Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home.
Suw is also founder and board member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
Kevin: From the blog of the Frontline Club, a club for journalists in London, asking whether the debate over the journalistic use of Twitter is over. It’s incredibly useful especially with additional tools for visualisation and search.
Kevin: A great collection of ways to visualise Twitter interactions. Twitter and other social applications have huge amounts of data that can be useful for journalism.
Kevin: From Adrian Monck: Jon Stewart’s show is just like the mainstream media, only more entertaining. It may not fit Modern Journalism’s definition of news, which requires a serious, authoritative, quasi-scolding style, but who gave them the right to de
Kevin: I always chalked up my preference for objective reporting as an American thing, but it’s great to hear my colleague Roy Greenslade make the case for ‘just the facts’.
Kevin: Twitter hasn’t broken into the mainstream despite a core group of users. Todd Zeigler has created a post to help people explain it to friends and colleagues who might not initially see the utility of Twitter. Twitter’s simplicity and flexibility ma
Kevin: Via Shawn Smith. Barack Obama is building a get out the vote, voter registration system that could mobilise 1m volunteers. Online-offline, social media driven general election crowdsourced juggernaut.
Kevin: From Kaiser Kuo with Ogilvy Digital China. This is a great list of Twitter apps. It is staggering the number of applications build around Twitter.
Steve Moore invited me to answer the question: What comes next? In my case, I was supposed to talk about the future of newspapers. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Head of Digital Publishing at Penguin, talked about the future of the book. And Matt Locke, of Channel 4, talked about the future of television.
Matt and Jeremy were brilliant. Jeremy is asking fundamental questions about what it means to be a publisher in the 21st Century, and Matt makes one of the best cases in the business to free your content to follow the audience. The day of building a website and expecting everyone to come to you is over.
It was a great morning, if for no other reason, I came up with a short way to explain what I really do. People always ask me how I edit the blogs at the Guardian, sometimes adding that wasn't the point of blogs not to have an editor. That's a fair question, and most of the Guardian blogs have desk or section editors who commission most of the content. What is it that I do then?
I use the tools that are disrupting our (the newpaper) business model to do journalism.
It's really that simple, and that's what I mean by leading by doing. How can we use these disruptive technologies to do improve journalism and expand our audience? If gains in technology have brought about faster, better and cheaper technology, why not use technology to beat the competition by being faster, use cheaper technology to undercut existing economics in our business and use technology to get stories and tell them in ways that weren't possible before. These are my goals, and hopefully with a band of merry journalistic pirates we can spread the future more evenly where we work.
It is now clear to almost everyone that the business model that has supported newspapers is under threat and that newspapers must change. Newspapers in the US are facing a perfect storm of declining readership, declining ad sales and a sudden drop, some might say collapse, in real estate advertising tied to the sub-prime crisis. But it's not just the US, lest people believe the cuts are down to the declining newspaper culture there. Le Monde is on strike over job cuts that could cut the newsroom by a quarter. Newsquest Glasgow is cutting 20 editorial positions due to "poor trading conditions".
But more and more it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising
And the writers of the report asked how news organisations could develop a new business model while having to make painful cutbacks. The need for change is urgent, and while the last two years have seen major strides by some news organisations, the companies and, let's be honest, many journalists were slow to adapt to the challenges of a now more than decade-long digital revolution.
What business model are we competing against? The TechCrunches of the world. As of last autumn, they had a full-time staff of eight. They have revenue's of $240,000 a month, and in February, they had 2.6m 'absolute unique visitors', according to Google analytics.
News organisations need to take advantage of the very trends that are disrupting our business model. When I worked for the BBC, they bought a digital video editing system in that had a huge external cabinet, a Mac tower and Avid software. It was about eight years ago, and it cost $80,000, which was reasonable and cheaper than professional systems that came before. Shortly after I left the bureau in 2005, they replaced the system with a Mac laptop, a portable RAID array and Final Cut Pro for about $12,000. It was faster, had more storage and was portable.
1) News, not newspaper, companies
Preparing for the talk gave me an excuse to begin reading Newspaper Next 2.0 report, the second installment in the American Press Institute's project to help newspapers get out ahead of the changes in the industry. Much of the work is based on Clayton Christensen's work and his books The Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution. The authors conclude:
This raises a big question: Are we newspaper companies? If so – if we define our companies and our mission by our core product – these coming digital solutions look threatening, even catastrophic. A newspaper company will instinctively fight to preserve and defend its product and business model. At most, it will cram a few new offerings in around the edges of the old model, as long as they don’t threaten the core.
This is the typical defensive reaction of legacy organizations and industries in the face of disruptive innovation, described vividly by Clayton Christensen in his best-selling books The Innovator’s Dilemma1 and The Innovator’s Solution2. As his research in more than 60 industries showed, it’s also a formula for failure.
To avoid that outcome, this industry needs a major mindshift: It must stop defining itself by its technology. We are not newspaper companies. Rather, we have always been companies whose mission and business model was meeting the human needs for information, knowledge, solutions, social connection, choice-making, buying and selling that arise in a given locale.
This is obviously a business plan for local or regional newspapers and not national, or increasingly, international newspapers and sites. However, there are lessons here for newspapers regardless of the market.
2) Aggressively undercut your own business model before someone else does
Don't do video on the web that pretends to be television and costs just as much to produce. Use Skype to do live podcast two-ways, or have journalists record their audio on their laptops and use Gmail to send the files. The Boulder Camera recently shut down its bespoke community software and shifted to Ning. (Amy Gahran quotes Matt Flood of Camera, who said, "the developer that built it is no longer with the company so we couldn't fix anything or create anything new". Familiar story? Can I hear an amen from how many people have been stuck in this situation?)
The difference between the late 1990s and now is that cost of editorial experimentation has dropped almost to zero in some cases. Creative use of freely available web tools can achieve most editorial goals, and it can be used as a guide for future development. Out of all of the things you could do, it will help you understand what you must do.
3) Good enough undercuts incumbents
I keep coming back to something that Steve Yelvington said at a citizen media workshop we were at last summer:
We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We're taking too long to create 'perfect ' systems that don't meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.
As journalists, we can meet this challenge. We can compete. We always have. We have competed against other journalists for exclusive stories. If new technologies are disrupting our business, we just need to use them to do some disrupting of our own.
Kevin: Optimism from newspaper editors but “Fifty eight per cent believed falling youth readership was their biggest threat, ahead of the internet itself (38 per cent) and lack of innovation and development (36 per cent).”
Next week, I'm headed to Princeton University to talk about the Future of News at the Center for Information Technology Policy. David Robinson has asked me to talk about data visualisation, which, along with a few projects at the day job, has given me an opportunity to think about and explore some areas of interest. During the conference, I'll be blogging here and on the Guardian blogs, most likely a mix at Organ Grinder, our media blog, and also at our Technology blog.
I think one of the opportunities that we're missing in journalism right now is that we're not doing enough with freely available tools to experiment with editorial concepts. The plethora of free web tools allows us to see what works for journalists and just as importantly our audiences and communities. If we lower the cost of experimentation in terms of time and money as near as zero as possible, we can try something new almost every day. As I say, experiment. Learn. Apply lessons. Repeat.
Here's something we can do today: Visualise the North Carolina and Indiana primary addresses of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It took me about 10 minutes to do both, and about 10 minutes to write this post. Innovation at the speed of news.
UPDATE: The embed code for this visualisation is pretty flakey or at least doesn't play well with Strange Attractor's CSS. It's going to take a bit of work. Fail forward.
Kevin: Josh Wolf has an idea for a new form of live news coverage pulling together video services like Qik, Flixwagon and UStream plus Twitter and Skype call ins. He says that it will only take him $1500 to get it off the ground. Faster, better, cheaper.
Kevin: New York Times visualation of how inflation is affecting the average consumer. It manages to fit a tremendous amount of information in a concise format.
Kevin: US newspapers face a continuing decline in circulation and also revenue as the economic downturn. However, the American Press Institute points to 24 newspapers leading in innovation becoming “information and connection utilities”.
The UK National Commission for UNESCO has organised several events today to mark World Press Freedom Day. One of them is: Is New Media killing journalism?
What the hell does this have to do with press freedom? Really? Questions like this publicly expose the bias some journalists still hold against the internet and their online colleagues. I'm mad as hell about this kind of intellectually lazy nonsense, and I'm not going to take it anymore.
And while I know and have worked with some of the people on the panel at the Frontline Club, it's difficult to see that panel making a strong case to support new media, especially the professional troll Andrew Keen. The only reason that he is still given place at a podium is because he reinforces the professional biases of journalists looking for easy answers to job losses and finding a convenient straw man in 'new media' - the 'murderer' - and the 'mob' replacing the 'old professional caste'. His ill-informed views may be comforting to some journalists, but they are palliative care for a professional 'caste', arrogant and bewildered in its decline. Furthermore, I'm a journalist, not some brahmin. And I don't perceive a challenge to the arrogance of some journalists as a threat to journalism as a democratic institution.
And Keen pitting 'expert journalists' versus the uninformed masses is a dishonest representation of what the vast majority of journalists are: Generalists. As a journalist, I know a little bit about a lot of things, but my knowledge of most subjects is superficial given the constraints of time. We do our best to make sense of a fast-paced, fast changing world, but we must rely on the expert knowledge of others and have the skill to interpret that. More journalists should specialise because the complexity of the subjects that we follow is increasing. For example, how many business journalists, let alone general reporting journalists, have the chops to explain the unwinding of collateralised debt obligations to our readers and explain how they are in part responsible for the credit crunch?
But instead of calling journalists to a higher standard, Keen bemoans the lack of intellectual standards amongst the masses who "think we know better than expert journalists. Rather than enlightenment, we want the self-expression and the democratised interactivity of blogs and wikis." Blaming the consumer for why your product isn't selling is a common tactic of hapless executives leading their businesses into bankruptcy.
But let's get back to the question: Is New Media killing journalism? The threat to the traditional business model of journalism could be interpreted as a threat challenge to press freedom. It takes money to mount journalistic investigations. But the threat to the business model of traditional journalism is not solely the fault of so-called new media, which isn't that new unless you've had your head up your arse for more than a decade now. In the US, newspaper readership has been declining since the 1970s. It started long before the wide spread commercial availability of the internet. Classified ad sales for newspapers in the US have been declining, with only the occasional break, since the 1940s.
Let's phrase this question as it should, more honestly, be phrased. Is new media a threat to press freedom? Tell Iranian journalists whose papers have been shut down and have turned to the internet to continue their work that new media is a threat to press freedom. Tell Berkeley journalism student, James Karl Buck, that 'new media' is killing journalism and human rights when he used Twitter to tell Egyptian activists and the world that he had been arrested. Tell people in Burma the technology is a threat to press freedom when the media would not have had the pictures of the recent crack down had it not been for mobile phone technology and the internet. As Geoff Long writes on a blog (sorry Andrew, those damned amateurs again):
Whether it’s via cell phone, blog, picture sharing sites or old-fashioned email, the consensus is that more news got out, and got out a lot quicker, than during the last big uprising and crackdown in 1988.
If you are a supporter of press freedom, then it's clear from example after example, that technology and new media have expanded, not erroded press freedom, often in the world's most repressive countries.
This debate is not about press freedom, it's about business models and technology. To cloak it as a threat to the democratic institution of journalism is dishonest and a distraction. The real question is how do we develop new business models to support the time consuming and therefore, costly, job of quality news gathering.
Instead, journalists fearful for their jobs and more importantly, their perceived positions of authority, have set up the 'new media' as the scapegoat. It's an intellectually bankrupt argument that won't stop their businesses from going bankrupt as well. I'm quite bullish about the future not only of press freedom, but also of journalism. However, it's long past time to move on from this bloggers versus journalists, 'new media' versus journalism debate. It's now a matter of urgency.
UPDATE: The amateurs on Mr Keen's post actually have raised some valid and well researched points. Worth a look through the comments.
UPDATE: From Nico Macdonald's notes, it looks like most of the journalists at the Frontline Club didn't rise to the occasion to attack the straw man of 'new media' presented by Andrew Keen. That's a good note on which to start the bank holiday weekend.
Thanks to Martin Stabe for linking to the news from Steve Outing that Adrian Holovaty will release the code behind Everyblock.com as open source. Everyblock is the Knight-funded project that Adrian launched last year. It's an extension of his groundbreaking ChicagoCrime.org. Normally, I would just link to this via Del.icio.us, but this development is important enough to warrant a post. It's Christmas in June, when Adrian said he will release the code as open source. This is a huge gift from Adrian and by extension the Knight Foundation, if only the industry will take it. Steve Outing has highlighted one application for Everyblock: Mapping classifieds.
When asked about the utility of mapping classifieds, Holovaty says that absolutely that’s a great use for Everyblock’s system. You can easily imagine the Everyblock concept applied to garage sale ads, lost-and-found listings, or real estate listings, for example. Mapping could be useful for other classified categories, too, but of course there are privacy issues to consider. (A private classified advertiser selling his car or bicycle might not want his ad showing where he lives, but since there’s a benefit to exposing that information, he should be given the option.)
There are other valuable points in Steve's post. He is not alone in encouraging news organisations to begin thinking about geo-tagging. It's not even that difficult to add geo-data to stories semi-automatically by parsing the data from the dateline, although the more local the story, the richer the data one would want to add. An increasing number of mobile phones include GPS functionality, and it's not difficult to add this to story data. What about a script that would automatically add that data if the journalist used the data connection via bluetooth to file? We all should be considering adding a geo-data field to our databases. It's a basic step that enables a vast range of journalistic and commercial applications.
And Steve and Adrian go one step further saying that geo-tagging is only one bit of meta-data that news organisations should be consider adding. One of the subtle changes the Guardian (my day job) has made to its CMS is to think about the information architecture of the site and the stories. Structured data, as Adrian has shown in several projects, allows news organisations to begin to make sense of vast amounts of information in novel and very useful ways. We can use our own meta-data to help show trends, make connections and add context to our journalism.
As Steve says, there are alternatives to Everyblock, and the code may not be applicable to all projects. However, I'm increasingly concerned about a 'not made here' complex amongst journalism organisations. You can see some of that in the comments on Ryan Sholin's recent post about building a local news site from scratch. Some of the comments are critical of open-source projects Drupal and WordPress. I'm not a knee-jerk open-source advocate, and some of the criticisms are no doubt valid. But I think many open-source projects deserve consideration along with the custom CMS route. Morris Digital Works has done some ground-breaking work with Drupal. The New York Times has even gone as far as being a good open-source citizen by releasing some of their code on their Open blog. All the code that's fit to printf(), as they say.
But I'm convinced that news organisations have more to gain than to fear from open source and projects like Everyblock. Open source can be another form of networked journalism. Instead of relying solely on your own development team, you can suddenly plug into a worldwide network of passionate developers.
Kevin: Adam Tinworth collects three great quotes from the Journalism Leaders Forum. Sounds like they were reacting to a lot of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Denial - from mainstream media folk. Sounds like digital natives are saying they’re angry and aren’t
Kevin: Sarah Hartley’s post very clearly explains the new economic realities facing media companies. They are being undercut by lower margin rivals. The battle is for “attention, time and reputation”.
Kevin: Amy Gahran at Poynter challenges what she journalists’ assumptions she finds in her training. She’s getting aggravated at what she sees as close mindedness that she believes are preventing journalists from seeing and seizing opportunities.
Kevin: An excellent example of how social media is not just about publishing, but also about listening. Tweetscan and Summize help people listen to what their customers are saying and help make their products better.
Kevin: Great post from Craig talking about how to increase traffic, length of visit and ultimately revenue. It might be the start of a web journalism mission statement.
Many social software experts talk about mapping real world social behaviours onto online spaces. This is a bit of the reverse and shows why some (some would say many) things in Facebook just don't work.
I just read an essay by Clay Shirky, Gin, Television and Social Surplus, about how the industrial revolution has resulted, after a brief period of societal gin-soaking, in a surplus of time and productive capacity which has been mopped up by TV sitcoms. Now, however, this social surplus is being put to use in things like Wikipedia, World of Warcraft and blogging. People are taking their spare time and energy and they're doing something with it.
It's a great essay, and I strongly recommend that you pop over and read it, right now, all the way through, because it articulates something that many of us know is happening, but which a particularly large chunk of the media hasn't cottoned on to yet. It's not the content of Clay's essay that I want to further discuss, but one little line that has much broader ramifications:
The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out.
Every now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn't work. Sadly, we don't often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.
There is a lot of failure in the use of social software in business, on the web, in civic society, but we need to see this as a part of the cycle, a step along on the learning curve. We can't afford to stop experimenting, just because something failed once, or because it didn't work out for someone else. And we can't afford to take part in the Great Race To Be Second, either, because if you're waiting to see how other businesses succeed (or fail) before you leave the starting line, you're not going to be second, you're going to be last.
From a business point of view, the nice thing about social software is that a lot of is is free or ridiculously cheap, so the monetary cost of failure is low and made up mainly of the cost of people's time. There is no need to judge a social software project based on the same criteria as, say, a massive software deployment from a megacorp vendor that cost millions and took three years, yet these are the terms by which many businesses are judging their blog, wiki, or social networking experiments. And because the tech is so cheap, businesses can afford to run many small experiments to find out what works before they deploy tools more widely; indeed, they cannot afford not to.
But we also need to recognise that the biggest speed bump in social software projects is invariably going to be the social, not the software. The technology is improving every month, mainly because it's being developed by small, nimble vendors who use the software they create and want it to be the very best it can be. But the tech is only a fraction of the battle. The rest, like Soylent Green, is made of people.
And this is where the problem with failure comes in. Generally speaking, people don't much like change. They don't even like choice all that much, although they'll tell you that they do. They certainly don't like failure, or anything that looks even remotely like it. (Especially in the UK, although I think that the US is a bit more tolerant.) And they don't like trying again when things do go a bit wobbly.
Failure, real or perceived, is inextricably entwined with status and, frequently, if a project looks like it's about to go bottom up, instead of figuring out how to save it, people figure out how to distance themselves enough to save face. In a business culture where rewards and punishments are focused on the individual, the teamwork and collaboration required to make a social software project a success can become too much of a risk. But if you've got the right skills and personality, you can turn that around.
To be successful at social software implementations in business you need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and relate to computers, tools, and each other. You need to understand how to introduce tools in a way that is non-threatening and which emphasises utility and benefits. You need to understand the political climate within your business, and know how to route around anyone who's threatening to be obstructive.
Secondly, you need to be really pigheaded. If one team doesn't take to a wiki, try working with another. If one blog fails, try to figure out why and then start another. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try again. After all, it's only failure if you give up.
Kevin: Madison (Wisconsin) Cap Times stops the presses on their daily newspaper becoming an online only plus twice a week tabloid. But as Jay Rosen says: “The presses have stopped but the press goes on.”
Kevin: Interesting article about the Cap Times move to web plus twice weekly tabloid. One investigative journalists worries about feeding the beast, but the ‘beast’ feeds investigations by freeing up journalists. But the beast must be fed.
Kevin: Mark Glaser is live blogging a conference at Berkeley called “Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Reporting?” Great coverage of a conversation amongst senior media executives. Mark asks: “Are these the people who will really see
Kevin: When lawyers attack blogs. Thomson rolls out a blogging code of ethics as part of their merger with Reuters. Some of this makes sense such as not using a personal blog to air grievances about colleagues, but I don’t see the logic behind barring emp
When I started in online journalism, we struggled with aspirations that far out-stripped our resources. We were small teams passionate about creating a new medium but still dependent and subservient to legacy media - newspapers and radio and television stations. We yearned to do original journalism but often had to settle for 're-purposing' other journalist's content. We did as much as we could that treated the internet as its own medium, that developed multi-media story telling methods that simply weren't possibly in print or in linear, broadcast radio and television. But most of it was simply shovelware: TV and radio scripts transcribed and thrown up online and print stories chucked on the internet. Or as Whatis.com says:
Shovelware is content taken from any source and put on the Web as fast as possible with little regard for appearance and usability.
It's sad to see that so-called integration sometimes isn't really about integration at all. It's about a maintenance of organisational and internal political status quo. It's about maintaining the dominance of print and broadcast and the subservient, derivative position of the internet. It continues to miss or ignore the opportunities the internet provides for journalists, which now isn't defensible in terms of audience numbers, advertising revenue or future prospects for growth. And as my friend and former colleague at the BBC, Alf Hermida, says, it just doesn't work. The BBC is advertising for a “web conversion producer”. I wonder if this is a position to produce web-literate producers from television and radio journalists. But seriously, Alf says:
This is a flawed concept and risks undermining the reputation for excellent online journalism that the BBC News website has built over the past 10 years. In any case, we tried in the early days of the site when I was a daily news editor, and it didn’t work.
It also implies that online is an after-thought, picking up the scraps off the broadcast table, rather than considered an equal.
Now, I'm not arguing for internet primacy over other media. This is not a zero-sum game. The legacy media still make most of the profits in real money terms, despite the double digit growth rates in online revenue for the past few years. Just as I say that the internet and on demand digital medium need to be understood on the basis of their own strengths, television, radio and print still have unique strengths. As Steve Yelvington says, the internet is one of the centers for a successful media business. He adds:
My rule of thumb is a simple one: Use the right tool for the right job. The Internet's strength is collaborative interaction; print's strengths are linearity, focus and serendipitous discovery.
But as news organisations struggle, some for survival, they will fail if, due to organisational in-fighting, they repeat the same mistakes of the late 1990s. Those few of us in online journalism who survived the dot.com crash have seen this before. Unfortunately, while we have a decade or more of experience, we digital natives still don't have the political capital when we go head-to-head with the powers that be in our own organisations. If media bosses want to engage in Shovelware 2.0, they can use that shovel to bury their own businesses.
Kevin: News organisations need to pay attention to this. Google’s app engine, Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and open source software are driving down the cost of start-up and innovation experimentation. Too many companies suffer from the ‘not invented here’ complex
Kevin: Steve Yelvington: “Context creates value. And another way: Loyalty accrues to the place that helps you find things, not necessarily the place that produces things.”
Kevin: Yahoo has been building a nice stable of Web 2.0 properties, but they haven’t really done much to connect those dots until now. Yahoo’s embrace of open standards is finally making that possible. Another important lesson in being part of the network
I'm usually rubbish at pimping myself, but I spent a couple of hours yesterday online, writing up answers to Dave Witzel's questions over at Live Interviews Online. It was fun to talk about what I do for a living, how I got into speaking Welsh, and to just start to tickle around the edges of ideas about business culture that I've been having lately. Even if I do say so myself, the interview has come out rather well, so do pop over and take a look!
Kevin: Good tips from Nick Booth on building an online community. News organisations want online communities but don’t put enough time, effort and thought into supporting them.
Kevin: Sorry to have missed Adam at the Tuttle Breakfast, but he has some great quick notes on the conversation. I like his observation of how titles can be the barrier to organisational change. Also: How to maintain passion as medium endures?
Not a question I can answer, as I've managed with no little effort to avoid joining, but I know more than one person who might agree with this (via Reportr):
Kevin: Paul Conley says: “No ‘print’ journalist should assume that there’s a place for him in the new world’. Worth the read, but the battle between ‘print’ and ‘web’ people isn’t over.
Kevin: Mindy McAdams highlights a post from journalism student Jared Silfies who takes a picture of his mobile backpack. My kit bags in the past actually counted as excess baggage. Things are faster, better, cheaper and much, much smaller.
Kevin: WSJ looks at study on blog reading habits. It’s a relatively small study. “Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or
Kevin: Must read from Q&A with Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com. “We’re trying to create something that’s true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.” Halleluj
Kevin: Faster, better, cheaper. Audio-video online isn’t about replicating the experience (and economics) of broadcast television. It’s about using lost cost digital tools to change the economics. MediaShift gives you a list of these.
Kevin: Interesting acquisition by SixApart. Anyone who has done business with SixApart knows that they have often steered clients to Apperceptive to fine tune their Movable Type installations. Makes sense to bring them into the fold.
Kevin: Lisa Williams has a top 10 list for journalists of how to survive in a high-tech industry. I like the one time is on your side but only if you take it. Set aside some time to learn something new.
Kevin: Via Mindy McAdams. Journalists can be passionate about journalism and the business. We have to pay the bills. There are very few of us who can rely on public money or trust support. Smart digital journalists are spinning ideas for the future.
Suw: One of the reasons that I’m a stalwart freelance is that I love being able to decide from where I work. Mainly, that tends to be my couch, but perhaps I should get more adventurous.
I already added the post Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media on ReadWriteWeb to del.icio.us because it talks about participation inequalities and relative time spent by people on various social media sites and services. The post has kicked off an interesting discussion in the comments as well as at the office. But as a journalist, one thing caught my eye. Sarah Perez 'interviewed' people on Twitter about how they spend their time using social media. Now, obviously, this isn't a broader sample of people who simply don't participate, but it does give a snapshot of social media usage and a range of participation.
I've used it personally if I have a tech question I'm stymied by or want to get a range of views on a movie or a restaurant. Suw jokingly refers to it as a query for the 'lazyweb'.
However, there is definitely something useful here journalistically. Sarah's use of Twitter also shows how using the service not only as a way to promote your content but also to create community could be used to add to your journalism. No, it's not a random sample. But since when are 'man on the street' interviews?
Kevin: Jeff Jarvis restates something that Suw often says: You don’t make money with a blog, you make money because of it. Jeff and Suw have created personal brands and businesses with their blogs.
Kevin: Must read post on blog and online journalism success metrics. I like the idea of a ‘loyalty index’. Regular readers. Original reporting. Getting people to comment, sign up for the RSS feed or get involved in other ways.
Kevin: Tim Robbins gives a modern version of Newton Minnow’s Vast Wasteland or possibly Network. The activist actor takes broadcasters and US leadership to task. Shame on the NAB for turning off the cameras. Irony?
The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It: Moving from the Paper business to the News business isn’t as simple as picking up a different skillset; it’s about changing the mindset of journalists.
It reminded me of a question I'm often asked about cultural change: How do you turn journalists into bloggers? The simple answer is that I don't. I find journalists who happen to be bloggers or who show an interest in blogging, give them all the technical and editorial support that I can, and then I try to share that knowledge and success around the organisation.
How do I spot a good blogger? I ask whether the journalist is already aware of other bloggers writing in their beat. I try to determine whether they are willing to engage with other bloggers and people who comment on their posts. In short, are they ready to join the conversation?
Sharing the success stories helps spread the culture. As David Anderson of Fairfax Digital in Australia told me recently, you need success stories to tell your managers, and I would say that you also need success stories to win over journalists, who are professional sceptics. You have to spread culture up and down the organisation.
I've been fortunate. At the BBC, I had support at all levels for digital experimentation and, when I came to London, it was great to see evangelism from people like Richard Sambrook, the head of the Global News Division. At the Guardian, we've got digital evangelists all the way up to The Editor's office. However, both the BBC and the Guardian still grapple with cultural change. And I couldn't agree with Ryan more when he says you can't mandate change from the top down.
Anyone who has worked with me will attest that sometimes I get frustrated at the pace of change in the industry. I really thought digital journalism would be further along by now than we are. The dot.com crash wiped out a lot of talent in the industry and set us back years. And I've crossed swords with a fair number of nay sayers. I'm not sure there is much we can do for the close-minded, and the need for change is urgent enough that arguing with the Andrew Keens in the industry just isn't worth your or my time.
Industry scale change will only come with time. The industry is struggling because the depth of digital culture is still too thin and still so new. Don't sweat that. Don't even try changing your organisation wholesale. We might have the experience, but as Steve Yelvington says, we still don't have the political capital. Many of you will run into middle management who 'own' the bureaucracy and have an investment in the status quo. They've spent several years supporting the Andrew Keens because it protected their position and power. Now, they have a new strategy: They are fighting over who owns change rather than focusing on actually creating change. While they're fighting, us digital journalists need to get on with it:
Start small with an event or story-based project.
Bring the cost of the project down as close to zero as possible from a technical standpoint. Use open-source or free net-based services.
Try one new multimedia story-telling feature or engagement feature with each project.
Debrief. Learn. Repeat.
This is based in part on my interpretation of the Newspaper Next project. As Steve Yelvington says:
We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We're taking too long to create 'perfect ' systems that don't meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.
This is real-time innovation. Try journalistic projects with existing tools and learn journalistically and technically from that. That takes zero development and relatively little time. It's about editorial creativity, not about development cycles or budgets. If you find something that works, then you know where to focus product development. What can you do with Twitter, blogging software, YouTube, Seesmic or FriendFeed to create a journalistic project and help build your audience?
Kevin: Suw is a huge fan of QR codes, bar codes that can be read by mobile phones that can have embedded text or URLs. Can they succeed where the Cue Cat failed?
Kevin: Ryan Sholin posts about how to change the culture from newspaper to news. Focus on supporting change agents not changing the entire culture in one go.
Suw: It’s not entirely clear to me that blogging causes death, but this article does illustrate the almost perverse rewarding of unhealthy behaviours, especially in terms of gaining kudos and status. Wrong sort of willy-waving, chaps!
Kevin: Mark Glaser throws down a challenge. He worries that news organisations are almost paralysed talking about change. All Talk, No Action=ATNA. He lists a series of iniatives, and projects move this talk into action.
Kevin: Fred Wilson with a great post from both the position of a VC and a user. Internet giants are buying up great services and then letting the services languish.
In January's Fast Company was an article by Clive Thompson, Is The Tipping Point Toast? I read it with interest and made a mental note to at least add it to our Del.icio.us feed. But over the last two months it has just been gnawing away at the back of my head and I find myself compelled to think about it in a bit more detail.
In the article, Clive discusses the work of Yahoo!'s principal research scientist, Duncan Watts, who is challenging the idea that a small number of highly influential people are the ones who start new trends. The concept is central to books such as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and is repeated over and over again in all sorts of contexts. In fact, it is so embedded in the way that we view how ideas are transferred and propagated between people that it feels almost like heresy to question it.
But Duncan Watts has questioned it, and his research seems to show that new trends can start anywhere, and that not only do you not have to be influential to start a trend, being influential doesn't guarantee that you are also a trendsetter.
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
This is a conclusion that's going to get up the nose of many a marketeer, but how does it affect social media consultants?
My work is focused mainly on how to persuade people in business to change their behaviour: how to replace bad working habits with good ones, and how to change unhealthy business cultures into positive, constructive ones. How do I help people wean themselves off their dependence on email, and learn how to collaborate and communicate in healthier, more effective ways?
The opportunities that social tools present to business are frequently missed because no one thought hard enough about how to introduce them to people. Most businesses fail to to understand why these tools are useful and why the old tools are so seductive. My job is to counter that, and is much more about psychology than technology (although the tech clearly does play a part).
Piloting social tools in business is relatively easy. You're working with a small group who have probably been picked because someone within that group is already enthusiastic. I can sit down and work face-to-face with these people, finding out how they work and then explaining how the new tools will help them. We can figure out specific tasks to shift onto the new tools, I can advise on how that shift should happen and I can support them through the change.
But rolling social media out to the rest of a large company takes a different way of working. I can probably work directly with tens, or maybe even over a hundred people - if the project has the time and budget - but no one person can sit down with thousands or tens of thousands of people in one company to make sure that they understand how the new tools could improve their working life. It would be a Sisyphean task.
Instead, we have to treat tool adoption as a meme, and rely on people propagating it through the company, person to person. In this sense, we are doing what marketeers are doing: Trying to create a self-sustaining trend. We want the social tool to go viral.
As anyone with real world experience of viral marketing will tell you, that's far easier said than done. The concept of an influential elite, a minority who have the majority of the power to influence, is a deeply attractive prospect. If it were true, it would mean that I could sit down with the 50 most influential people in any one company and bring them up to speed, and they would go on to do my work for me. I could change the culture of a business from closed to open, from distrustful to trusting, from competitive to collaborative, in m
