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- Just cleared 1300 emails from my inbox at work - only 4741 left for Monday morning!
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- is back to work on Monday. Monday!Feb 08, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @AledThomas99 @pedrobob Pete was just saying the same!
- @strawberrysoup that is impressive!
- @adsshepherd did it last night!
- checking the mail in my spam folder and google keyword ads are showing me recipes for meals based on spam. Ha!Jan 25, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @lisanova too fast for me!
- @Steffilewlew Me and PG did hotel on the park once. Lovely food. We played scrabble with coffee.
- Katie Hopkins being predictably annoying on BBC breakfast re breastfeeding
- @lisanova not just yet - Feb 13! How's things?
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Posts
- Jul 27, 10
Engagement: some unexpected downsides I have discovered this week.
1) the people you think might be interested, aren’t. One of our most voracious commenters (and a frequent critic) has stopped commenting compeltely. After an initial willingness to engage in a conversation, they stopped talking to us at all. Is that because they don’t like being asked about their opinions? Don’t want to accept that we might have a different view? Sinply preferring trolling? Or is it because they think our responding to their comments is unwanted intrusion? I have no idea which it is.
2) There might be some things that actually shouldn’t be discussed in public. Yesterday one of our readers took offence to the removal of comments on a story about a grieving family. The comments were about what causes road accidents in the place where a young man died.
Our policy is that comments are only open on those stories to allow people to place tribute. Normally we’d post that at the foot of the story when it’s uploaded: on this occasion it was accidentally left off and I had to post it in retrospect.One reader took this as a personal affront and developed our Twitter “discussion” into accusations about whether grieving families should talk to the press.
I felt, rightly or wrongly, that giving that reader details of how we came to speak to said family wasn’t really appropriate in a public forum: it’s none of their business if they choose to come forward to speak.The reader, though, assumed that my refusal to engage in an argument meant that the family didn’t come forward and that we must have obtained the quotes by underhand means.
So what to do? Our integrity is being questioned, in public, but I can’t defend us in a dignified fashon. In the end I offered to speak to the reader face to face, they called me a hypocrite for not being able to take criticism.
And finally, and most unexpectedly, 3). If people are used to a chatty, social, entertaining Twitter feed, they might take offence when you post serious news.
We didn’t really post much on twitter yesterday about the tragic deaths of a family in Fordingbridge. The RSS feed posted an initial story, then we tweeted when the family were named, because the updated story wouldn’t feed through the RSS.
We also tweeted to say we had video footage from the scene going online – it was a policeman giving a statement and some reaction from the town; less in fact than had been on the rolling news channels all day.
Some of our readers felt Twitter was not the place for such news. Which made me think. We didn’t treat it any differently than any other news story. But should we have? Do people expect different things from the news they get from Twitter? Does adding detail make you seem in some way ghoulish? Is it because of the specific kind of story?I’d be very interested to hear any thoughts about any of these points. Twitter has not been my friend this week but hopefully we can learn something, even if it’s just when to keep our mouth shut.
- Jun 28, 10
I WAS overwhelmed by the positive reaction to my presentation at last week’s excellent news:rewired conference, but slightly annoyed with myself for not having a better answer to Hannah Waldram’s question afterwards.
My presentation was about building online communities, and the concept of the reader plus – the elusive category of cheerleader readers: demanding customers, but the most effective marketing you could ever ask for.
The slides from the presentation are here and the post where I first came up with the lamer-the-more-I-hear-other-people-say-it “readers plus” is here.
In the questions afterwards, Hannah asked me what percentage of our readers did I think were readers plus. The best answer I could come up with then was “I’m not sure.” But really, since I’m trying to persaude people that the time spent getting them is worth it, I should know. So I’ve been thinking about it and here’s my best estimate.
Flickr: I’d say 25 per cent are genuine readers plus. I know this because we talk to them not just on Flickr, but on Facebook and Twitter and face-to-face occasionally! Because what they do is just a specific area of interest, I think the very fact of our taking an interest has been enough to transform the way they think about the paper or at the least challenged their expectations of us.
Facebook: The best I can say here, is I’m working on it! Putting effort into Facebook is a recent development, and Facebook doesn’t tell you how many times your links are shared by friends, so the only thing we have to go on is comments and traffic figures coming to our site. As I said on Friday, traffic from Facebook has tripled and comments are building. We’ve got some facebook friends who definitely COULD be readers plus but I’m not sure we’re quite there yet!
Twitter: Based on retweets and interaction, I’d say twenty percent of our twitter followers are definite readers plus. It may be more, but obviously I don’t know what people are saying about us when I’m not listening!
Hopefully that’s a fuller answer than “I don’t know” – and sorry I didn’t say this at the time.
For those who asked about how exactly we use facebook etc, you can see for yourself here:
bournemouthecho.tumblr.com
flickr.com/bournemouthecho
flickr.com/groups/echoyear/
twitter.com/bournemouthecho
facebook.com/bournemouthecho (my work profile)
facebook.com/bournemouthdailyecho (our Facebook page)
We also have a pretty neglected YouTube account at youtube.com/bournemouthecho, and of course there’s the comments at bournemouthecho.co.uk.
- Jun 23, 10
Recently those of us who work for Newsquest have been taking part in some best practice social media workshops (main lesson learned so far: no two twitterers are alike and they all think their way is the right way!).
As a result of chatting with fellow web types about Facebook (main lesson learned there – no-one really knows how best to use it!) I’ve made some changes to our pages and profiles, which have doubled the number of the clickthroughs we’re getting.
They were really straightforward changes, so I thought I’d outline them for anyone who might be interested.
First: RSS Graffiti for Facebook – the best way to feed your news to Facebook, whether you’re cheating with a profile (of which more in a second) or using a fan page. It looks pretty and it doesn’t dump all your stories at once, but in relatively real time to when you post them.
Second: we had been using a profile, simply because the only way to actively find and friend people on Facebook is to have a profile. We’d set this up in the paper’s name, not mine, because I wanted the paper online to be it’s only personality and not connected to a specific person. However. This is generally frowned upon and people who are sussed out can have their accounts closed down without warning.
So I invited all our friends to “like” our page. Almost all did. I changed the name of the profile to Bournemouth Echo Sam (the name change had to be approved by Facebook) and started using it to share news links fed through to our fan page.
I also turned off the link that fed all our Twitter updates to our profile page, to stop all the news stories being replicated.
The page changes have been massively successful, although I’m finding that the best way of generating interaction with our posts is to comment or like them myself.
The profile changes have changed the way other people on Facebook treat me – because they can see I’m a real person now I’m being approached a lot more, on chat and by email. It’s more time consuming – if I want a story from the paper to appear on my profile I have to remember to manually post it – but with more than 70,000 potential fans in the Bournemouth network, it’s got to be worth the effort.
- Jan 29, 10
First thing: I check Facebook twice a day: probably I spend half an hour a day on the site. Every day I see at least one advert that makes me think – oh, I want/need/like the look of one of those.
But I’ve NEVER clicked one. Why? I don’t trust their integrity. They run alongside the ubiquitous take this pill to be thin and 1 tip of a flat belly adverts, and I have no confidence that the link I’m about to click will take me somewhere sound. I wouldn’t trust these advertisers with my money.
Second thing: Here’s an advertising policy from an American blog, describing how they choose (yes, choose) their advertisers and sponsors.
First, they need to have been recommended by a reader, client or industry professional. We don’t simply look for a referral but rather for a passionate reason as to why a particular vendor deserves to be in the book. Whatever the connection, it must be strong and based on a real knowledge of the vendor’s work.
Second, we dive head first into the vendor’s business. Their portfolio, their experience, their time in the industry. We look at press that they’ve received, we chat with their industry neighbors, we get to know who they are and why they are good at what they do.
We spend time…. getting to know them, figuring out if they are honest, have a high level of integrity and are truly devoted to their craft. For highly competitive industries, like photography, we also have vetting teams. An unbiased group of vendors who can fairly, objectively, and accurately evaluate other’s work.If you have had a negative experience with any of the vendors listed, please let us know as soon as possible. Your name will remain anonymous and we will take your issues very seriously. If we find that indeed the vendor has violated what we believe to be good, honest work ethics, they will be removed from the site immediately and any advertising dollars will be refunded.
That’s a pretty firm commitment – but one that I’d say increases the chances of readers clicking those ads dramatically.
People talk a lot about curating in journalism, a new attitude to news gathering and distributing, being a place readers trusts to sift through the web and find them the solid gold good stuff.
So what if you applied that logic to advertising?
What if your food pages had a similar list of producers that your knowledgeable food writers had checked out? Or even restaurants or coffee shops? What if your leisure pages had a similar list of hotels? What if your online readers knew that they wouldn’t see fat-busting ads but instead the logos of reputable local trainers?
Just a thought….
- Jan 29, 10Other people, not least Jeff Jarvis and Alan Rusbridger, have said what I’m about to say better than me.
But as a person who “community manages” I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
Here’s a quote from a local councillor’s blog.Why do local papers go to the trouble of producing a newspaper, then providing most of it for free in a way that for many people is also more convenient?Perhaps to drive people to the website? but to what end? We are not going there and buying something (we are going there and NOT buying!) I am certainly not clicking on any money making links.I cannot see any point in providing content for free on the site. Nor can other local newspapers, The Whitby Gazzette charges £5 for 3 months access to premium content. Thats not bad – I would pay that!Some commentators say that it would alienate readers, but they are not paying readers!That last sentence bothers me. It’s this growing tendency to punish online readers because we can’t figure out a way to make money from them.People like me spend a lot of time trying to build and nourish online communities. And it’s pretty successful. All the online year-on-year figures I’ve seen suggest rises of between 40 and 70 per centAnd these aren’t like paper readers. They’re readers plus.They talk to us. They correct our mistakes and they suggest questions for us to ask. They respond to our questions. They distribute our work for us, when they like and when they hate it. They tell their friends.They’re our newsagents, our delivery drivers and our billboards. They create content for us, they help us answer complicated questions or sort through complicated data. They chat with us, they help us out when we don’t know what’s happening in a weather crisis or a police incident.They make us part of their lives. They trust us to be fair, and if we haven’t been fair, they expect us to be honest about our mistakes. They don’t let us get away with being sloppy. They force us to be better at our jobs, to close the gap between them and us.And no, they don’t pay. But since when did the cover price ever pay for newspapers’ journalism? In most places the cover price doesn’t even pay for the cost of printing, let alone the salaries of the people who write the news.So to me, the concept that readers are to blame for the fact that online doesn’t make money is nonsense. And yet despite the months and years they’ve put in, and we’ve put in, creating an interesting and engaging online community, newspapers all over the country are choosing to punish them by installing paywalls for frequent visitors or holding content off the web.But it’s not their fault our advertising strategies failed. It’s not their fault they don’t click the flash-heavy, irrelevant-to-them monstrosity for a dodgy sounding loan company or car dealer. It’s ours.If you don’t sell advertising in the paper, you don’t blame the readers who borrowed their copy from a friend, or read it in the library, and you certainly don’t put the cover price up to compensate.So why are we blaming our readers for our failure to recognise that print advertising strategies don’t work online?
- Jan 03, 10
One of our local councillors (@lisanova) has just posted this on her blog.
It’s about commenters on our site and what responsibility we have to moderate them.
On the one hand, she’s entirely correct. Comments on this story started badly and got worse.
On the other hand, none of the points she suggests are we in a position to implement. Our moderation policy (in that we don’t moderate) is dictated by group-wide legal advice. We can’t require people to register with their real names as we have absolutely no means of checking whether they’re telling us the truth.
Point four we do of course stick to, with the proviso that we don’t moderate, so we can only act when something is drawn to our attention.
Point one, the community manager, is in many ways what I do, although it’s not my job description and not a position that would be recognised by anyone else in our newsroom. I also don’t work 24 hours a day.
Point two – have reporters respond to comments – is a brilliant idea in theory but in practice is hard to implement (willingness, experience, confidence all being factors here, in management as well as reporters).
In an ideal world, you see, I’d post a response to her blog. But I’m not sure what I’d say. Is she right? Probably. Is there anything I can do about it? Not at all.
- Dec 07, 09
Oh the irony.
My post asking why our live blogs weren’t working got more comments than all the liveblogs put together.
And the responses have been a bit of an eye opener:
I would suggest that people would like to discuss the major issues, not the periphery issues. Specifically, staffing levels, salaries and staff pensions which I assume are the biggest element of Council expenditure by a country mile.
Most people have no interest in this online blog for the simple reason the options are all about cutting services that effect us. What most people want is to see the wage bill cut from the overpacked top half of the Council. Why don’t we have the option of saying “sack half the managers?” Year in, year out these people take more of our money, and give us less and less services. Doesn’t stop them voting themselves increases in wages and expences though. Stop paying for consultants and do the job yourself, that will save money. Cut down on the amount of Councillers. It’s been shown time after time that they are of little use. They find out more about what the Council is doing by reading the Echo, then they do from attending expences paid meetings. Most of all, they had better remember it is election time next year.
Its the same old B$ response we get – nothing changes no mater how much we do or do not get involved. Why waste our time
as for the blog waste of time if it made any difference you would not have it
There is no point in commenting because most of the suggestions are not acceptable for example cutting back services to the elderly or for youth
What should be brought forward are cost saving measures that the public actually want-Cuts in number of Councillors , cuts in Special Allowances , cut expenses,get rid of agency staff, get rid of any posts that have been vacant for more than 3 months,cut out expenditure on outside Consultants, cut out expenditure on projects like “Town Centre Vision”, cut down on the number of meatings and the number of people attending them so they can do some actual work, and generally make the Council more efficient and cost effective
Why should the public have to say they would cut Youth Clubs or Concessionary Fares when these other areas are the places savings should be madeI suspect that there is no sense of an equality of sacrifice and that we are being asked to cut into too many services for vulnerable people. Cut Councillors allowances to where they were in May 2007. make a pledge to aim for a slimmed down Council. and people might begin to think their views were important.
The cost-cutting measures suggested for comment look like Civil Service impossible choices, with the implication that there is no scope for the efficiency improvements and cost of service- delivery reductions that people are entitled to expect.
If I thought that the council were really serious about cost-cutting then I might want to engage with the process, but the council suggestions so far just don’t give that impression. When I see serious proposals about reductions in the number of Councillors, removal of contract staff, cuts in allowances, reduced overheads, etc, then I will start to believe that they mean business. And even then I will want to see the accounts!I guess too many people realized that the select inner few in the cabinet have already decided what is to happen; after all if they have shown little interest in democratic local government in the past, so why should we expect a change now?
This was just a box ticking exercise to show that they are listening.
Recent events prove they don’t care what we think, then they wonder why we dont bother going along with there stupid pr stunts.I’m not surprised the ‘Blog’ was of little interest to people. It appeared to me to be nothing other than a propaganda excercise, designed to show that the council was so efficient, that the only way to make ‘Savings’ was to cut services that would have a highly visable impact,(closing public toilets/being unable to close down drug dens/not repairing roads etc).
Because despite anything being said by the ‘public’, people are probably of the opinion that Bournemouth Borough Council will go ahead anyway with whatever has been decided by them already. I suggest that whatever they are going to cut (allowances are NOT to be cut) has been set in stone and the agenda’s, together with discussion papers, already prepared for the meetings.
Because the council’s mind is already made up, never mind the ‘consultations, they know what they are going to do and they will do it.
And my personal favourite….
This needs to be run and controlled by an organization that has both the skills and knowledge to do a consultation in this way. With respect to the Echo I don’t think they have such skill and knowledge.
I’m not sure what any of this means for us and future liveblogs. But the strength of feeling against the council has been quite a surprise.
You can read the rest of the comments here
- Dec 04, 09
I’ve just written this for our Ask the Echo blog.
We tried an experiment this week. Three lunchtime live webchats focusing on Bournemouth Borough Council’s proposed budget cuts.
We spent a lot of time thinking about the best time and structure for these blogs – the council had asked us to help get people involved in the budget consultation, and we were happy to do so. It’s your money, after all, it’s only right that you have a say in how it’s spent.
So we decided on three blogs focusing on specific subject areas. A councillor and council officer would come in each day to answer questions and respond to comments.
We posted a story about each blog, with a form for submitting questions if you weren’t able to be there live. We also made sure each story had details about exactly what cuts were being considered.
And we chose lunchtime because our previous experiences with evening blogs had not been very successful.
The response, however was underwhelming. Even Cllr Stephen MacLoughlin putting in an appearance on Thursday wasn’t enough to provoke a response.
Today’s blog, about cutting funding for ASBOs, stopping closing drug dens because it costs too much and switching off the town’s CCTV cameras, was cancelled because not a single question was posted.
Reader numbers for the blogs never made it out of the “few dozen”. So we’d like to know why.
Is it the format? The time? Are you not interested in the budget options? Do you think it’s not your job to decide? Whatever the feedback, we’d like to hear it. Be constructive, please… we really want to know how we can make these discussions work for you. There’s a form <a href=http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/yoursay/ask_the_echo/> here </a>…
Essentially this week’s discussions have been a very damp squib. The most response we got came from the issue of bowling greens (it costs the taz payers £200 per year per bowler to keep the greens maintained.)
My theory that is people comment, on stories or blogs, only when they feel personally outraged by the subject in question.
Ask for their opinion before a decision is made, and they don’t have one (unless they feel something underhand is happening, of course). But tell them that decision has been made and they’ll be outraged that it wasn’t the choice they wanted.
Or maybe it’s simple apathy about politics and councils in general. Maybe people feel their opnions aren’t needed. Maybe they thought the options in question were so ridiculous they weren’t ever going to get the nod.Hopefully we’ll have more respsonse to the why than we did to the original blogs… will let you know!
- Sep 16, 09
I recently realised that I’ve not blogged about journalism for a long time. My tweeting, too, has been mainly of the non-journalistic type, except for sharing the links I find most interesting on Twitter.
So I’m wondering why that is. It’s not that I don’t have opinions; I do. I have thoughts about restructured newsrooms, about paywalls, about tweeting the news, engaging with readers – you name it, I’m opinionated about it.
Yesterday I was particularly exercised about Google’s Fast Flip and how all the reaction I’ve seen has been about how it serves newspapers and not how it serves consumers of news (which in the end is surely what will decide if it’s successful or not?)
Today it’s the way someone in my office has asked me, as a notorious heel wearer, what I think about the TUC wanting to “ban heels from the workplace”, a misinterpretation of the motion written so hilariously about by the Times today that has become “news fact” because a bunch of journalists thought it was funnier to pretend that what’s the TUC wants, so much funnier they completely ignored the quote from the TUC that said that wasn’t what they wanted at all.
But for some reason I’m reluctant to share.
Partly it’s because I know opinions can get you into trouble.
First, Twitter: A brief but unfortunate appearance in UKPG (pre-rising-from-the-dead) reminded me that while I might feel there’s a culture of trust amongst the people I follow, not everyone feels the same way.
You never know who’s reading, or how they might choose to repeat what you say. And yes, I could protect my tweets, but that excludes me from the wider conversation which to me was the point of twitter in the first place.
Then I lost a follower (yes, just the one) for reasons I’m not sure about but can guess at, which for me underlined the futility of having a presence in a media where people might expect me to express an opinion without being able to say what I really think.
And sometimes I find myself agreeing with Steve Jackson’s pov about Twitter and the media. The opinions I find most interesting are often those of non-journalists (because I think Tweeting journos can sometimes suffer from as narrow a world view as those who say the internet is killing newspapers)
Then there’s the difficulty of working in online in a traditional newsroom. I am often frusrated by our approach to, and execution of, news online, but blogging about it will not solve that –although I’m sure others out there would find it informative, if not helpful.
And then there’s my general uncertainty about newspapers and journalism in general. Maybe I’m reading too much Enemies, too much Bad Science. Maybe it’s the way that stories that would be a nib on a printed page get equal billing with leads on a website (especially when you come at a story from a link), and the way that skews the view of readers about what we as news organisations stand for/care about.
I read the Guardian interview with Max Mosley and agreed with him that his private life is none of our business. I watch Glenn Beck on Fox News and wonder if Fox would be allowed to get away with it here – and then I read something by @antonvowl and wonder if what he’s outling is that we’ve already got our own Fox.
And sometimes I wonder if we’re asking the right questions when it comes to ‘saving journalism’, confusing what has always been a business with our own altruistic notions that we’re a public service.
What if it’s as simple as “what the people want, the people will pay for”? And what if that’s not the kind of reporting we want to do, or think we should be doing?
And I’m tired of the squabbling about if, what and when we load to the web that distracts us from all the exciting, innovative forms of storytelling we could be trying, all the things that digital journalism could and should be.
In short, I’m struggling to find anything nice to say at the moment. I’m feeling picky and prickly about what news I consume and to be brutally truthful quite often I wonder when (not if) I’ll end up doing something else instead.
It may be that all I need is a holiday. (which is lucky, because I’m about to go on one). It may be that I’m just suffering from plain and simple resistance to change. Or maybe it’s just writer’s block.
Whichever it turns out to be, I’m going to make an effort to resume blogging when I come back from my holiday next month.
Hopefully I’ll find something positive, forward thinking and useful to say. ..
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Photos
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Posts
- Spot on from Andy Dickinson
“It’s easy to dismiss putting time in to getting your multimedia on twitter as a waste of time. Like the ipad, it’s easy to dismiss things like twitters new features as gadgets and technology that get in the way of proper journalism.
But experimenting with getting a video on to twitter is not about video on twitter. That’s the easy (now easier bit). It’s about exploring if you have the capacity to do video at all.
Just like exploring delivery of content to the ipad is a way to experiment with html5. Hell, if nothing else it’s a convenient excuse to try.
If you don’t take the opportunity to experiment then you will find that you have less of a capacity to produce the content your audience will want and no ability to chase them as they migrate to platforms that do.”
I think the greatest realisation at the end of the evening though was agreeing on what makes money on a website or mobile device.
Now, this might seem shocking or controversial to some of you; I suspect others realised this long ago.
But collectively we pretty much agreed that on any “news” product, the journalism itself doesn’t make any money. It never will. It never has. It never should. Instead it facilities a wide variety of other products which do make money; a subscription service, a shop, a sponsored mailing list, events etc.
They cannot make money without the journalism, but the journalism cannot exist without them making money.- good points about collaboration....
Trust the Crowd; Its Smarter than You — The sooner you trust the group and empower it, the sooner it can produce high quality results. The group can make up for any weaknesses you may have as an individual. The idea is to bring out the strongest skills and downplay the weakest in each person.
Diversity and Creativity Are Intrinsically Connected — Creative brainstorming is significantly improved by diversity. Individuals not only challenge each others’ ideas, but they also inspire each other as well.
Collaboration is Messy — When Jimmy Wales said “[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don’t necessarily want to see how it’s made,” he wasn’t kidding. Chaos, in many ways, seems to be the spark of great collaborative endeavors.
Be Open to Receiving and Giving Criticism — When working collaboratively, it is important to let go of your ego. Learn to not take things personally and be honest about what you think without being disrespectful.
From what-working-for-wikipedia-taught-me-about-collaboration
Why is social media so powerful? Two reasons. Trust: we don’t send our friends crap to read. Relevance: we’re more likely to have common interests with our social network and therefore our links are more likely to be relevant. Ah, trust and relevance. Sound familiar? If a newspaper’s job is to reflect, affect and connect the community it serves, trust and relevance are what get the job done. It’s amazing to me how at this time, with more tools available than ever to fulfill these objectives, newspapers are turning away from what made them great brands in the first place. By refusing to listen to and engage their readers by ignoring social media, limiting comments and erecting pay walls, they are destroying trust and hastening their irrelevance. They are destroying the core, not protecting it. It’s time to embrace the community.
If you consider mass media to be important, by which I mean the kind of news, analysis and content that is written for a large, generalist, audience then, online, access to it must be as unencumbered as possible.
People must be able to share it, quote from it, comment on it and – hang on to your hats – even add to it. If you believe that’s important then that’s what you must do. And if you believe that’s important then you will have to figure out a way to make it pay.
Putting your content behind a paywall is, online, a retreat from mass media. It’s an abdication.
The Times is now a niche publication though I’m not sure who it’s for, which is another problem entirely.
A niche publication serves a niche audience. A legal periodical, for example, is for lawyers. The Times appears to be a niche publication for “Times readers”, which is at best vague and at worst tautological.Free content isn’t a right but David Mitchell is still wrong about paywalls – Telegraph Blogs
pretty much sums up what makes me uncomfortable about paywalls…
“Perspective is lost when we over focus on the disruptions from such simple technologies. ”
Some of the TBD people have been talking about David Rothman’s suggestions for their business today. I found the post interesting, not just because of the TBD angle, but because of what it seems to say about Rothman’s understanding about the local blog scene.
Rothman suggests that TBD needs…
Here is the deepest and, to many serious journalists, most disturbing truth about the future of news: The audience will control it. They will get the kind of news they choose to get. Not the kind they say they want, but the kind they actually choose.
No matter what its business model might be, journalism will fail to deliver to the broad public the civic education our society requires unless it can persuade large numbers of people to pay attention to it.
So the choice is not between giving people what they want or what they need. The challenge is to induce people to want what they need.
The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience.People will not want to buy a newspaper every day to find out about (normally) boring news, such as if a dictionary wants to add an extra word to their tomes or if Comcast and ESPN are in an argument over profits, when they can just get news online for free. It is much more convenient to be able to read news online.
Most people read the news to get a better sense of what is happening around them. They don’t read it for an in-depth analysis of topics. Therefore, a quick scan of a short article is normally all that people desire.
Finally, advertising is much more effective online, where the advertisements are scrolling down next to the text. There, they are visible yet unintrusive. In newspapers, the ads are normally grouped together in an advertisement section. Most people simply skip over this.
There’s a whole world of assumptions in this 14-year-old’s essay about the future of news that are completely contradictory to the way most of our industry thinks.
Will he have changed his mind by the time he’s 20, or 40? Or should we be thinking about how to make ourselves relevant to teenagers like him?
The rest of the essays in the Nieman report are worth a look too.
The countries where online newspaper website consumption is highest – Korea, Norway, Iceland, Japan – outscore Britain almost two to one and fare much better at protecting print circulation as well.
Austria, pretty close to the UK in news site usage, lost a mere 2% of publishing turnover in the two years where we saw 21% go.
Here’s a hint in these statistics – the sort of people who get their news online are also the sort of people who buy print newspapers. It’s not one or the other; it’s often both.
And nothing they find prompts the OECD researchers to conclude that print papers have a doomed, finite future.
Well, of course, international forecasters can be wrong. But a few nagging conclusions about our Fleet Street and regional press won’t go away.
In the broad, we’re a long way behind the US, and other nations as well, in increasing digital advertising.
And in the main, intense, introverted competition stops industry-wide thinking and co-operation. Compare places such as Norway and Sweden, which do better on every count.
Worse, we’re particularly poor at connecting with new, young readers – who may prefer news on the net, but often choose no news at all.
We fulminate about immigration, but don’t provide a service to meet their different needs.We tell ourselves that Fleet Street knows best, but change painfully little in style or range as the crisis bites.
The test participant in the top gaze plot fixated a few times within the big empty color block before the content downloaded, then spent the remaining time looking at the rest of the page. This user never looked at the big promotional space after it had rendered.
The second user (bottom gaze plot) happened to be looking away from the screen during the 8 seconds when the promotional content downloaded. Thus, the first time he looked at the page he saw it as intended, complete with the entire promo.
The slideshow occupies 23% of the page, not counting a footer that’s not shown here. The user who had to endure the download delay spent only 1% of her total viewing time within this space. In contrast, the user who in effect received instantaneous page rendering (because he didn’t look until it was done), spent 20% of his viewing time within the slideshow area.Website Response Times (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Newspapers that view the website as a place for reverse-publishing articles are settling for short-term solutions that won’t last the course.
It seems vaguely appropriate that Coren should be spitting teeth for an interview to promote a book about anger. It strikes me this is an elaborate publicity stunt. But no.
“The publicity people have been a fucking nightmare,” he yells. This interview was due to last half an hour but in the spirit of compromise I say let’s do 10 minutes. In the end it lasts less than a minute before Coren stands up and calls it off.
A few fucks later, coupled with a hasty apology, and I’m standing in the street, Dictaphone whirring.
What makes Coren so cross? - Press, Media - The Independent (via Jon Slattery)
