Flying the user-friendly skies

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Originally published on Newstogram.com blog on March 24, 2011

I travel a lot. I’m in a lot of airports (some good, some bad). So flying analogies usually work for me. But a recent trip that ended at Miami’s beautifully redone American Airlines terminal made me realize why one analogy I hear too often is misguided.

You’ve probably heard someone say, “We’re trying to rebuild the airplane while we’re flying it.” Sound familiar? It’s usually uttered when you need to justify why all work has to stop on anything except today’s mega-project.

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Google’s the wrong blip on news industry radar

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It seems that Google is falling prey to the ugly sort of herd mentality that can give journalism a bad name when it happens among the press pool covering a candidate or those chasing after the latest octomom rumors. In this case, journalists are doing it in defense of our profession and the benefits it brings to society, but that still doesn’t make it defensible.

Unfortunately, this requires getting out a calculator (for those journalists who don’t have one, see if your cellphone offers the capability). This is, after all, just a math problem.

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Build it like you expect them to pay

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Everyone in the news industry seems to be talking about charging for news content – again. It seems so 2001 (remember when economy last tanked and the online ad market swooned). 

Of course, whenever such discussion starts, people inevitably start to assess the experience of The Wall Street Journal’s subscription model, regardless of their level of knowledge or depth of understanding. Quite a few of my former Journal colleagues have weighed in on the subject, but I think even they’re still missing some key elements.

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Don’t overlook acquisition costs

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I wanted to offer one addendum to the post above about the WSJ.com subscription model:

One point Bill Grueskin tried to make in his “The case for charging to read WSJ.com” post on Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur blog deserves some elaboration: He dismisses the marketing challenges of getting people to pay and technical complexities of managing subscription accounts. He says: “Most of the acquisition cost amounted to some cheap advertising and a couple of percentage points to the credit-card company.” This seems to suggest that “cheap advertising” is all it takes to convince someone of the value of a subscription. If that were the case, I’d imagine the Journal would be buying a whole lot more of that cheap advertising and boosting the subscriptions even faster. It’s pretty simple math: Is the cost to acquire an incremental subscriber less than the net value of an incremental subscriber? If a subscriber is so valuable and it only takes “cheap advertising” to get more, then why doesn’t WSJ.com have 2 million subscribers?

The truth is that the considerable time and energy goes into finding creative ways to convince people that something they haven’t yet experienced will be worth putting down their credit card on a registration form, even if they get a free trial period. It also overlooks the fact that Dow Jones probably spent at least $5 million over the early life of WSJ.com building, licensing software, rebuilding and rebuilding the subscription management systems. No doubt the marketing department still has a huge laundry list of features it would like in the third-generation system now in use.

I remember when Netscape abandoned the business of producing server software to support online subscriptions because the market for such software never developed. The landscape is only marginally better today.

All I want for Christmas…

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Dear Santa:

I know all my loved ones have already completed their shopping, but I hope I still have time to get something in your gift bag. I especially hope you have some pull with Jeff Bezos. Because, you see, I’ve decided I want a Kindle for Christmas. I know, I could wait until early next year and get the newer model that is supposed to fix all the flaws in the current device. I suppose with the country in a recession and people losing their jobs, asking for a $349 gift is a bit much. At least I’m not asking for Irex’s Iliad e-reader, which seems pretty cool, too.

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We need more ‘mental flexibility’

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One of the problems with getting nearly all of your news online is that you often miss interesting articles or columns that you are much more likely to discover when turning the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

I had one such moment yesterday, when I purchased the Sunday New York Times to enjoy while flying back to Miami from a weekend in Chicago. Having not read the printed NYT Magazine for weeks, I found that it has a column by Virginia Heffernan called The Medium, and this week’s offering “Content and Its Discontents” was particularly thought-provoking. Continue reading →

News for our grandmothers

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Jonathan Zimmerman’s piece “Who’ll Read All About It?” (originally published on USA Today’s opinion page and available via syndication on DailyMe) echoes some of my thoughts below about the loss of print newspapers. He writes:

“We’re not there yet. Nobody knows how frequently our oldest citizens go online, but it’s probably not often. In a 2007 survey, for example, just 6% of American centenarians said they have been on the Web. For people like my grandmother, then, the demise of print newspapers would mean the end of newspapers, period.

“And for the rest of us, it might mean something else: the decline of sustained concentration, deliberation and analysis. When we read on the Web, recent studies suggest, we’re much more likely to skim a piece — or to stop reading it altogether — than when we encounter it in print formats.

“If you’re reading this essay online, you can click on any number of nearby links and windows right now. Maybe you already have. But if you’re reading it on paper, there’s a better chance that you’ll stay focused on the piece until you have finished it.”

Reason to keep working on ways to deliver news digitally in formats that will work for readers not yet online.

Will print be around for next historic event?

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It was great to see that newspapers sold out and even did extra press runs on Wednesday after Barack Obama’s election victory. I just wonder if this might be the last historic event where we’ll still be saving the print newspaper as a keepsake. How will online be able to preserve history? Yes, we have collections of screenshots of news sites, but is it the same?

Speaking of the front pages of news sites. I was amazed at how quickly major sites were able to reformat their front pages to announce Obama’s victory a few minutes after the polls closed in California. Clearly, they had these pages entirely ready with the headlines written and just pushed the button at the given moment. If the exit polls and returns were telling them they could do this before the polls closed, why weren’t they telling their readers that already?

Are we ready for the future news consumer?

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For a variety of reasons, I’ve been immersing myself in the wealth of research out recently on news consumers. It is thought-provoking reading that everyone interested in the future of news should spend time absorbing. The patterns of news consumption have changed dramatically in recent years, and even more changes lie ahead. Those of us seeking to build the digital news products of the future need to understand these changes and our future audiences.

The most engrossing report was released in August by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which titled its biennial news consumption survey “Audience Segments in a Changing News Environment: Key News Audiences Now Blend Online and Traditional Sources.”  It’s not that it’s taken me two months to digest the 129 pages and thousands of data points, but it easily could have. I also was working my way through 71 pages of “A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption,” the insightful ethnographic research released by The Associated Press in June, and 57 pages of “The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America’s Daily Newspapers?” from The Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Now that paragraph is a mouthful.

Pew’s identification of two key online news audiences – the Net-Newsers and the Integrators – is a valuable distinction. For most of the first decade or so of creating online news products, we were mostly targeting anyone who happened to be online and interested in news. If anything, most traditional news organizations shied away from creating online news products that we too appealing to their ink-on-paper readers. No sense encouraging them to switch. But as I look around at online news sites today, I wonder if we’re ready for the coming wave of online news consumers.

Lately, it seems as if most online news products are being targeted squarely at the web-savvy Net-Newsers. While smaller in numbers, Net-Newsers do spend more time getting news online, which makes them appealing. But I’d posit that Integrators – those getting their news from both traditional and new media – are poised for greater growth and represent a better opportunity.

After all, what happens when more newspapers cut back and send their readers online looking for news, as the Christian Science Monitor just announced it would do. Will these Integrators know how to discover news of interest to them? Will these Integrators be comfortable with the latest social media approach to finding news? Will people used to scanning headlines while turning the pages of a newspaper be confused by online navigation and tiny headlines crammed on a small computer screen? If news sites don’t make them more accommodating to these less savvy users, will they get the traffic they so desperately need to make up for the lost print advertising revenue?

At last week’s New Business Models for News Summit, I was in a group charged with creating a hypothetical newsroom budget with no real guidance on what it would produce. After much debate about whether this hypothetical newsroom still had to produce a newspaper or just an online news site, we decided it would be the newsroom left standing after a major metropolitan newspaper stopped publishing in print. We quickly realized that we’d need to reduce the size of the newsroom from 200 to about 35, given the revenue we could expect from this hypothetical site generating 75 million pageviews a month. A sobering thought. And none of the budget was allocated to creating a news product that might appeal to former newspaper readers. In fact, it seemed to be a given that newspaper sites spend too much time on design and should just be turning out content on basic blogging platforms.

We need to find ways to make online news appealing to both Net-Newsers and Integrators – perhaps even to Traditionalists, who may soon find the Christian Science Monitor isn’t the only defunct newspaper. 

Somethings old, somethings new

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This week’s news got the creative juices flowing for the DailyMe team in ways that played to our blend of old and new media. The final presidential debate allowed us to fine-tune a Twitter module we added to our elections pages and it’s now very active pulling in tweets about the candidates. You can see it in action on all the pages of our Election News section.

Then, while monitoring political news video available from Voxant while watching the debate, I started thinking we had enough strong content on where the candidates stand on issues to create a separate page. I shared the idea with Bob Rountree the next morning and by noon our Issues page was up and running.  Bob had the idea for our next twist, deciding to pull all the coverage of Joe the Plumber together on a topics page.

Exciting stuff. Isn’t this how it’s supposed to feel in the new age of journalism?