New way: “Beats” are based on niche communities that already exist. . . .
Old way of thinking: Newspapers were hesitant to even mention competitors in the newspaper.
New way: News organizations do what they do best and link to the rest, as Jarvis says, and yes, that means even if the link leads to the competition.
Old way of thinking: Soon after the “nut graph” newspaper stories contained a paragraph(s) of background information.
New way: Articles on Web sites link to anything that’s relevant – background information, transcripts that back up interviews, photographs. “On line, content without links is the tree that falls in the forest that nobody hears.” (p. 124)
I could keep quoting and quoting but instead, I’ll urge you to go read her list in full and add your own.
Smith does this in a guest post in Gina Chen’s blog and Gina herself, a few days earlier, also adapted WWGD? to papers with advice on adding value and listening to readers.
We’re fighting for our lives here as an industry. We can’t afford to do anything that doesn’t add value, and figuring out what adds value must be tied to the reader. . .
We forget that we’re a service industry: We’re in the business of helping readers make sense of their world, not of selling them news. And like any business, if we aren’t responsive to our customers, we’ll die.
Forbes quotes AP head Tom Curley sabre-rattling in negotiations with Google: “Curley warned that if Google doesn’t strike the right deal with the AP soon, ‘They will not get our copy going forward.’” This is more than mere negotiation. The AP has been making noise about trying to force Google to favor it and its members in the search engine’s algorithms.
Forbes explains:
The AP, a 163-year-old cooperative owned by news organizations, won’t discuss its talks with Google, but plans to create landing pages and Web-based “news maps” directing users to original AP stories (and away from secondary sources who post material “borrowed” from the AP). To do this, the AP needs Google’s help. Most likely that means Google creating search protocols similar to those created from the licensing deal the AP inked with Google in 2006.
Since that deal was struck, Google has paid the AP undisclosed fees to carry AP content on the Google News section of the site. Search rankings on Google News give priority to recognizable news brands like the AP. But Google applies no such algorithmic discretion to general searches. The broader search rankings spread AP content out across the Web, says Curley, encouraging misappropriation by other sites. Curley wants Google to “protect content from unauthorized use and pay us for the longtail.” By “longtail,” Curley refers to the thousands of small sites that collectively drive vast herds of traffic using AP content.
THe AP is trying to play victim here, saying that Google is pointing to sites that steal its content. Name two. When I search for news, I can’t remember being taken to a thief. I’m often taken to the AP, which rewrites news and cuts the links to original journalism and thus cuts off the value of links. But not reputed thieves.
Now, apparently, the AP wants to start to rectify its role in the link economy by creating these news maps. OK, I’ll agree that there must be more linking directly to journalism at its source. But I don’t know why Google needs the AP to do that. It could improve its algorithms not to favor certain brands but to favor original reporting wherever it occurs, at the AP, at newspapers, or at blogs.
So it’s in the sense that I’ll suggest Google should cancel the AP contract first – not as retribution but as a service to journalism. Now GoogleNews runs full AP stories it licenses from the wire service, taking traffic away from AP members’ sites and pointing to rewrites of reporting rather than original reporting. If what we want is an ethic of linking to original journalism, then Google should consider no longer presenting full AP stories and, for that matter, linking to AP rewrites. That would serve original reporting. But we have to wonder whether serving journalism or the AP is the AP’s real strategy in these negotiations.
Danny Sullivan links us to an explanation of the AP’s tactics at AllThingsD earlier this month:
This has been construed in some quarters as a plan to create a search engine or news portal. But it’s really just an attempt to upgrade the AP’s search engine optimization strategy — that is, trying to get its stuff to show up higher on Google’s (GOOG) search results. It will do that via “search pages,” or “topic pages,” which are par for the course in the Web world….
If the search page plan works, the pages will be generating plenty of page views when people land on them, and it’s possible that the AP will sell ads on that inventory, Kennedy says. But their real function is to shuttle searchers to the original source material from the AP’s members.
So Google could cut out the middleman – the AP – and just link to the original journalism itself. But being bullied into linking to the AP and its members is not the way to go.
Sullivan explains:
Google’s web search quality team — which has nothing to do with Google’s business folks — generally does not take well to people suggesting they’re somehow going to own the search results. AP content probably will start ranking well for some things, but if it started showing up Wikipedia-style for everything, people outside the AP would start complaining about favoritism.
That’s what makes the Forbes piece so puzzling. AP chief executive Tom Curley (who the AP told me was “unavailable” to talk; nor after nearly two hours, does anyone else seem available) sounds naive enough to believe he can force Google into a deal that would give AP preferential treatment in regular search results….
Google News doesn’t give “recognizable news brands” a boost. I’ve never seen them say this, nor have I seen it actually happen in real life. Google News includes large and small news sites and lists a diverse collection of stories. I know lesser-known news sites do well because I run one of those. At times, I can have a headline story that beats the AP or other mainstream outlets in Google News….
Certainly if Google starts ranking brands better than other content, they’ll have issues. Brands do not equal trust. Enron had a brand; AIG has a brand — being a brand doesn’t mean that you are more trustworthy or deserve an automatic ranking boost. From my perspective, Google’s algorithm has continued to change over the past few years to reward trusted sites. Many brands have sites that Google has decided are trustworthy, but some don’t.
Curley is foolish if he thinks he’ll browbeat Google into somehow changing its algorithm in web search to reward AP as part of this deal. Google’s search quality engineers wouldn’t stand for that, any more than a journalist would stand for a newspaper CEO marching into a newsroom and demanding that certain advertisers get favorable stories written about them.
There’s the irony: Journalists would never stand for what the AP is allegedly trying to do on behalf of journalism. If an editor walked into a newsroom and told reporters: ‘I want you all to quote only big-company and government officials from this approved list and stop quoting little people,’ there’d be a proper revolt. Google’s engineers will protect the authority of their algorithm just as self-respecting journalists would protect their own independence and reputation.
So, Google: Resist the bullying and blackmail. Drop the AP. Perfect ways to link to and thus support journalism at its source. That is the better service to the public and news.
(Full disclosure: I’m a partner at another aggregator, Daylife. As I’ve blogged before, I’ve discussed both there and at GoogleNews the need to link to and thus support journalism at its source, wherever it occurs.)
: LATER: In the comments, Paul Colford of the AP corrects me:
AP sells only a selection of its staff-generated international and national news stories to Google and other commercial customers. A very small slice of this — less than 2 percent of the mix — comes from member newspapers, typically scoops that are credited to the papers.
Stories from member newspapers make up a much larger piece of AP’s state wires — but the state wires are not available to Google and others outside the AP membership.
I stand corrected. But then I would also say that the AP now has an unfair advantage over its members by selling its content to Google to distribute in full. Google does this only for wire services, not for anyone else. And I don’t want it to do this for others, because someone will get left out of the mix. So I still think Google should link instead, and link directly to original journalism.
It’s fate that GeoCities dies at the same moment that MySpace reshuffles and reboots its management in the face of no growth (which, on the internet, is the same as shrinkage). What they have in common, of course, is that they are platforms for creating content.
But content is not king. What is? Well, the junta in charge of growth online is Google, which is about search; Facebook, which is about social; and now Twitter, which is about live and social.
There’s a lesson here for newspapers because they’re about content. And they’re not as open as GeoCities and MySpace, which are (or were) at least platforms for others to create content. Newspapers create and control their own content and then allow others to comment on it (but enough about you….). Every effort newspapers have made to bring their content online and to update it with new ways to make it – audio, video, Flash, or the next flavor – still leave them in the exact same spot. That’s why they seem to be spinning their wheels. They still define themselves as content.
Newspapers must define their value differently – not as paper, for God’s sake, and not even as content but as a platform. But a platform for what? Content? No, there go GeoCities and MySpace. I think they should follow the advice of Mark Zuckerberg, member of the ruling junta, that their job is to bring communities elegant organization. In a sense, they always have done that; they helped communities organize their knowledge so they could organize themselves; that’s the essence of an informed democracy.
But now there are so many more ways to organize ourselves and we naturally use those tools to do it. As Clay Shirky teaches us, we don’t need organizations to organize. We need tools and maybe support. That’s what Google, Facebook, and Twitter provide. Should newspapers create such tools? No. They’re not good at it. But they should use the tools that exist to help communities organize themselves. They need to figure out how they add value to that.
Or else the will go the way of GeoCities and MySpace.
