Quick Takes: 5/31/13

This piece about why niche media is important is not only spot-on but also more than a little distressing as it evaluates some recent mainstream foul-ups. But aside from that I think it exemplifies why newspapers in particular missed an opportunity back in 2003 or so to reach out to the emerging independent blogger field and work with subject matter experts, bringing them into the fold in a way that was mutually beneficial instead of playing around with paywalls and so on.

An interesting perspective on why Marissa Mayer is making the moves at Yahoo she is.

Poynter has a great rebuttal of Buzzfeed’s much-discussed “The Social Media Editor is Dead” piece. In my opinion there’s still a strong need for there to be one – two is actually better – who act not just in a traditional editorial capacity but who also are kind of the heart and soul of the program, who keep it true to itself, who know what the goals are, who knows the nuances of the fan base and more. This is’t a dead role, it’s one that is vital and necessary if if the responsibilities are and will continue to evolve over time.

I think this hand-wringing story about the demise of high school newspapers falls victim to the trap of getting hung up on form-factor. So what if a high school is producing a Tumblr blog instead of a print paper if the content is similar? It’s not about the printing press (or the blog platform or anything else) it’s about training kids to be writers, photographers, coders and more in a way that gets them excited about the process, not the distribution form.

This article shouldn’t be necessary as everyone should already be in complete agreement that The Monkess are and always have been cool.

Medium is a platform that I’m super-intrigued about. The closed beta that it’s been in for an extended period has allowed it to highlight and curate some high-quality material from some great folks. But when it does open up and it loses the mystique of being a high-end, prestige magazine of sorts it will have to use it’s cool set of tools and functionality to compete with WordPress, Tumblr and everything else in the platform market.

Movie theater chains want to force studios to make trailers shorter by 30 seconds, or about 1/5 of their current running time. The hilarity starts when the theater owners start talking about shorter trailers creating a better movie-going experience when they’ve done everything in their power to make that experience almost excruciating while grabbing every ad dollar they can.

Long story short: We’re not going to Mars any time soon, though it will be super cool when we do.

No, we don’t want Facebook – or any other company – deciding what is hate speech. That’s largely because at any scale it needs to be algorithm-driven and that leads to an incredibly faulty system that will penalize a lot of innocent people while still letting lots slip through.

Chicago pizza is the universal sign of appreciation

Chicago Tribune sends pizzas to Boston Globe newsroom | Poynter..

Data has its role, but creativity will still thrive in the future of TV

The future of television is disinter-mediated and data-driven. That’s the gist of this Wired story that covers Game of Thrones, the new season of Arrested Development and more.

One thing the story points out is that while traditional Nielsen ratings are still a big – dominant – factor in determining whether a show lives or dies there are more and more considerations coming to the forefront. In addition to how well it may or may not fit into the network’s (or whatever the outlet might be) portfolio – some shows survive longer than they otherwise would have simply because the look good on the lineup from a prestige point of view – those considerations include social buzz. So it’s possible for shows to stick around, be revived or otherwise survive because they’re being talked about to an extent that other shows, which may perform better in those traditional ratings, aren’t.

Some people have started to wring their hands about this sort of data-driven programming future because they’re afraid it will lead to a world where creativity is put in the back seat because the numbers show the network needs a zombie-driven comedy set at a community college where Kevin Bacon is a professor of 1960s advertising history.

That’s obviously an extreme example but even so I think these concerns are a bit over-blown. That’s because for every five decisions that are made at the network (or whatever) level to greenlight something that comes pre-market-tested, there will be two quirky, independent projects whose producers couldn’t get their show officially picked up but who decide to go it alone and distribute their 12-episode mini-series themselves in some other manner. And of the 15 that are released there will be two that are hits and the network (or whatever) execs will look past their spreadsheets and pick up a project because it’s what people have shown they want, not what the data has predicted they want.

All of that is a long way of my saying that while I’m glad data-driven decisions have helped bring back some great entertainment – I’m chomping at the bit for Arrested Development S4 – I’m also confident that it doesn’t mean the end of creativity in the media world.

Media’s “good enough” problem

The nut graf from Mathew Ingram’s piece on free content and it’s place in the media publishing world:

When it comes to things like media, your real competition isn’t the product that is better than you, but the one that is good enough to satisfy your customers — and if readers are happy to patronize media outlets that use writing they got for free, or writing they have aggregated and excerpted, there is precious little that freelance writers or any of us can do about it. Our only option, as a number of commenters at Hacker News pointed out, is to make it clear that we want better quality writing by actually paying for and/or clicking on it.

I’ve done my share of free or low-cost writing ($10-$25 per post/article) for other outlets and found it to be a satisfying experience. But he’s right in saying that the best way to support quality is to vote with your dollars. That’s true of any product or industry, but there will always be a market for “good enough” that satisfies what people are looking for at little to no cost.

Good content = good advertising

There’s a ton of good points made in Brian Morrissey’s piece at DigiDay about Twitter’s emerging role as a media company powerhouse. Specifically he dives into how the company is putting the pieces together to lead a new wave of advertising changes, changes that will put the focus back on quality creative as opposed to the soulless algorithms that have dominated much of the last decade of online advertising.

Here’s the nut graf:

All the innovation, he noted, has been around targeting and bid management for Google’s auction system. What’s been a distant third is creative. Bain made the case that this is backwards. Twitter’s ad system is designed to reward those that create good content. That’s done by people, not machines.

When people talk about “content marketing” it too often means something that is an ad first, with slightly longer text shoe-horned in in some manner. But what Twitter is aiming to do is take content that is already produced – in this case Tweets – and turn them into an advertising unit, which allows for much higher-quality material to filter through than in the other scenario.

It actually makes me think of all the talk about “native advertising, which is back in the news thanks to a new initiative by The Washington Post and now Fortune, which says it will write articles exclusively for advertisers.

Imagine if this kind of situation worked out a bit differently. Instead of new material being written at the behest of advertisers, what if advertisers could pay to promote a story that was already written? So after an article is published – say a profile of a CEO, review of an important new product or what have you – a company could come in and say “We’ll pay $X to stick that to the front page for 48 hours/have that get five extra tweets” or something along those lines.

I can’t imagine it would compromise anyone’s ethics any more than they already are in this new “native advertising” world for existing stories to receive paid promotion as opposed to people being asked to write stories for the express purpose of marketing dollars.

Problems creeping up in online media

If you’re at all interested in the ins-and-outs of online publishing, this Buzzfeed story is a must-read.

For Google, this is far more damning: Google is the table. A site should not be able to auto-post a stub of another story and immediately outrank it in the world’s most popular and powerful search engine — that is a bug. And on the surface, it seems like an easy one to fix: One story was posted days later, with a small word-for-word excerpt of the other’s text. Even to a machine, it seems like it ought to be easy to tell which one of these posts is derivative of the other.

I would absolutely expect in the next couple years for major news organizations (whoever they may be) to pressure Google to not just treat the time something was published as one signal among many but as a primary signal in determining search rankings. While there may be good reporting that comes later in the lifecycle of a story, the first mover/reporter should absolutely be given extra weight, if for no other reason than to present an accurate online representation of how the story evolved over time.

On a similar topic, the “curation/aggregation” debate has a new case study as Brian Morrisey of DigiDay got into it with Business Insider’s Henry Blodget when BI took a screengrab of a Digiday story along with a copied/pasted paragragh and posted it to their site. While BI did include a link back to the original story it’s clear that the benefits, at least in terms of the pageviews the online media economy truly runs on, went to BI and not DD, which got a paltry amount of traffic out of it.

So yes, search engine rankings are one solution, though it may be a short term one. Longer term it would be great if we moved away from the pageview economy, though the paywalls that are currently seen as an alternative aren’t a perfect solution either. I’m not sure what the answer is but there has to be a better way to reward the people writing original pieces and doing good journalism as opposed to the ones that have gamed the system to benefit off other people’s work, all the while saying the victim should be “grateful” for publicity that doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t sustain the work they’re doing.

The New Orleans reporting power outage

I have to say I agree with this analysis of CBS’ handling of the outage during Sunday’s Super Bowl. While I completely get that, you know, the power was out it still seems like there were a load of missed opportunities.

Watching the broadcast during the 30-40 minutes while the lights were out and coming back on I was struck at how badly, to use an situationally-appropriate metaphor, CBS was fumbling the journalistic football. Maybe this says something about the deferential nature of sports reporting but I kept wondering why the guys on the sidelines who had power and were presumably just feet from the head coaches never went to ask them what they were thinking. How come we weren’t getting spur-of-the-moment interviews with the field refs about what the situation was going to be once the lights did come back on?

Instead of any of that we were shown the same five highlights over and over again while the panel of commentators talked about them in exactly the same way they had 10 minutes ago as they tried to talk some more about how the unexpected interruption may – or may not – help the 49ers regain some momentum and how these were professional athletes who are used to stopping and starting so they’ll just stay limber while things were sorted out.

But why weren’t we getting more information? While I know direct communication between certain parts of the stadium were down surely these reporters could send and receive text messages from the producers. Seemed like a sports news organization should have been able to transition into reporting on the news pretty quickly given the circumstances. This was a major missed opportunity for a solid journalistic moment.

The news is getting shorter

CJR took a look at story length at some of the nation’s biggest newspapers and how there aren’t as many long exposes being written as there used to be.

The reduction in longform comes, of course, in the context of a general industry decline. It’s important to note that the number of stories published overall is down at all the papers, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal, which actually published more stories in 2012 (40,070) than it did in 2003 (33,133).

Now it’s important to note, as many have, that length is not necessarily an indicator of quality. There’s still lots of good writing going on even if the stories that are being written aren’t as long. But it does show that papers are adjusting to the shortened attention spans of the audience and not requiring such an investment of time. That’s a trend that has reached its zenith with outlets like Buzzfeed, which has so much of its output in the form of “listicles” that are meant to be almost completely consumed by reading the headline and then shared on Facebook for the lulz.

 

 

UPDATE: Forgot to include a link to this Mathew Ingram piece on PaidContent that contains a lot of good commentary and thinking. Ingram points out that not only is length not necessarily a good criteria for determining good journalism but that the form factor of how the news is presented – he cites the New York Times’ recent “Snow Fall” story but you could also point to any use of data visualization and multimedia – is changing in a way that word count is less and less important in storytelling overall.

Twitter for breaking news, journalism for context

I’ve been sitting on this story about how Twitter uses a combination of algorithms and then human-assisted editing to contextualize breaking news and trends for the benefits of discover for a while and this quote keeps popping out at me:

News organizations had better start thinking about how they can continue to matter in a world where Twitter is the destination, not just a pipe for sending links.

I get what the central point of that statement is – that when a big news story breaks many people turn to Twitter to see what kinds of stories and opinions their friends and contacts are sharing about it. But how many times have we seen breaking news where facts are muddled beyond comprehension by the people we turn to for the latest?

Aside from all this there is a lot of interesting stuff that was revealed about Twitter’s search contextualization and I’d urge you to check it out if you haven’t already.

That’s where journalists and the organizations they work for can come in and provide the value. If people know that their friends are going to be talking about it but that X news source will be trusted enough to be passing on good, reliable information – at least as good and reliable as it can be in such situations – then value is added to the conversation and trust is built between that source and the reader. Both of which are good things.

But who, exactly, is The Public?

There’s a lot that I agree with in Jeff Jarvis’ post about the use of and publishing of publicly-accessible data by journalists, but this opening is ridiculous on its face:

Reporters and editors used to decide what was to be made public. No longer. More and more, the public decides what will be public … and that’s as it should be.

OK…that sounds nice and egalitarian and euphoric. But who is the public? What’s the voting mechanism to decide whether some sort of data or information is made public or not? What’s the criteria – is a simple majority alright or does it need to be 2/3 of the voting public and when exactly is the arbitrary cut off date for that voting to be tallied?

Jarvis goes on to argue that such matters should be decided as matters of law, but I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what’s going on right now. And the journalistic community, then, is the face of that public. I agree with him that the journalist’s duty is then to make some sort of point based on that data and add value to what may be a dry spreadsheet. But there’s little to no difference outside of the size and reach of the platform whether a daily newspaper does this or if a local blog writer does it.

Again, I agree with much of Jarvis lays out here. But the idea that “the public” is somehow responsible for deciding when and how information is brought into the light of day doesn’t really hold up to much rhetorical scrutiny.

Speaking of data-based journalism, CJR has a story up about the dangers of this field since data can be so open to interpretation, molded into anything the writer wants it to conform to. There are certainly lots of potholes in this road and it’s going to, I think, require a whole new level of training for media professionals.