Exploring Media in Transformation | Transforming in Media Exploration
/ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃən/ n. 1: a process of change from one form to another.
Steve Outing gives two thumbs down to Trib CEO Sam Zell's comment that he's going to innovate in the smaller markets:
Waiting for experiments from the hinterlands to pan out before implementing them in Chicago, LA and Long Island is a going-too-slow approach.
We've been talking about "engagement" at The Dallas Morning News, in the hope that this will supplant page views as a more effective way of measuring our audience's interest in our content. We're not alone, as Tech Crunch reports:
In a speech today Brian McAndrews, Microsoft’s senior vice president of Advertiser & Publisher Solutions, announced the beta of a new way to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns that Microsoft is calling “Engagement Mapping.”
Influential Silicon Valley VC blog Tech Crunch writes about Mochila, the content syndication company that Belo invested in. It's a mostly positive post about how the company is offering some BBC video. But - ouch - check out one of the comments, in which "Webmogul" rips the company for having bad code:
...it is the worst code I have ever seen written, period. I’ve seen bad code from IBM, Microsoft and others, and nothing compares to what these guys put out. It doesn’t scale (we tested it), is the very definition of “spaghetti code” goes against every good programming practice you can imagine. I know of at least half a dozen other people that feel that same way too.
From Jennifer Okamoto, who led the charge on this:
Starting today on dallasnews.com, readers can vote for the most interesting stories of the moment as part of a partnership with Yahoo.
The Dallas Morning News is contributing to Buzz, Yahoo’s newly launched social news site. It pulls feeds from 100 sources, including newspapers, blogs and magazines and ranks their stories based on readers’ votes, searches and forwarded e-mails.
Look for the Yahoo ! Buzz button on each story on the site to vote for an article and see how it ranks among other stories online today. Stories with the highest Buzz score may be displayed on the Yahoo.com home page.
Buzz is similar to another popular recommendation tool, Digg. Users can “Digg” a story on dallasnews.com by clicking the “Bookmark” link.
Kent Fischer reports progress knitting together a network in his note to Beat Blogging: The Network is Working - Next Question: How to Automate It. But he points out one key issue.
The network exists, but you wouldn’t necessarily see it from just reading the blog because our primary communication thus far is via an e-mail discussion group.
As Beat Blogging coordinator David Cohn notes, "This method works - and is very personal. But it doesn't scale (if he wanted to grow the network) and it only adds more work to his growing load."
In this post, Twitter, Jeff Jarvis explains how he's come to respect the microblogging platform as "an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging." I agree. Worth a read.
I've already mentioned the debut of Everyblock, the latest effort by Web data guru Adrian Holovaty. Now he's fleshed out some of the work behind the scenes that led to the site's recent launch, in an interview at OJR.
Adrian explains it clearly took some work in the community and on the computer. And he offers his reasons why we newspaper.commers haven't equaled his efforts.
Holovaty: Unfortunately, there's a lot. In the general case (and "general" means this excludes the newspapers out there who are doing great things online) --
- A lack of technical competence
- A culture so obsessed with daily deadlines that little thought/resources are put into paradigm changes
- A culture that disdains technology and science, particularly math, and, worse, actually takes pride in that
- Red tape
- Legacy systems
- Legacy attitudes
- People who ask "Is this journalism?" ;-)
Well lookee here: Steve Outing has a post that harkens the meeting we had here just last week about fixing our newsletters! URL: Personalize e-mail communications for better open rates.
That's what we need to do!
Several folks have asked me about the latest Neilsen report on time spent on newspaper.coms in January. Pay it no mind.
Although it looks as if people spend a lot less time on our site per visit than on peer newspaper.coms, the discrepency is one that’s due to bad data collection, not lousy Web site design or uninteresting content etc. Our internal numbers put us in January at 16:45, which represents a consistent, three-year rise in time spent, and is much more in line with our peer newspaper.coms.
So why isn’t that reflected in the Neilsen numbers? It’s because of the way we architect our site and the way they collect the data. We have many different domains: Guide Live for entertainment, HSGT for high school sports, “beloblog” for our blogs, hosted.ap.org for nation/world news, neighborsgo for hyperlocal, etc., and when people navigate to one of those during a session with us… the clock stops.
We still actually have users looking at our content, but the Neilsen or comScore systems don't know that they're looking at our content, because the URLs have changed.
In Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories, Berkeley's Paul Grabowicz says:
Taking long investigative projects written for newspapers or magazines or as TV/radio documentaries and then shoveling them online, perhaps dressed up with a little multimedia, is only jamming old media forms into a new media pipe. But understanding how to present data in an appealing way, and making that data accessible so people can mess around with it and create their own "stories," is taking advantage of what digital has to offer.
Last week I chatted with the TDMN video reporting interest group that Victor Godinez has been leading. We discussed the different forms of video journalism that seem to be most effective on the Web. Now Jennifer Woodard Maderazo writes about the Best Use of the Medium::5 Videoblogs That Do It Right.
Robert Niles provides a brief guide on How, and where, to hyperlink within a news story -- which has relevance in two areas for us at TDMN (The Dallas Morning News, for those who don't work here.) First, bloggers should ask themselves if they're lnking to something that makes sense. Secondly, as we look at vetting computer-based inline linking software, we should remember we can't just set up the system and forget it. Robert noted one example of how that didn't serve Yahoo very well:
[Yahoo] linked the first reference to the country "China" in a story about the upcoming Beijing Olympics to... a page listing China's medal count from the most recent Olympics, in 2006. In Turin, Italy.
Mike Merschel discovered a good post on how blogging isn't just about writing well.
Author Steve Pavlina says,
...he only spends about 20 percent of his time actually writing material for his site. The rest of his time is spent connecting with peers, evaluating potential subject matter, and optimizing the site for visitors...
Provocateur and former newspaperman Jeff Jarvis explores new ways of organizing our newsrooms to better serve the various platforms we're publishing on:
[I want to] explore the idea of breaking up a newsroom into two companies around two separate functions: gathering and packaging (that is, reporting and editing), each freed to work independently. That last bit is the important change: this means they can work with anyone. We separated them before by medium: print v. digital. But the public isn’t looking at the world that way, only the owners of media did. News is news. That’s why they are being merged back together. But when they are remerged, old roles, old models, old processes, and old politics tend to win out. Print is bigger and older and so it wins. And the organization doesn’t truly change.
Jeff isn't the first to suggest this, of course. It's what Gannett's tried to do with hits info centers to some degree -- separating out the newsgathering role from the production role.
Check it out at: Cutting up the newsroom
There was some talk here this morning about how newsrooms could help in human powered search. That brought to my mind a new search site that's getting funding and buzz, Mahalo. Here's how they state their mission:
In the past six months, some of the digerati notably, Robert Scoble, have been suggesting this kind of editorial effort could succeed Google, which relies on computer algorithms.
There was some talk here this morning about how newsrooms could help in human powered search. That brought to my mind a new search site that's getting funding and buzz, Mahalo. Here's how they state their mission:
In the past six months, some of the digerati notably, Robert Scoble, have been suggesting this kind of editorial effort could succeed Google, which relies on computer algorithms.
I've long advocated creating games as a way of touching an audience that wouldn't otherwise care about what we write. And we've done a few good ones at my other shops, like this taxes game.
Berkeley's Paul Grabowicz explains: Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games
Video game storytelling also challenges our traditional notions about being detached, third-person, objective observers who produce stories for passive consumption by readers and viewers.
A video game reverses that relationship - the story must be written from the perspective of the player, and the story unfolds according to what the player decides to do. A game in which you try to impose on the player a rigid linear narrative is doomed to failure.
This doesn't mean the journalist's role as storyteller goes away - you're still constructing the game world and shaping the play that exists within it.
And check out the first version of what he's putting together.
It's kind of crude, but here's a neat mashup that pastes news feeds onto a map. If we can figure out how to better tag our articles with location (such as a street address or geocode) we could really add to our relevance as people search for what matters near them.
This post from Gerry McGovern is not new, but it's relevant as we consider how to think of what we do our our Web site. In short, we need to focus on what our audiences wants to do on our site, not on the content we should provide.
When we put the task at the center of the web management process, we cut away the clutter and the waffle. And we also—in a very real sense—put the customer at the center of the process. What we may find is that our most common tasks are useful for a wide range of customers. If so, we don’t need customer segmentation on the website. We just need to focus on the task and on making it easier and faster to complete.
Steve Outing reports:
The Huffington Post has a really nice feature that lets you look at map views of who has donated money to US political campaigns