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.
Romenesko points out a study from Ball State University pointing that more than a quarter of newspaper journalists plan to 'leave newspaper journalism'. One thing that should be particularly worrying is that the number wanting to leave the profession is higher for younger journalists. The conclusion is that newspaper journalist burnout is on the rise.
When those who said they wanted to leave the profession were asked why, “36 percent said money or salary was the reason, 27 percent said hours or schedule and 19 percent said stress or burnout. Also, a reference to family life was mentioned in 13 percent of the responses.”
One line that caught my attention is that there is opportunity for those journalists who leave newspapers:
He further speculated that many might try their hands at online media, and that those who do want to move away from newspapers but remain in the media have plenty of opportunities elsewhere.
If you're thinking of leaving newspaper journalistm, feel free to leave an anonymous comment. I'd be interested in hearing your reasons for leaving.
John Robinson says rightly “A protected group from within can come up with innovation, but unless they require no money or commitment, then they have to go before some decision-making person or body.”
But ‘unless they require no money…’ is of significance. Now that the tools of video journalism are so incredibly cheap, now that tuition with regard to the essential skills is so accessible (CurrentTV’s tutorials, etc.), the reporting/storytelling innovators must surely already exist in growing numbers.
Many months ago, I collaborated on a project looking at the future of retail. I'd been asked to take part in two discussion sessions by the company writing the report, and four of us sat around a big whiteboard thinking about trends in retail, and what the future might hold 5, 10 and 15 years out.
Our main conclusion was that the final recipients of this report, a global company who wanted to be prepared for the future, were woefully unequipped to even make the most of the present. Many of the most basic things that you'd expect such a company to do online were not being done and it was clear that, given the culture of the organisation, they were not likely to get done any time soon. It wasn't so much that they weren't Web 2.0, more than that they hadn't even made it as far as Web 1.0 yet.
Much of the media - and other sectors too - struggle to understand the developments of the last 5 - 10 years, and find it difficult to work existing technologies into their business, even when there are clear benefits to doing so. But it's not like things are actually changing that quickly, especially if you stay on top of developments. As Tom Coates said about the broadband vs. TV 'debate' last year (his italics):
These changes are happening, they're definitely happening, but they're happening at a reasonable, comprehendible pace. There are opportunities, of course, and you have to be fast to be the first mover, but you don't die if you're not the first mover - you only die if you don't adapt.
My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they're screaming that they're being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! 'The snail! The snail!', they cry. 'How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail's been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren't paying attention.
When businesses talk about innovation, they frequently mean "new" in the sense of "brand, spanking, no-one-has-ever-done-this-before new" or "first mover new". Because they see the landscape as changing at an alarming rate, and they see innovation with the same blank-paper fear as the blocked writer, the whole thing becomes terrifying. Add to that the fact that they do not have a good solid grip on the state of the art as it is now, and you end up with a group of petrified execs standing on the brink of a chasm they fear is too wide and too deep to risk jumping, because the only outcome they can see is crash and burn.
Another type of innovation is the "new use" - taking tools that someone else has created and using them in an innovative way. How do you use all this Web 2.0 stuff that people are creating all the time and work it into your business? How does it bring value to your audience? What symbiotic relationships can you nurture that will enable you to do something different? This is the sort of innovation that I think the media needs to focus on.
Some are trying very hard to do this, some are just paying lip service, but many aren't trying at all. Comments are a great example of a relatively new technology - it's only been around for a few years - which the press have embraced en masse, but entirely failed to use effectively. The point of comments is that it allows writers to have a conversation with their readers, and for stories to continue to be developed post-publication, yet in the majority of cases comment functionality is slapped on to the bottom of every article - regardless of whether that article would benefit from comments - and readers are left to fight it out by themselves. Little of worth is added to either the articles, the publisher's brand, or the commenters' lives.
Creating a boxing ring online is not an innovative way of using comment technology, it is obvious, old-school, and short-sighted. It's creating conflict to sell newspapers, increase hits or get more viewers for your TV slug fest.
Equally, using video to replicate television is like using Thrust to do the shopping - it makes no sense and is a massive waste of money. There are plenty of big hitters already doing TV rather well, and in an era of 24 hour rolling news, the last thing that we need is to replicate that online. Rather, the media should be using online video to do things that TV cannot do, to get places TV cannot go, to examine issues with the sort of depth and nuance that 24-hour rolling news couldn't manage if their very lives depended upon it, to tell the stories that TV has no time for.
Where are these media outlets - newspapers or otherwise - who can honestly say that they are using even just comments and video truly innovatively? In so many cases I see new-school technologies used in old-school ways that transform it from groundbreaking to mundane. One case in point was Ben Hammersley's BBC project about the Turkish elections. Yes, he was using Del.icio.us, and Flickr and he was blogging and using RSS, but with a distinctly old-school flavour that robbed the tools of their own potential.
A pneumatic nail gun can put nails through steel girders, but if all you do with it is build a garden shed, you might as well have used a hammer.
Finally, technology may not be new, but if it's "new to you", it can have real value. It used to be just blogs that provided an RSS feed, but then the tech press started using RSS, and now it has become standard across the majority of major news sites - no one sensible is without it. Other outlets might be using blogs or Del.icio.us or wikis, but that shouldn't stop you from assessing how best you can use these tools yourselves.
But businesses are inherently neo-phobic, and this has resulted in the Great Race to be Second: the burning desire of companies everywhere to watch what others do and see if it succeeds before they follow suite. Neo-phobia also leads companies into a state of group-think, where they use technology only in the same ways that they've seen other people use it. RSS is another fabulous example of this - news outlets will only provide a headline and excerpt news feed, rather than a full feed, because they are scared that if people can read their content in their aggregator, they will not visit the site and if they don't visit the site then valuable page views and click-throughs are lost.
Every now and again I see an article saying that full feeds increase click-throughs, the most recent being Techdirt, and their argument is compelling (their italics):
[I]n our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it's that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what's being said -- which makes it much, much, much more likely that they'll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing -- and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage.
But even if the assumption that partial feeds drive traffic to ads is correct, there's still no excuse for having partial feeds, because ads in RSS have been around for ages. I don't remember when Corante started putting ads in the RSS feed, but they've been doing it for ages and I have never had a single complaint about it. I don't know what the click-through rates are compared to the ads on the site, but I'm sure that it would be possible to experiment and find out. It is undoubtedly possible to design a study that would give you the right sort of data to compare the effectiveness of partial, full, or full with ads feeds, but I've yet to hear of one.
And therein, I think, lies the rub. We don't always know what will happen when we introduce new technology, but instead of experimenting, the majority prefer to go along with group-think and the old-school ways. They want innovation but only as a buzzword to chuck around in meetings - the reality is just too scary. Yes, there are mavericks who get this stuff, but they are frequently hamstrung by the neo-phobes, and have to spend their time pushing through small, bite-sized changes whilst they wait for the dinosaurs to die off.
Project Red Stripe was a small team of six Economist employees who were given £100,000 and asked to "develop something that is innovative and web-based and bring it to market" within six months. They brought in outside experts to talk to the group and solicited ideas, from Economist readers and the wider blogosphere, which they then "evaluate[d ...] against a set of criteria that the Project Red Stripe team have predetermined".
Unfortunately, the idea that they came up with wasn't really one that The Economist could see a way to earn any money out of. Project Lughenjo was described as:
[A] web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.
It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.
Neil, in his response to this turn of events, rightly questions whether 'profitable' is the only definition of success, and points out that innovation isn't always radical and that a single innovation's success can be, instead of based on it's own performance in isolation, a result of its position within a group of innovative components that are profitable only in the aggregate. He says:
The lessons for news organisations? We needn't make innovation hard by insisting the end product is always huge and/or high-profile. We shouldn't think that innovation is something that can be outsourced, either to a small team or to a software vendor (the latter being a surprisingly popular choice for many newspaper publishers).
And we needn't necessarily worry that we're not having enough ideas. If you ask around, you'll probably find it's not ideas we're lacking. What's tricky (I know - this is my job) is capturing the best ideas, mapping them to strategic goals, and delivering them in a way that makes them successful.
To do that, you need innovators who understand the importance of baby steps and can deliver them, one after the other, regular as clockwork. And, unlike Red Stripe, you can make their life easier by making sure they're not locked away from the rest of the business, worrying about a blank sheet of paper and a mighty expectation from the mother ship that, somehow, they'll be able to see the future from there.
[T]hey ended up, I think, not so much with a business but with a way to improve the world. Their idea, “Lughenjo,” was described in PaidContent as “a community connecting Economist with non-governmental organizations needing help - ‘a Facebook for the Economist Group’s audience.’ ” It wasn’t intended to be fully altruistic; they thought there was a business here in advertising to these people, maybe. But still, it was about helping the world. And therein lies the danger.
I saw this same phenomenon in action when, as a dry run for my entrepreneurial course, I asked my students at the end of last term what they would do with a few million dollars to create something new in journalism. Many of them came up with ways to improve the world: giving away PCs to the other side of the digital divide, for example. Fine. But then the money’s gone and there’s not a new journalist product to carry on.
This gives me hope for the essential character of mankind: Give smart people play money and they’ll use it to improve the lots of others. Mind you, I’m all for improving the world. We all should give it a try.
But we also need to improve the lot of journalism. And one crucial way we’re going to do that is to create new, successful, ongoing businesses that maintain and grow journalism. We need profit to do that.
A very good point. Altruism isn't really what's needed, and it doesn't necessarily equate to innovation (although in rare cases, it does - think of the $100 laptop project).
It's not just newspapers One thing that's really important is to remember that the problems that The Economist have with innovation also face many other businesses in many different sectors. I see, for example, the PR industry just storing up trouble, the way that they have segmented themselves in to different agency types such as creative, print, TV, or online. I don't think that any company can afford to segment its PR and marketing like that, let alone an entire industry. How can the situation where your creative team is separate from your online team - and those teams are run by different companies - be a good way to keep abreast of technology, to understand and grasp the opportunities? If a creative agency has an idea for online, how will they be able to implement it if online is run by someone else who is actually in competition. Now, maybe I'm misunderstanding the way that the PR world works, but that's how it looks to me on the outside: like built-in failure.
Interesting little piece from eMarketer about how people find the blogs they read. It's really no surprise to discover that 67% of respondents find blogs through links from other blogs, and 23% via recommendations, but I like the way they analyse this for the benefit of businesses used to dealing with old-style websites who try to use search engine optimisation techniques to make their site more visible:
The fact that blog awareness is effectively spread by word-of-mouth is key for anyone using one in a campaign. Not only can you not build it and expect them to come, you cannot even build it and optimize it for search and expect them to come. Blog launches must be accompanied by links on established blogs, and some good recommendations from established, influential bloggers.
My only quibble with that advice is that you have to launch your blog without links from established blogs - you can't just go round emailing influential bloggers and asking them to link to a blog they've not yet had the opportunity to read! Trust - and links - have to be earnt over time and there's just no way round that. You can't have a "launch accompanied by links on established blogs", you have to launch, write what you write, and the links will come if you are good.
Another quote:
Two-thirds of blog readers said that they read to be entertained, and 43% said that they read to keep up with personal interests or hobbies (multiple answers were allowed).
Businesses really need to understand this point. People don't read blogs to be marketed at, they read blogs to be entertained and kept up to date with stuff they are interested in. If your blog doesn't do either of those things, it just won't be read. Bunging any old crap up on a blog isn't going to cut the mustard - you've got to be passionate, interesting, and entertaining.
Of course, none of this is news, but it's good to see some statistics to back it up.
I first used Flocklast year after meeting Chris Messina in Paris. He was working to get the word out about the read/write browser at the time. I really liked the idea, partially because it just makes sense as a concept. With blogs, photo-sharing sites Flickr and social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, it makes sense to have a support for these social tools on the browser level.
I have to admit. I downloaded it in December, wrote one blog post and quickly decided that it wasn't ready for prime time. The tools didn't work as advertised. I couldn't even get it to work with my Flickr account, and it made life more difficult not easier.
That was then. This is now. A few weeks ago as I was looking for an RSS reader and other blogging tools to make life easier for my new colleagues at the Guardian. I downloaded Flock again. It's now my default browser at work. The RSS reader alone is pretty good. RSS is the most under-utilised technology for jourrnalism bar none. For journalists wanting to use RSS, Flock is definitely worth a download (and this article is worth a read). It's not as full-featured as NetNewsWire, but it's damn good.
And from a blogging standpoint, it's better than Sage, my favourite RSS plug-in for Firefox. If you see a post in your feed reader you want to blog, just click the blog button and up pops a window for a new blog post.
I actually like the uploader tool for Flickr photos better than Flickr's own tool, although truth be told I haven't used the Flickr uploader in a few months. But even more than the uploader, I like the fact that with a click, I can create a new blog post from my Flickr photos. I can easily see the pictures of my Flickr friends, too, which is a nice feature for personal use.
It has all the search functionality of Firefox and more. You can also set it to search your local history. It has all of the search plug-ins from Firefox.
OK, that was the good. Now for the bad, or at least the work in progress. I liked the spell checker because as you well know if you've read Strange for a while, I really benefit from a good editor. However, I discovered just yesterday that it puts span tags around the words it questions or changes. Well, initially, I just saw all the span tags and wondered WTF? It was only after a quick Google that I discovered it was the spell checker that was spawning the spans. It doesn't look like a new problem, blog posts about it since the summer. I hope it gets fixed.
Suw downloaded Flock after finding Firefox 2.0 broke her can't-live-without session saver plug-in. Here are her impressions:
I am finding that it isn't behaving well when posting to a blog either - it just sits there and tries to post without ever completing the action (even though it does post). As you say, minor but annoying.
I also have a problem with the behaviour of their search bar - the sub-menu comes up whenever you click in the search area, instead of when you click on the G, (which is Firefox behaviour) meaning that when I am trying to select all by triple-clicking, it doesn't work so well.
I have to admit, I am still liking Firefox better than Flock, but determined to still give it an honest trial
The HTML code is not entirely clean. I'm just looking at the source code of this post. The code definitely needs a tidy up.
But it's getting there. Beginning bloggers could definitely do worse, and journalists who find Movable Type or WordPress's interface daunting or difficult will find it much easier. It's come a long way in the last year. I'm hoping that development continues and the bugs and quirks get ironed out.
As you might or might not know, I've got a relationship with Edelman, the PR company. I know Richard Edelman, I've spoken to their clients about blogging, had meetings with them, and spoken at two of their events. I have also worked closely with Jackie Cooper PR, their sister company, providing training and consultancy.
So I'm pretty embroiled with Edelman, and that makes me even more disappointed to be using the 'Blog Fuckwittery' category on this post, but it can't be helped, I'm afraid.
If you're into the whole PR thing, then you'll likely have noticed recently that Edelman have got themselves into a bit of a pinch by helping create a fake blog for Wal-Mart. Called 'Wal-Marting Across America', it purported to be a blog by a couple who decided to go on a cheap holiday in an RV (that's camper van to us Brits), staying in Wal-Mart car parks overnight. What the blog failed to mention was that the project was a publicity stunt and that Wal-Mart were paying for their petrol, food, and the RV. This trick is known in the trade as 'astroturfing' (i.e. faking grassroots). Another way of describing it is 'lying by omission', and we all know lying is bad.
I'm not going to go into detail here about what was wrong with this specific project because lots of otherpeoplehavedonethat, and I don't much feel like parroting them. (For balance, I include the frankly lame responses from Richard and Steve.) But I do want to discuss a creeping disquiet I've felt lately that this serves only to reinforce.
Now, I like Richard Edelman - he seems to be a nice guy, quite savvy, and genuinely interested in the blogosphere, but the problem here is not just that Richard and his team were not transparent, it's more fundamental than that. It's that they are still thinking in old media terms: This was a typical 'broadcast media' stunt, an attempt to change the way people think about Wal-Mart by playing up the warm fuzzy angles and neglecting to mention that the whole thing was set up from the start. That is such an old-school way of thinking and it reveals just how much of the bloggers' ethos has percolated through to the heart of what Edelman do, i.e. 'not a lot'.
The other week, Kevin and I were invited by Richard and his team to attend a briefing that they, with Technorati, were giving their clients about the European blogosphere. Kevin was on the panel and I was asked by Richard just before the event if I could stand up and say something about the difference between US and UK top ten bloggers. I didn't really blog it, bar a quick mention on Chocolate and Vodka, because I ended up feeling a little bit uncomfortable with some of the basic premises on show, such as 'the A-list are important'.
There were a lot of other bloggers there, but that didn't make me feel any better about it, because it was a little too much like they were there for show. For a long time I've felt that Richard is indulging in the zooification of bloggers - collecting and displaying them the way that rich people used to do with exotic animals. I worry that this makes him feel that he's got a better understanding of the phenomenon than he actually has.
Surrounding myself with Chinese speakers does not instantaneously make me a fluent Chinese speaker. Yes, having access to Chinese speakers can help me learn Chinese better and faster, but only if I actually bother to speak Chinese to them. Surrounding yourself with bloggers is a pointless tactic if you don't talk about blogs with them, if you don't actually put some effort into learning what all this stuff means. You can't pick it up by osmosis.
And this Wal-Mart debacle shows that Edelman still have a long way to go before they genuinely understand blogging. There are a lot of values and ethics they have yet to instil in all their staff at an instinctive level - Wal-Marting Across America should have been simply impossible to conceive, one of the ideas that they never had because it runs so counter to blogging culture. The fact that it wasn't shows that too many people at Edelman think the old school way, about control and being on-message and spin. This is not the blogger way.
Kevin frequently talks about how he sees big media trying to adapt blogs to their business model instead of adapting their business to blogs, and Edelman are making exactly the same mistake - trying to use blogs for PR, instead of trying to adapt PR to blogs. Having a blog isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix anything. The magic comes from transparency, openness, honesty and engagement. As Kevin says, that's the cluetrain, this is just clue-fucked.
Now, a few days after the furore, Richard has outlined the steps Edelman are taking to remedy the situation within Edelman. I have a few thoughts about his ideas, in order:
1. 'Best practice' is not something you get by put down rules into a document, or creating a set of processes you make people follow. It's achieved by ensuring your staff have a deep understanding of what blogging is and how blogging culture works.
2. A single class on ethics in social media will not solve your problem - it will barely scratch the surface. I spent six months this year with employees from JCPR, giving them as thorough an insight into blogging as possible by introducing them to all the surrounding technologies and communities, and by encouraging them to read and write blogs. We spent two hours every fortnight for six months talking about and participating in social media, and you know what? There's still a lot more they don't know yet (but we're working on it!). Blogging is not something you can learn in an afternoon, or a day - it's as complex and alien to PR people as Chinese culture is complex and alien to me. Do not underestimate the scope of the differences - what's acceptable in PR circles is far from acceptable in blogging circles and it takes a lot of unpicking to see exactly what's what.
3. A hotline? That indicates to me that you know your staff haven't got the requisite clue. But tell me, where are you getting all these lovely guidelines from? I've been doing blog consulting for nearly three years, and frankly I'm still learning things. The field is evolving rapidly, and I have yet to come across a nice set of guidelines that encapsulate it all.
4. Who's writing your ethics materials? Please, God, don't say WOMMA.
Finally, Richard asks for advice, to which my response is: If you really want to understand blogging properly, stop collecting bloggers to display at your events and start actually learning about the blogosphere. Set up a proper training course for your staff, run by someone who actually knows blogs, and who is not a PR blogger. I am highly sceptical of PR, and that allows me to point out to PR people where what they do is at odds with what bloggers do. If you simply employ PR people who happen to blog, all you'll get is the same old PR attitudes, but with comments and trackbacks. And we all know that that is not enough.
I do think Edelman are doing better than most, but you are also more vocal than most, and if you're going to talk the bloggy talk, you damn well better be capable of walking the bloggy walk, otherwise you're going to look more than a little foolish.
I just finished listening to a panel discussion titled News 2.0 here at the Monaco Media Forum. It was depressing on a number of levels.
There is a pressing question in the news business right now: What is the business model that will support ‘quality’ journalism? That is usually how it’s phrased. Putting aside the issues of quality for the moment, let’s just talk about the business model of news. I have colleagues in the news business who envy the companies that I’ve worked for: The BBC and the Guardian. The BBC has a huge war chest based on the TV licence fee, and the Guardian has the Scott Trust so that it’s not completely based on profit motive. It’s nice not to worry so much about the money side of things.
Newsgathering is expensive. There is just no doubt about it. I was just thinking back to my former BBC colleague Jonathan Baker who said that the Beeb spends about $2.5 million a year to pay for coverage in Iraq, most of the money going to pay for security. Jonathan was really honest about what that $2.5 million buys in terms of journalism: A lot but not nearly as much as any journalist would like. But the bottom line is that it’s very, very expensive. Newspaper readership is declining, and newspaper readers pay a lot more into the coffers of newspapers than online ads do yet.
And let me be very clear about this, I believe that journalism is very important in a democratic society. Odd as this may seem for what I do and have done for 10 years, I was trained as a newspaper journalist. I still prefer newspaper-style journalism over most broadcast journalism. Mostly because it fits my news consumption patterns. I can scan a lot of text a lot faster than I can quickly scroll through video. I like video news for certain things, but I have to say, it’s not for 24 hour news. I want that kind of news on demand, not every 15 minutes. I just don’t have time to wait, and the presenters telling me to wait for the story that I really want to watch just pisses me off.
But notice, I said newspaper-style journalism. I want information. I want insight. I don’t have time for shouty commentary. It’s of little value to me. But it’s just the style of journalism, I’m not hung up on the delivery medium.
One of the panelists talked about a Latin American newsroom of 1400 journalists. Wow. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. It takes time and investment to do investigative journalism. But recently, the Dallas Morning News ‘right-sized’ their newsroom to deal with current economic realities. Newspapers are trying to reinvent themselves, but it’s painful work.
But what troubled me in this conversation is the issue of quality and what separates what professionals from amateurs in gathering news. Personally, I’m trying to get closer to my audience, not further separated from them. I had another journalist tell me: Well, certainly some of what we do must be telling people what they should hear. I agree with that. I’m not going to write stuff just to please my audience and keep them blissfully ignorant. What I have a problem with is that I’m really uncomfortable having the final say in what my audience thinks is important. When I was a cub reporter, I learned that listening was a pretty important part of my job.
I am just really uncomfortable with this obsession, this almost divine right that some journalists feel in setting the agenda and determining what is important. It’s the gatekeeper role of journalism driven by ego and arrogance. I’m probably going to get frogmarched out of the Fourth Estate for saying that. But it plays into this whole debate about quality, which is really just about control. And I think it’s simply a defensive position that is largely unhelpful in dealing with the real problem of adapting the news business model. Newspapers really need to hop onto the Cluetrain.
Involving your audiences isn’t pandering. Listening improves the quality of your product, and in this Attention Economy, there is no shortage of information, quality or otherwise.
And personally, while they were trying to figure out ways to defend the purity of the Fourth Estate, I was happy to get on with News 2.0, writing my blog post, uploading the video I took with a consumer digital camera that cost £140 and being very happy about my new job.
I’m still recovering from the Association of Online Publishers awards bash on Wednesday night, but Mark Sweney at Guardian’s (yes, my new keepers) Organ Grinder blog has a roundup of the award winners. Host Jimmy Carr was baffled by one winner: Nature’s Avian Flu Google Earth Mashup. Too bad he didn’t have a clue what a mashup was, and too bad that this is behind Nature’s pay wall. I’d love to have a play with it. But you can get a feel for it here at Declan Butler’s blog. Declan is a senior reporter at Nature and helped put the mashup together.
(Thanks Declan for the updated link!)
Congratulations to the CiF editorial team for their award and several honourable mentions. The team works hard to keep their rambunctious community happy. It’s a bit anarchic sometimes at CiF, but the commenters seem to like it that way. Well done, Georgina, Tom, Ben and Toby.
Jemima Kiss was there for PaidContent, and she has a nice write up with pictures of Tim O’Reilly’s session. You can see that brilliant IBM visualisation of a Wikipedia change log. She also wrote up the session about marketing to youth, or The Mystery of Teenage Boys. As Jemima says, “kids are watching less TV, spending loads of time online and on mobile and just love IM,” which are trends that pretty much everyone knows already. But there were interesting experiences given by panelists. I also liked how she wrote in the post about how social this generation are. They are just socialising in different ways.
This was the second time in a year that I've heard Ulrik speak, and it's a real treat. I first heard him talk at an IFRA convergence workshop last summer. His ideas are compelling, but his new media leadership is some of the best in the world. He clearly communicates a plan of action for media organisations but he also has a management framework that helps organisations help staff through the change.
He started off by quoting a Chines proverb:
When the winds of change blow, some build shields against the wind but others build wind mills.
In 2002, Nordjyske was a newspaper in North Jutland in Denmark as it had been since something like 1767. It took about 10,000 Euros a day to put out the newspaper in 2002, and he said that the staff would strike at the slightest provocation. But they were facing a crisis, possibly the worst thing that can happen to a newspaper in Denmark: They were under threat of being sold to Norwegians.
Something had to change. He asked his staff what Darwin had said. Invariably, they said that strongest survive. Ulrik corrected them. What Darwin had actually said was that those with the ability to adapt to change in their environment would win, would survive. And he said that if more change is happening outside your window than inside, you're in trouble. They had to adapt to survive, which is a fair comment on lots of business models these days.
We as journalists have lost our monopoly on information
They looked and saw that their audience was watching TV. They could run adverts telling their audience not to watch TV, or they could manage the change. Everyone watched CNN Headline News, but what they needed was a local version, so they launched 24 Nordjyske. Now, it's watched by almost everyone in North Jutland, and they suddenly have an audience far greater than the newspaper. And that wasn't the end. They launched a radio station, a premium SMS service. They have a website, and a weekly newspaper as well as the daily newspaper.
They now have a multimedia newsroom. They don't have newspaper reporters or radio reporters. They have reporters. They create story for all media, but not all stories are created for all media. He broke it down this way as media and their strengths:
TV- feelings
Radio- here and now
Web- searchable and depth
Mobile- everywhere
Traffic paper- find time
Weekly- to everyone
Daily- stops time
His thinking about convergence is some of the best in the industry. He was the first person who I had ever heard that said that convergence is not a cost-cutting measure. It won't save you money. He said that his staffing has changed little since transforming his organisation from a newspaper into a multimedia house. (They are so successful that people the world over come for tours and sessions. They pay 2000 euros per visit. They put that money in a box and just bought a new helicopter.)
His journalists are multi-skilled, but obviously, the learning curve is steep and not all of the results are award-winning. But he said: Don't criticise the product. Applaud the process. He also talked about the difference between industrial management and innovative management, and one of the things that he said was that industrial thinking looks for short-term returns, while innovative thinking looked for long-term results. He said that the word for manager actually came from a French word for controlling horses, but that modern managers didn't need to order their people around.
One thing that he said last summer that he didn't in this talk is one off the lessons that I learned and really informs how I work and now I lead as an editor:
Most managers point and say to their staff: Go that way. That's where the future is. But leaders say: I'm heading in towards our future. Follow me.
Torin Douglas of the BBC moderated this panel. The panel:
Rod Henwood, head of new business Channel 4
Zach Leonard, digital media publisher, Times MediaTim Weller, chief executive, Incisive Media
Jim Scheinman, VP of business development and sales, Bebo
Rod Henwood, 600 channels on Sky's basic pack. Our business model is under threat in a multi-channel world and with the disruptive force of broadband. He says what will save their bacon is brand (We worship our brand, he says), exclusive content, cross-promotional capability, corporate focus and adaptability. The biggest challenge is not so much what to do but what not to do. They have embraced video on demand. It is a possible threat, but they see it as an opportunity. They are looking for platform ubiquity.
I'm glad that VOD is coming. Even with 30 channels of choice on Freeview, too often it's 30 channels and nothing on, and I go back to DIY video on demand.
Zach Leonard and the Times are gunning for the Guardian. The last six months he said that they are bringing in deals that before were only familiar in a print market. The story telling process of journalism has changed forever. He made a plea for developers to come see him. "I am sure that we can make you an attractive offer," he said.
Good to hear that. At least someone is hiring.
Integrated newsrooms and common platforms are just the beginning. They are also looking at user-generated content and community. They recently posted the video of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 that was just discovered. Their traffic doubled and trebled. And their podcasting is 'dominating iTunes'.
Tim Weller, founder and CEO of Incisive. One of 40% that didn't know what a blog is. He was the target of bloggers in the States for their search engine strategy. He founded the company 12 years ago. They turn a quarter of billion in revenue. They connect people who want to buy products with people who want to sell. They are platform agnostic. Key challenge is that the call for ROI (return on investment) is getting stronger. Buyers want real-time market intelligence.
Work with search engines or block them out from paid content? I think it's a fabulous marketing tool. Develop more community-based content with user-generated content. MySpace and Bebo, peer-to-peer markets are great at breaking down barriers to people communicating with each other.
Jim Scheinman, of Bebo, was a no show. Bummer. I wanted to hear from him.
Rod of C4 said the word: Convergence. I've heard about convergence for years, and for C4, it's all about VOD right now.
Torrin said that at C4 and the BBC, they have public money coming in, but how does the Times finance these changes. Zach says that they have a range of titles from the Times, the Sun to the Times Literary Supplement. On the Sun, they can play more with community.
There was an interesting discussion happening about how to innovate. Rod said that there was the integrationist and the internal incubator model. They are two extremes, but he said that a balance must be struck between speeding up innovation but also getting this to the core of the business model.
After listening to this, the absence of the voice of Bebo was noticeable. People are talking very peripherally about community, but you can tell it's not core to their business models right now.
I'm of at the UK Association of Online Publishers. The keynote is about how to compete in a new economy, giving by Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, so my boss's boss's boss, or some such high level above my head.
She laid out five challenges for online publishers:
1) Our brands and our staff are the foundation of our future. This didn't wow me at first, but then she started to talk about online brand tracking. I don't think (and Suw will tell you) that companies are doing too little to monitor how their brands are being talked about online.
Dell Computer's business is a little soft. Did Jeff Jarvis' continual drumbeat of discontent on Buzzmachine play a part? Definitely. Hard to say how much. But he's offering them suggestions.
2) Stay close to your users. She mentioned that Flickr doesn't even talk about users but talks constantly about community. This is one opportunity that bloggers like Robert Scoble understand implicitly, but publishers don't yet. Blogging is an opportunity to listen as well as publish.
3) Innovate to learn. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. You have to start somewhere.
4) Excel at software development. Our best developers are as important as our best journalists. Adrian Holovaty will be cheered to hear that his message is getting out.
5) Drive digital revenue growth as soon as possible. I'm not a hard-core money maker, but I feel very strongly about the importance of quality journalism, which costs money and takes time. It's desperately expensive, but without getting into the pro-am debate, it's also pretty important. Newspaper revenues are in collapse in the US, well at least they are declining from the double digit margins of the past. But to continue to pay for quality journalism, the revenue model has to change.
Torin Douglas asked who has time to read Comment is Free, the Guardian's mega commentary site. Carolyn, honestly said, that she only goes there a couple a times a week to get a flavour of what people are saying about Iraq or the Labour Party.
Again, if you want to download the podcast directly, you can click here. (29:32 14.2 MB)
I’ll add some more detailed show notes, but Suw starts off talking about her excitement about Second Life, watching the progress of Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond and the wonderful radio programme, This American Life.
We recorded this on Sunday night, but I’ve really struggled with Odeo’s upload tool. In the end, I gave up, uploaded to the Internet Archive and just linked to it via Odeo. (Note: It does take a second or two to load into the Odeo player) The Creative Commons publisher worked a treat, and I’m happy that we’re using CC licencing anyway.
Suw has been on the conference circuit lately. I so glad that she got a new MacBook so we can do video iChat. Otherwise, I’d rarely see her. She’s been to FooCamp, EuroFoo, and EuroOSCON. It’s got her excited about Second Life among other things. And we talk about the devloper-as-journalist Adrian Holovaty.
She just left this morning to go to Shift in Lisbon.. We’ll have to talk about that later.
We started off thinking that we really didn’t have much to talk about, but in the end, we talked so much that we decided to break up the podcast into two parts. I’ll add the show notes in a bit and post the second part in a bit.
UPDATE: Show notes:
00:30 EuroFoo recap Suw talks about FooCamp and EuroFoo, including talking about the Google Flyover, making a crashed Cylon raider out of beanbags 03:25 Suw talks about a presentation on chocolate. Remember, only losers chew. Real people suck. 07:00 Other topics at EuroFoo, future of spying, Ryan Carson talks about working a four-day week, and ‘Could we build a tricorder?’ 08:56 EuroOSCON. Suw discusses Tom Steinberg of MySociety presentation about democratising government. I talk about distributed journalism. I space on the details, but Glyn reminds me in the comments. 11:52 Adrian Holovaty talks about adding structure to the data that journalists gather. Adrian talks about the developer as journalists. 16:40 It’s like Tom Coates who talks about a ‘web of data’. Journalism now is a web of news, Suw says.
The first half ends a bit abruptly, but I’ll post the second half now.
Journalism right now is broken. Several ways - celebrity focus, political bias, circulation declining consistently, stock prices dropping, craisglist taking away classifieds market.
But that's not the issue. The issues is that newspapers throw away data.
So if there was a burglary, you have the address, the person, the stuff nicked, roughly the time. has key value pairs. But all the journalist does is write an article and throw away most of the data.
News orgs have huge infrastructure, with reporters on the street, specialised. Infrastructure to collect and edit information, verify it. Not every media organisation does that, that they're not taking advantage of. Have infrastructure to get info out to people, i.e. a printing press originally. Also have the attention of people.
But can't take advantage of data because they are just creating big blobs - stories.
So contrast to
Google Base, (which is just infrastructure with no data).
Wikipedia
Craigslist
All great frameworks desperate for data. Journalists have great data desperate for a framework.
Why is structured data important - because if it's structured a computer can do cool stuff with it.
Journalism via computer programming.
News people write an article, or create a video. A programmer makes a web app that makes it easy to look at the data.
WaPo, Iraq war, huge issue. Most recent deaths page, total fatalities, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, or Operation Enduring Freedom. Collect data on everyone who's died, but can't do a story on everyone, but can make that data available.
Faces of the Fallen - get own page, bio, map of home town. Depressing but important. Breakdown of age of deaths, most are 21, look by age, photos, breakdown of state, see all the people from the state and their town. Googlemaps. RSS Feed for every state. Sounds depressing and gory, but people are interested and they are then making their own sites, using for political activism.
Another example:
ChicagoCrime.org
Type of crime, street, by block, brows by day, by hour, and latest crime RSS feed
Votes Database, representatives in congress, their votes, breakdowns of late night votes, votes missed, get RSS out there. So people can get more interested in government: did you know your representative voted this way today?
Telling a story via an application not words. Being smart about data, dealing with raw data. Badger journalists to get the raw data so we can do cool stuff. End game is not creating an article, but getting data in one place to do cool stuff.
Cultural similarities to this and open source code.
Open source:
- making code available.
- understanding through transparency: can download stuff and look at it.
- encourages derivative work, although depends on licence.
Journalism via code:
- make the data available.
- encourages understanding through transparency: better to look at the data than someone's opinion.
- encourages derivative work, can take the data from the RSS feed and do stuff with it yourself.
Call to action
Done talks at journalism conferences, and people grumble that this 'isn't journalism', but that's kinda depressing that the industry thinks that way. It's not full of passionate people who want to do cool things with technology but full more of people more interested in the ends than the means. So if people are interested, then go out there and do it.
That's the title of the talk I gave last week at IBC and that I have given in various forms at other places over the last year. I began the talk by showing off some numbers from Dave Sifry's most recent State of the Blogosphere reports, the latest one being from early in August. Technoratiis now tracking 50 million blogs, and that's just a self-selecting sample of people who have registered with the site (well self selecting and plenty of splogs, spam blogs, which the Team Technorati is working on trimming from its ranks). That's a lot of people.
The mainstream media, or MSM for short, can give 16-year-olds trying to lay their hands on the latest fashion a run for their money when it comes to herd-like activity. And newspapers, TV networks and everyone else trying to protect or resurrect an old media business model have jumped enmasse on what Jon Stewart called the 'Blogwagon'. But it's mostly been an unthinking, headlong rush towards the blogosphere, "to get snaps" from the good-as-advertising-gold 18-to-34 demographic.
Is this really about giving a voice to the already voiced, as Jon Stewart says? What value is it to our audiences to serve up 'news sushi', content we already produce and publish but just served up in bite-sized blog bits in reverse chronological order? And I can hear the editors out there saying: "But blogs are just snarky comment, and hey we've got snarky columnists in spades. We are so going to own the Technorati and iTunes Top 10." (And I've heard them say this.) Sorry, but if you want to sit up on high and keep pushing your content out at the "great unwashed masses", YouTube, CraigsList and their successors are so gonna own your asses.
This is not about changing your content management system. You've already sunk a lot of cash into those. This is about changing your culture. What do blogs allow you to do that you don't already do?
Blogs can get you closer to your audience
And that's exactly where you need to be. I met Robert Scoble at a Geek Dinner here in London last summer, and he talked about having a conversation with his customers on how Microsoft could better serve their needs. I don't really understand when journalists moved away from their audience, but many people have that impression.
Blogs can bring new voices to your journalism
Since when did journalism become a game of pick the pundit? It's lazy, and it's turned a lot of journalism into a talking shop amongst pundits, politicians and other journalists. Google yourself some new voices. In the last year, blogs have helped me bring serving soldiers in Iraq onto programmes, helped me hear from a Saudi teenager calling for women's right to vote and let me eavesdrop in on a guy's thoughts as he left New Orleans to escape Katrina.
Blogs can get you closer to the story Blogs and a world of tools that have grown up around them make creating multimedia stories in the field easier than ever. I'm an online journalist because I believe that the internet is a revolutionary medium. I can do better journalism with blogging tools: Real, raw and in the field, while being in constant contact with my audience. What do they want to know? What questions do they have for the people I'm interviewing?
Blogs could just re-invigorate western democracy
OK, OK, maybe I'm getting a little carried away. But I'm still an idealist at heart. That's one of the reasons I got into journalism. Steve Yelvington, who really should be in your RSS reader, put it this way recently:
The end of mass media. Here's what the 20the century gave us: A population of consumers whose economic role was to eat what they're served and pay up. These "people formerly known as the audience" are alienated, disengaged and angry. Instead of setting our sights on building a nation of shopkeepers, bankers and passive consumers, what if we set our sights on building a nation of participants in cultural and civic life? Perhaps this world where everyone can be a publisher will not be such a bad place.
And as Steve says a few days later in his blog, there isn't a silver bullet, and I'm not going to try to sell blogs as one. But Steve told me in Florida a year ago that blogs represent a complex set of social behaviours that we're just understanding. Blogs are just the tip of the ice berg in this fast moving world of participatory media. Blogging and the mainstream media has to be more than 'me-too-ism', and it can be. With a little thought to understand these new behaviours and a willingness to actually accept and adapt to these changes instead of wishing they weren't happening, we might just have a chance.
I saw Second Life being demoed at Supernova last year, although I stood and watched a bunch of avatars dancing to Chumbawumba, I didn't immediately pay much attention. Oh yes, that's me, on the cutting edge right there... no, back a bit...
I have this really annoying practical streak. Whenever I see something new, I think to myself, "Yes, but what can I do with it?" and if I can't immediately answer that question, I tend to move on. A few months ago, I started to hear stories of what people were doing with Second Life, and my ears pricked right up. Mixed reality events. In-game stores created by real-world businesses. In-game stores created by in-game people. Commerce. Oh yes. Now you're floating my boat. (Oh dear... am I really that much of a capitalist?)
So I signed up for an account (I'm TiddlesMcNubbin Goodnight) and logged in to find out what all the fuss was about. What I actually found out was that my iBook really couldn't handle the client. I'd press the arrow key three times, then have to wait whilst the client caught up - totally sub-optimal user experience, that. But now I have a spiffy new MacBook and I'm away. In just the last week, I've learnt how to move around, I've left the Help Island and gone to the mainland, bought my first plot of land, and been given a terminal velocity-triggered parachute, a house and a four poster bed, and been treated to a fight between two Daleks.
(Really, no user experience is complete without Daleks.)
And you know, that's just the start of it. American Apparel have a store there, apparently a replica of a store they have in Tokyo, where you can go and buy t-shirts. Creative Commons have an auditorium where they hold events. Nissan have a presence (not quite sure what to call the big tower-y thing they have, and not sure if it's official or not). Developers from the Amazon community are building things in-game like virtual bookstores in which you can actually buy books from Amazon. And I've heard that a chain of hotels, W I think, are creating a replica of one of their hotels there so you can go check out the rooms.
The possibilities really are endless and the above is just a tiny selection. It doesn't really matter what you do or how you do it, you can do something in Second Life. You can stream audio and video into an in-game theatre, as BBC Radio 1 did from their One Big Weekend gig in Dundee. Actually, there's a ton of music events in Second Life, as this Wired article shows, with a Duran Duran gig coming up. You can give away goodies - the BBC gave away headphones with their logo on. You can create and sell, for Linden Dollars, any object you like, from clothing to houses to jetskis.
So, whilst I was at FooCamp, I went to a couple of talks about Second Life. The first from Matt Biddulph about bringing web apps into the game, and the second from Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab, who talked about what is happening with the game and how its community is developing and behaving. Both were fascinating.
Matt's talk was pretty techy, and I missed the beginning so I didn't really fully grok it until I read Tom's summary, but in short, it's about taking stuff from the web, such as a Flickr photo stream, and bringing it into Second Life - in the case of the Flickr stream it is projected up on a big screen that anyone can go and look at.
Think for a second... you can take anything that's out there and bring it in-game. And then people can see it in-game and follow the link out to the web. Does this make anyone else as excited as it makes me? Think of all the really cool shit that you can't afford to do in real life, but which you can do in Second Life!
Philip was talking about what people do in-game. One of the things that interested me was that there is an in-game building industry, with skilled builders creating objects and selling them, either in-game for Linden Dollars, or on eBay for US Dollars. Bear in mind that both currencies are 'real', no matter how you define 'money'. I'll spare you the detailed argument right now, but if you doubt me go and read Play Money by Julian Dibbell and that should convince you.
So there's a bunch of cool - and sometimes physically impossible - things you can do in Second Life and an ecosystem of skilled artisans in-game who can help you realise your ideas.
Of course, it's never that easy. Like blogging, if you're a business and you wanna get into Second Life, then you have to be really careful what you do and how you do it. Talking to Jeff Barr from Amazon, he told me about how people will turn up and protest - with placards and everything - when a business turns up in Second Life without been a part of the community before, or without giving something back to the community they are 'invading'. People don't want to be sold to. They don't want the creep of commercialism to take over their play environments as well as their work and home environments.
So what is successful? Well it's early days for me in Second Life, so I'm still figuring that out. Like my friend and fellow social software consultant, Stephanie Booth says, it takes a while to learn what's happening in-world and how it all works:
What makes Second Life exciting is also what makes it really difficult to get into: it’s complex. I’m spending a lot of time learning stuff which isn’t really that interesting in itself for me (I have no ambition to become a digital hairstylist) but which is needed for what’s coming next. Feeling comfortable with your inventory, moving the camera about, doing things with objects… there are all basic skills and I’m not comfortable with them yet. But if you want a world where people can be digital artists, build businesses, organise live music performances or conferences, you need that level of complexity to allow users to be creative.
But I think the rules for businesses in Second Life are going to be similar to those for blogging:
- be a part of the community, and empower them to do stuff with your stuff
- be respectful, truthful, honest, genuine
- don't sell at people
- give people something valuable in return for their attention
- do cool shit
And the capacity for doing cool shit in Second Life is huge.
I grew up in the rural Midwest in the US, about 90 miles west of Chicago, and my father loved - still loves - county fairs. Back in the mid 1980s, I was lucky enough to see Johnny Cash with his wife June Carter at a country fair. I still remember the shiver that went down my spine when he took the stage and said: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
I'm not a huge country music fan, but I love good music. Johnny Cash was a living legend, but he still thanked the audience for coming to the concert, for buying his records. He was humble, but it was a humility and a gratitude for his audience that was common to country singers. When I saw Walk the Line this year, I realised for Johnny Cash it might have been because of all of the letters of support he got, especially when he was struggling with his demons and addictions.
I got that feeling of connection with my audience when I was a cub reporter in western Kansas. It was not just a connection with my sources but also with my audience. That feeling of connection is one of the reasons that I find blogging as a journalist more fulfilling than traditional publishing or broadcasting. I find it odd now to write a story that doesn't have a space for comments. Yeah, I can see the stats. I know people are clicking on the story, but I find having a conversation with my audience more fulfilling.
I talk to a lot of people in the media who view their audience as an annoyance. In the past, the only time they ever heard from members of their audience was to complain. Here in the UK, they jokingly refer to agitated callers or writers with the blanket phrase, 'Angry in Milton Keynes'.
When I started this post, I was going to point out some of the many incidents when the media turns on their audience. It's a pointless exercise really. It gets pretty ugly pretty quickly, like when Richard Cohen of the Washington Post this spring called e-mail correspondents a 'Digital Lynch Mob'. (For more background, Kos called it the 'Substance of a Blogswarm'. Tailrank has a nice roundup of this particular spat.)
I'm not going to pick on Mr Cohen or any publication. Even I have found myself in a middle of a blogswarm or two, such as when the brothers at Iraq the Model banned the BBC from their blog last year. A poor colleague, Sarah, who actually had little to do with the misunderstanding, got some pretty abusive e-mail. She asked me to help out. I hopped into the comments and explained what we were doing. Two comments later, the tide turned, and a commenter named Thomas was even talking about linking back to us.
As I've said before, if we in the traditional media blog, we have to play by the rules of blogging, not our own rules. You don't issue a press release. You get out ahead of the blog storm. You get into the comments. You give your side of the story.
But you don't always have to be on the defensive. Real blogging - getting out there and actually engaging in a conversation with your audience - has real benefits, both in terms of the business bottom line and just in terms of personal satisfaction.
What do I get back from it? A lot. As I blogged a few weeks ago, I'm changing jobs. Friday was my last day in the office at the BBC, and my colleagues blogged about it. I had plenty of well wishers. Abdelilah Boukili in Morocco has become a loyal member of our audience. He's been quick to let us know when something is wrong with the blog, usually technical glitches. But it's helped us fine tune our blog setup. He has also set up his own blog to chronicle his comments on BBC websites. But his comments on the World Have Your Say blog and here on Strange Attractor show how blogging opens new ways to relate to your audience. He said in a comment to me:
It was your interaction with the contributors to the BBC blog that encouraged me to be one of the frequent contributors. I am not a journalist like you equipped with means to get information. All I can do is give my comments which can be good or bad.
In case, you leave BBC blog I will be "following" you in the Guardian blog.
And there are several bloggers who have become frequent visitors to my blogs, Steve in Utah, Ipanema, Anbika in Nepal and Roberto in Miami, who have wished me well.
It takes time to build a community with a blog. Media companies are rushing to blog, rushing to use social networking tools. But as Suw and I always say, the technical tools are just the start. First off, learn to love your audience. We need to learn from the country music crowd. They remember who pay the bills.
This is probably the worst kept secret, which is why I'm a journalist and not a member of the intelligence services, but I can finally announce that I'm under new ownership. After almost eight years with the BBC, I'm joining the Guardian as their Head of Blogging and Interaction.
During my eight years, I've been fortunate enough to work with some great people on some great projects. The correspondents, videographers, radio producers and business managers at the Washington bureau, which I called home for six years, are the best in the business. I can't thank them enough for their support. And Andrew Roy and Martin Turner, the two bureau chiefs I worked for, were instrumental in the success of the BBC News website's Washington operations. John Angeli, Nic Newman, Cathy Grieve and Steve Herrmann at the News website gave me the support and the freedom to innovate.
Nic's idea for our first US Election road trip put our audience in the driver's seat. The US Election Challenge in 2000 pushed the edges of technology and the limits of endurance as Tom Carver and I raced across the US. More than 6,500 miles in six days.
Before Strange Attractor, I used to joke that "I'm not a blogger, but I play one on TV". It was an accident of professional prodding really, but I was excited when Steve suggested that I blog during the political conventions in 2004. But it was such a success that Richard Greene and I reprised the 2000 road trip and I blogged across America. As I will be the first to admit, technically, it wasn't much of a blog. No RSS. No trackbacks. The comments were put on the bottom of one of our standard web pages. But I tried to behave like a blogger.
I've been an online journalist for 10 years now. The reason why I am an online journalist is because every morning I get to wake up, go to work and create a new medium. And there is a lot more work to do. Here's just a taster of what my new job is about:
[To act as] a role model for the new, participative form of journalism emerging from the best blogs. The role won't just be about encouraging more journalists and commentators to blog. It should also be about experimenting with different forms of community interaction, spotting opportunities to launch new blogs and develop existing ones, and helping us form a strategy.
Suw and I have been meaning to do a podcast, maybe a podcast over crepes in the morning. The Strange Attractor Crepe-cast. At any rate, fresh off our two-week European road trip, I decided to take the podcast plunge and have a chat with Eric Sundelof, who is just finishing a fellowship with the Reuters Digital Vision programme.
As he says on his site:
Cell phones today transmit audio, video, photographs and text. When combined with the proper web application, cell phones enable any citizen in any country of any background to publish information and share it with the world.
Technical Notes: As Kevin Marks noted before, I originally didn’t enclose the audio download in the RSS feed. It was easily solved by linking to the file on Odeo and using Kevin’s rel=enclosure microformat. The directions are here.
For those of you who are interested, I used a very versatile Skype add-on called Pamela to record the interview with Erik. Pamela is like a Swiss Army knife add-on for Skype, allowing you to record both audio and video, upload it to remote servers and even generate RSS feeds from the uploads. I’m not using half of the functionality, but I have found it well worth the cost and use it often for work.
One note with Odeo’s upload service. I originally had saved my file as 64kbps at 22Khz. Odeo didn’t like that, nor did it seem terribly happy using. But when I resaved the file at 44Khz and uploaded it using Internet Explorer, it worked.
The Guardian's Comment is Free site has been troubled again this week after they introduced a half hour waiting period in between comments. The accusation levelled at the commenters was that the discourse was not of a high enough standard and that a wait of half an hour would force people to calm down and think a bit harder before they posted. Thus, the assumption goes, would the conversation become more erudite, more intellectual, more stimulating.
[T]he sheer number of comments now coming in from individuals is making it harder to keep the quality of the debate high through post-moderation alone.
Aside from the persistent breaches of our talk policy a frequent cause of complaint is the pointless chatter that litters threads. Too many comments have nothing to do with the original post, or degenerate into back-and-forth slanging matches with others which just get in the way of reasoned argument and put off people who want to engage with the original piece.
[...] For those that want to cotinue to debate the issues raised by CiF bloggers, we're proposing to introduce a comment frequency cap which will only allow individuals to comment once every half an hour. If it works it might make for more thoughtful contributions from those who tend to write before they think. If it doesn't work - ie, if it simply dries up or drives away the best while leaving us with the worst - we'll think again.
The majority of commenters were outraged at this arbitrary limitation of their freedom to post, and unsurprisingly so. They feel that it's their site now, and that The Guardian has acted undemocratically and heavy-handedly. Commenter Sealion said:
Wow, what an atrocious idea. So what's the problem? Cif has become increasingly popular and thats a problem for you? So you suggest that people don't use your site, they go find another, or use a talkboard. Cif is a talkboard....did you really think it was a blog?
By your own admission, discussions have become better when the originator has come online to debate with the commentators. 1 post every 30 minutes? That's altrui knackered then. And Sunny. In fact anyone who wants to get involved in a discussion is going to have to wait 30 minutes for a reponse from somebody they may have raised a point to, which is going to kill any debate stone dead, or persuade people to create multiple screen names to get around it and add chaos to confusion.
People will also write longer pieces because they have only one chance, and then they'll probably go off and do something else because this isn't much of a spectator sport.
Yes, it will probably get rid of a lot of abuse and pointless comments, the same as it will get rid of just about everything else. This will kill discussion, people will just post an essay length summary of their opinion and then leave.
Of course, it didn't takecommenterslong - about 1 hour and 4 minutes - to figure out that The Guardian were using cookies to achieve their aim and that, by deleting the cookie one could post as much as one wanted.
But the reason people feel miffed is not just to do with their ability to post comments. Henry had posted previously that CiF had around 10,000 commenters, but only 100 people have posted over 207 comments each, with two having posted over 1,500 and one person approaching 2,500. This is a power-law distribution. Now, quantity is not the same as quality, but I would wager that if you plotted the quality of the comments, that too would follow a power law: the majority of users write perfectly acceptible comments and the name calling, ad hominem attacks and unpleasentness is committed by a small minority of users. Yet by imposing a half hour wait on every single user The Guardian are reacting disproportionately, as if the problem is widespread 'bell-curve' problem. It's not, and the commenters know it. They feel as if they have been treated unjustly and that The Guardian has meted out an indiscriminate punishment to all without bothering to try and solve the problem posed by a minority.
After an evening of protest, Georgina Henry ceded some ground, and the system has changed so that the half hour wait is per article, not across the whole site. However, she doesn't acknowledge that the commenters' protests are in any way valid, and in my view fails to take in their points at all. She says:
Thank to the odd commenter who understands and supports what we're trying to do. Just to reiterate, for the critics, there are other audiences that we're trying to reach which this might help - they include the vast majority of people who read CiF but never comment; those who comment occasionally when they have something worthwhile to say; those who used to read us but are put off by the mindless irrelevant chatter that infects many of the threads and those who would like to engage with the original argument but have to scroll through too much rubbish before they do so.
How is this supposed to help? It's natural that there should be a power-law of comment frequency amongst readers. I would expect nothing less - it's how almost all these sorts of websites work. Lots of people read, some post once, and a tiny minority post frequently. This distribution is extremely common and well understood. Apart from, it seems, by Ms Henry.
There is no need to try to encourage those who don't post to post by shutting up those who do post. Maybe the people who don't post don't post because they are happy just reading? Is there actually any evidence of droves of people put off by 'mindless irrelevant chatter'? If that's the reasoning behind limiting posting times, then I fear that there'll be disappointment when the number of people posting doesn't suddenly increase in leaps and bounds.
But there are a couple of themes here that CiF needs to understand. Firstly, 'messy' comments is not only inevitable, it can also be good. Euan Semple said:
We can tolerate a lot of apparent messiness and our ability and desire to make patterns allows us to get real value from it.
Dave Snowden was right when he said if you have a complex environment you need to have simple rules. Complex rules just result in a mess.
One mans rubbish is another man's gold dust.
We can work together on complex activities with minimal directions.
The question is, what are the rules? Putting a wait time on posting is not a rule that is going to encourage less chaotic commenting, it's just going to string it out over a longer period of time, and maybe destroy some valuable conversation that might have otherwise happened.
Perhaps, more important, is whether or not the original author actually takes part in the comments thread. Blogging, done well, is about a conversation, and on CiF, it seems that that conversation is rather one-sided: columnist opines; commenters comment. It that really any way to encourage an intelligent discourse?
What to do? The Guardian is - understandably - worried about not just quality of conversation, but also libel, defamation and other things that they might get sued for. This is serious shit - they cannot and should not allow libellous material on their site. They have to strike a balance between chilling out about the mess and ensuring that really nasty stuff gets dealt with.
But half hour waits will not appreciably help, especially if all it takes to sidestep the delay is to delete a cookie. Keeping the existing system will annoy people more than it will help. The Guardian will have to be more innovative than that.
Here's a thought. How about learning from sites that face a similar problem. Slashdot is well known for having a rather low common denominator amongst the comments. Yet it's still readable... So long as you know that you can filter out the rubbish by using the built in ratings system. Digg also uses a ratings system and comments with a low enough score are hidden from the casual reader: whilst they remain on the site, you have to unhide them to read them. Could the Guardian not improve on these systems?
It's essential to remember that the problem is not really a technological one, but a social one. Comment ratings systems are only a tool to allow the community to look after itself, but the tool has to be well crafted in order for it to work.
Let's consider a simple thumbs up/thumbs down system which the community can use to police itself. It can have a sliding scale of punishment, to allow for the varying severity of misdemeanours: -10 points, say, and your comment is hidden; -20 and you have to wait half an hour before your next comment is published; -50 and your comment is deleted. Extreme behaviour gets a ban.
The problem is, such systems can be gamed. Even if you have a system wherein you can only vote once for each comment, malicious behaviour from a minority can break the system. How could you combat this? Perhaps by using Amazon's Mechanical Turk - send all comments to MTurk and pay an uninvolved strangers to answer the question "Is this comment abusive?". I'm assuming that a combination of RSS and MTurk's API would make it possible to integrate this seamlessly into the site so that you have an impartial input into whether or not comments are good or bad.
It's possible to completely outsource comment moderation, but my personal feeling would be that it's preferable to let the community have a stab at self-moderation first. The more people feel divorced from the way that a community is run, the less they care about it. I think this is why people react less well on threads where the author of the blog post doesn't engage in the discussion, particularly when they don't answer (reasonable) questions that are directly put to them. Taking the comment moderation and giving it to some third party, whether a room of moderators at The Guardian or an external moderation house, feels a bit like saying to the community 'Right, you can't be trusted'.
So I think there are a few things to pull out of all this:
The Guardian needs to chill out about comments. They're not all going to be Nobel Prize winning essays, and some of them may go off topic. No big deal.
CiF bloggers need to interact more with the commenters and stop thinking of commenters as annoying, underemployed and overopinionated. Digs like "My guess from looking at the email addresses is that the list is overwhelmingly male" by Georgina Henry do not show much respect for the people who make CiF as vibrant as it is.
The Guardian needs to think about ways in which the community can self-moderate and use technology to facilitate that process, not try to use (shoddy) technological fixes to try and arbitrarily shut people up.
CiF could be a great site, but it needs some significant work and a change in attitude from the bloggers there in order to evolve from the 'soap-box with hecklers' model to a being a real blog.
I guess I inadvertently coined a phrase last week when I thought out loud about 'audience-driven journalism'. Paul and Steve shortened it to ADJ in a few comments. I can see it now, as someone says that ADJ doesn't stand for audience-driven journalism but attention-deficit journalism, journalism for the internet age. I think I'll stick with Jeff Jarvis' networked journalism instead.
Jeff meant it as a replacement for the term 'citizen journalism':
This is probably the worst kept secret, which is why I'm a journalist and not a member of the intelligence services, but I can finally announce that I'm under new ownership. After almost eight years with the BBC, I'm joining the Guardian as their Head of Blogging and Interaction.