NYT memo:
...We are reimagining the way we build products to reflect the simple truth that
journalism, audience development and revenue are not at odds but entirely
dependent on one another. This includes continuing to expand on the success of the
last year by empowering more cross-functional teams — with news, product,
design, technology, marketing and advertising working shoulder to shoulder — to
create more cohesive and comprehensive products that meet our customers’ needs
across platforms.
● Over the next few years, the battle is going to be won or lost on smartphones. This
continues to be our biggest area of focus in every part of the organization. But longer
term, we have to build a flexible organization that can respond quickly to future
changes in technology and user behavior....
http://www.nytco.com/wp-content/uploads/Our-Path-Forward.pdf
Showing posts with label digital journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital journalism. Show all posts
Thursday, October 15, 2015
The New York Times builds out digital rewrite team
politicomedia reporting:
The New York Times has created a new newsroom unit to tackle the types of stories that are going viral on the web.Headed up by Patrick LaForge, the "Express Team" "will cover news that readers are searching for and talking about online, but also push that news forward rather than just repackaging it for clicks," according to a Tuesday afternoon staff memo signed by executive editor Dean Baquet, deputy executive editor Susan Chira, editor for innovation and strategy Kinsey Wilson, and assistant editor Clifford Levy."This new team will quickly and smartly weigh in on the issues and questions that are attracting attention across the day and around the world," they wrote.The move comes as the Times' is becoming ever more aggressive about scaling its digital audience, which is becoming more important to revenue growth...
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Grading The New York Times, a year after the Innovation Report
digiday reporting:
A little over a year ago, The New York Times’ internal Innovation Report was leaked, offering a candid and troubling look at how one of the world’s greatest journalism brands is lagging digitally. The report highlighted the paper’s shortcomings in everything digital, from culture to talent and workflow. It recommended the creation of audience development, analytics and strategy teams, more collaboration with reader-focused departments on the business side, and digital hiring. Here are five areas where the paper has made progress — and still has work to do.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
The Guardian: A 200-year old startup?
EJO reporting:
The Guardian’s London newsroom was reorganised in January, into four identifiable operational sectors covering the entire range of the newspaper’s activities: the “news desk” manages business, national and international news; “live desk” covers breaking news and live events; “visuals” deals with data projects, infographics and anything with a visual angle, while “audience” works to engage the readers and to manage social activities and interaction with the public – including data analysis. Paper and digital work closely together.
“It’s like launching a 200-year old startup”
“We wanted a vertical structure which could also enable multidisciplinary approaches,” Pilhofer told an audience at this month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. In a talk, entitled, ‘It’s like launching a 200-year old start-up’ Philhofer said: “The idea of this reorganisation is to deliver every possible journalistic ambition we have.” He described multimedia and interactive projects, such as “Guantanamo Diary” or the motion graphic explanatory guide to Scotland’s independence referendum as examples.
...“To put content on the homepage and pray for the best doesn’t work anymore,” Pilhofer said. Instead the newspaper studies the metrics of how readers move through content, to understand their behavior. Such data has helped the newspaper build a picture about what readers want to read, and what they ignore.
The newspaper uses Ophan, a software which enables journalists to receive information about traffic data for each story published on its site. Pilhofer said that these figures have not meant an endless diet of kitten stories at the paper, instead such data can spark “interesting conversations in your newsroom.”
“The future of journalism is a team sport”
Quartz’s Kevin Delaney: Time to kill the 800-word article
digiday reporting: The tyranny of the 800-word article must end.
Most newspaper articles fall around 800 words. Oddly enough, that’s the same length of many online news pieces. Delaney, who wrote hundreds of 800-word articles during his 12-plus years at The Wall Street Journal, sees that as a problem, particularly as news goes mobile.
“What people read online, when you look at the data, is shorter stuff that’s focused, creative and social with a really good headline. It doesn’t mean it’s unsubstantial. It just means it’s really clear about what’s interesting and focuses on that. A lot of the 800-word stories have been padded out with the B matter. It’s called B matter because it’s B grade, not A matter, which is the focal point of the story.”
Many journalism practices are antiquated.
Like the 800-word article, journalism conventions need updating. Everything from the headline writing process, to using topic-area sections and even reporter beats are relics. Rather than strict beats, for instance, Quartz leans on “obsessions,” a rotating group of focus areas that take deep dives into subjects, such as “the future of finance” and “space business.”
Like the 800-word article, journalism conventions need updating. Everything from the headline writing process, to using topic-area sections and even reporter beats are relics. Rather than strict beats, for instance, Quartz leans on “obsessions,” a rotating group of focus areas that take deep dives into subjects, such as “the future of finance” and “space business.”
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
REINVENTING THE WIRE HOW TO PREPARE FOR CONSTANT DISRUPTIONS
Reuters Institute reporting:
Jairo reviews the large amount of literature already published in this area, and supplements it with interviews with senior figures at Thomson Reuters, Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse.
He focuses his paper on three key questions:
- Is the corporate culture in news agencies evolving fast enough to keep pace with new industry routines that will enable them to cope with the demands of an internet world in constant change?
- Is there a common strategy in news agencies to help improve the skill sets of current employees to increase the value of stories and become better news curators in the mobile internet era?
- What innovative tools are available that will eventually be disruptive for the future of news agencies? ...
- Amongst Jairo’s many conclusions is his view that ‘News agencies will now have to operate somehow like an open-data, open-journalism system, and earn revenues from it. Publishers are asking for more elaborate news pieces, videos, and visual content, something that news agencies, precisely because of the handling of vast amounts of sources of information they’re involved in, are better positioned to provide.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
The Unmanageables
Vanity Fair reporting:
When a crusading but conflict-averse billionaire bankrolls several of journalism’s most prominent mavericks to create a hard-nosed investigative news organization, it’s a recipe for turmoil. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s differences with First Look Media staff have been all over the press. Two top hires are out the door. Sarah Ellison asks whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren’t about itself.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2015/01/first-look-media-pierre-omidyar
When a crusading but conflict-averse billionaire bankrolls several of journalism’s most prominent mavericks to create a hard-nosed investigative news organization, it’s a recipe for turmoil. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s differences with First Look Media staff have been all over the press. Two top hires are out the door. Sarah Ellison asks whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren’t about itself.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2015/01/first-look-media-pierre-omidyar
Can Silicon Valley disrupt journalism if journalists hate being disrupted?
theguardian reporting:
Over the weekend, an open letter by some of the outgoing writers and editors of the New Republic appeared on the Facebook page of Robert Reich, the former labor secretary turned professional pundit, following a mass resignation of staff and unpaid “contributing editors” from the magazine. The letter, which lamented that “The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow” with the resignation of editor Franklin Foer and literary critic Leon Wieseltier over plans to replace the former, also railed against what the authors described as “liberalism’s central journal” being “scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon” – a reference to internal changes being introduced by the 100-year old title’s owner Chris Hughes, a 31-year-old co-founder of Facebook.
The irony of the New Republic’s retreating elite posting their displeasure on Facebook was heightened by Hughes publishing a defense of his plans for the magazine – plans which recently-appointed chief executive Guy Vidra described as changing the publication into a “vertically integrated digital product”, whatever that means – through that most traditional of outlets: the Washington Post. To see the changes at TNR as part of the ongoing battle between Silicon Valley and traditional journalism, Hughes wrote, “dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today”.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/silicon-valley-journalism-chris-hughes-new-republic-buzzfeed
Over the weekend, an open letter by some of the outgoing writers and editors of the New Republic appeared on the Facebook page of Robert Reich, the former labor secretary turned professional pundit, following a mass resignation of staff and unpaid “contributing editors” from the magazine. The letter, which lamented that “The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow” with the resignation of editor Franklin Foer and literary critic Leon Wieseltier over plans to replace the former, also railed against what the authors described as “liberalism’s central journal” being “scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon” – a reference to internal changes being introduced by the 100-year old title’s owner Chris Hughes, a 31-year-old co-founder of Facebook.
The irony of the New Republic’s retreating elite posting their displeasure on Facebook was heightened by Hughes publishing a defense of his plans for the magazine – plans which recently-appointed chief executive Guy Vidra described as changing the publication into a “vertically integrated digital product”, whatever that means – through that most traditional of outlets: the Washington Post. To see the changes at TNR as part of the ongoing battle between Silicon Valley and traditional journalism, Hughes wrote, “dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today”.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/silicon-valley-journalism-chris-hughes-new-republic-buzzfeed
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Mapping Digital Media: Global Findings
Open Society reporting:
...The Mapping Digital Media research confirms that digital television and the internet have had a radical impact on media businesses, journalists, and citizens at large. As might be expected, platforms distributing journalism have proliferated, media companies are revamping their operations, and citizens have access to a cornucopia of news and information sources.
Other findings were less foreseeable: digitization has brought no pressure to reform state broadcasters, less than one-third of countries found that digital media have helped to expand the social impact of investigative journalism, and digitization has not significantly affected total news diversity.
The Global Findings reveal other common themes across the world:
...The Mapping Digital Media research confirms that digital television and the internet have had a radical impact on media businesses, journalists, and citizens at large. As might be expected, platforms distributing journalism have proliferated, media companies are revamping their operations, and citizens have access to a cornucopia of news and information sources.
Other findings were less foreseeable: digitization has brought no pressure to reform state broadcasters, less than one-third of countries found that digital media have helped to expand the social impact of investigative journalism, and digitization has not significantly affected total news diversity.
The Global Findings reveal other common themes across the world:
- Governments and politicians have too much influence over who owns, operates, and regulates the media.
- Many media markets are rife with monopolistic, corrupt, or untransparent practices.
- It’s not clear where many governments and other bodies get their evidence for changes or updates to laws and policies on media and communication.
- Media and journalism online offer hope of new, independent sources of information, but are also a new battleground for censorship and surveillance.
- Data about the media worldwide are still uneven, unstandardized, and unreliable, and are often proprietary rather than freely accessible.
- http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/mapping-digital-media-global-findings
Monday, June 23, 2014
What if Quality Journalism Isn't?
baekdal reporting:
By now you have probably already read the leaked Innovation Report from The New York Times. And if you haven't, you should. It provides a great overview of the challenges and thinking that are happening in the industry, not just for The New York Times, but for every newspaper and magazine.
To very quickly summarize it, The New York Times has had a ton of success with its digital subscriptions, but despite that, is facing a continual decline in digital traffic.
And like all other media companies, they blame this on the transformation of formats and a failure to engage digital readers.
They say the solution to this is to develop more digitally focused 'growth' tactics, like asking all journalists to submit tweets with every article, be smarter about how the content is presented and featured, and generally focus on optimizing the format for digital.
...
But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers?
If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience?
...
By now you have probably already read the leaked Innovation Report from The New York Times. And if you haven't, you should. It provides a great overview of the challenges and thinking that are happening in the industry, not just for The New York Times, but for every newspaper and magazine.
To very quickly summarize it, The New York Times has had a ton of success with its digital subscriptions, but despite that, is facing a continual decline in digital traffic.
And like all other media companies, they blame this on the transformation of formats and a failure to engage digital readers.They say the solution to this is to develop more digitally focused 'growth' tactics, like asking all journalists to submit tweets with every article, be smarter about how the content is presented and featured, and generally focus on optimizing the format for digital.
...
But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers?
If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience?
...
What if the real problem isn't digital? What if the problem is the journalistic work itself?
http://www.baekdal.com/insights/what-if-quality-journalism-isnt/10C3F189EE6048BBB4D5CB448CE6F069DAC6C08B6F9E7F72EF24FC33EAC1F946Saturday, May 25, 2013
At The Miami Herald, tweeting’s about breaking news in the a.m. and conversation in the p.m.
Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Have you ever tried tweeting at a major news organization? How often have they responded or retweeted? Probably not often — and that corresponds to the findings offered by a GW/Pew study of 13 major news organizations which found “limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.”
So when I went to The Miami Herald as part of a much larger project looking at newsrooms and news buildings, I was pleasantly surprised to find it, like some other newspapers, has actual people manning Twitter — breaking news “by hand,” interacting with readers, and having a genuine public conversation over the main @miamiherald Twitter account, with its 98,000 followers. (Aside from Twitter, The Miami Herald is making ample use of its Facebook account, posting new stories once an hour and relying on feedback from the 46,000-plus audience for stories and tips — and as an extension of the Public Insight Network pioneered by American Public Radio.)
In Miami, Twitter takes on two distinct modes during the day — in the morning as headline service and in the afternoon as conversation. “In the morning, we try to get the audience between 6 and 8 a.m. on Twitter and on the website,” says continuous news editor/day editor Jeff Kleinman, who says he wakes up at 4:30 to begin monitoring the news.
Kleinman uses Twitter to break news — whether or not it’s on the paper’s website. “We want to be first,” he noted, as he quickly dashed off a tweet about a boat fire in front of me. More often then not, though, there will be a link to a short two-paragraph story begun on the website. But not always...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/05/at-the-miami-herald-tweetings-about-breaking-news-in-the-a-m-and-conversation-in-the-p-m/
Have you ever tried tweeting at a major news organization? How often have they responded or retweeted? Probably not often — and that corresponds to the findings offered by a GW/Pew study of 13 major news organizations which found “limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.”
So when I went to The Miami Herald as part of a much larger project looking at newsrooms and news buildings, I was pleasantly surprised to find it, like some other newspapers, has actual people manning Twitter — breaking news “by hand,” interacting with readers, and having a genuine public conversation over the main @miamiherald Twitter account, with its 98,000 followers. (Aside from Twitter, The Miami Herald is making ample use of its Facebook account, posting new stories once an hour and relying on feedback from the 46,000-plus audience for stories and tips — and as an extension of the Public Insight Network pioneered by American Public Radio.)
In Miami, Twitter takes on two distinct modes during the day — in the morning as headline service and in the afternoon as conversation. “In the morning, we try to get the audience between 6 and 8 a.m. on Twitter and on the website,” says continuous news editor/day editor Jeff Kleinman, who says he wakes up at 4:30 to begin monitoring the news.
Kleinman uses Twitter to break news — whether or not it’s on the paper’s website. “We want to be first,” he noted, as he quickly dashed off a tweet about a boat fire in front of me. More often then not, though, there will be a link to a short two-paragraph story begun on the website. But not always...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/05/at-the-miami-herald-tweetings-about-breaking-news-in-the-a-m-and-conversation-in-the-p-m/
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Performance Pay Arrives for Journalism
Digiday reporting:
The economics of the digital world have created a cultural
shift where some publishers are figuring out ways to compensate
editorial staff based on business metrics like pageviews, visitors or
even sales.
This is tricky territory, since editorial staffers have
tended to see themselves as walled off from the grubby concerns of
making money. But the reality of media today is the pressure to make
money. Old and new media publications, from Forbes to Complex and
Gawker, deploy some type of incentive-based compensation for their
editorial staff based on metrics. The upside is a business that’s all
going in the same direction; the downside is a further eroding of the
wall between editorial and advertising.
Gawker was an early booster of this approach, and even
today it proudly touts its “big board” that keeps track of pageviews for
each writer. Forbes has monthly incentive programs for full-time
staffers based on a range of metrics, including how many new followers a
reporter gained on Twitter that month. It has an even more ambitious
program for its “contributor network,” which it calls an experiment in
“entrepreneurial journalism.” And most aggressive of all is Complex,
which has gone whole-hog with incentives, such as the one in which
editors get paid based on certain business goals, like the profitability
of their division, among other business metrics...
Sunday, March 17, 2013
What makes journalism ‘innovative’? Lessons from this year’s Scripps Howard Awards
Poynter reporting:
...
Unfortunately, too many news organizations and journalists still see innovation through the lens of their legacy medium and the way they have always done things. A newspaper doing a video or a TV station doing a magazine? This is not innovative to the reader/user.
True innovation in news means connecting that reader/user to important information in a new and meaningful way. Will non-journalists share your project on social media and email it to their friends? Then you might be onto something truly innovative. The day of doing journalism for journalists — or awards — is over. Focus on the customer. Serve the customer.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/207335/what-makes-journalism-innovative-lessons-from-this-years-scripps-howards-awards/
...
Unfortunately, too many news organizations and journalists still see innovation through the lens of their legacy medium and the way they have always done things. A newspaper doing a video or a TV station doing a magazine? This is not innovative to the reader/user.
True innovation in news means connecting that reader/user to important information in a new and meaningful way. Will non-journalists share your project on social media and email it to their friends? Then you might be onto something truly innovative. The day of doing journalism for journalists — or awards — is over. Focus on the customer. Serve the customer.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/207335/what-makes-journalism-innovative-lessons-from-this-years-scripps-howards-awards/
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
10 ‘Snowfall’-like Projects That Break Out Of Standard Article Templates
mediabistro reporting:
“Snowfall” has become a verb in many newsrooms after The New York Times launched its beautiful multimedia project earlier this year. Though the format was touted as the future of online storytelling by some, The Times wasn’t the first to pull of this type of format. If you’re looking for inspiration to make snow fall in your own newsroom, here are a few other examples, not all of which come from newsrooms, as I think it would be irresponsible of us to confine ourselves to the sphere of news organizations when collecting inspiration for innovative storytelling formats.
1. Pitchfork: Glitter in the Dark
http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/10-snowfall-like-projects-that-break-out-of-standard-article-templates_b17340
“Snowfall” has become a verb in many newsrooms after The New York Times launched its beautiful multimedia project earlier this year. Though the format was touted as the future of online storytelling by some, The Times wasn’t the first to pull of this type of format. If you’re looking for inspiration to make snow fall in your own newsroom, here are a few other examples, not all of which come from newsrooms, as I think it would be irresponsible of us to confine ourselves to the sphere of news organizations when collecting inspiration for innovative storytelling formats.
1. Pitchfork: Glitter in the Dark
http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/10-snowfall-like-projects-that-break-out-of-standard-article-templates_b17340
Saturday, September 22, 2012
First look: Spundge is software to help journalists to manage real-time data streams
NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Many power users of Twitter consider TweetDeck essential for managing multiple streams of data. Once you adapt to its overwhelming user interface, the software becomes essential. And addictive.
Imagine
being able to add more real-time sources to TweetDeck — RSS feeds,
Facebook, Flickr, YouTube — and you have something like Spundge,
a web app that launches in public beta today. The software is being
marketed initially to journalists and is being tested inside a few news
organizations.
“The problem is today’s journalist has to use too many products and applications to do their job, and very few of these were actually built with newsrooms or journalistic workflow in mind,” said Craig Silverman, the corrections guru who is working with Spundge to help develop the product for journalists.
“Spundge is a platform that’s built to take a journalist from information discovery and tracking all the way to publishing, regardless of whatever internal systems they have to contend with,” he told me.
A user creates notebooks to organize material (a scheme familiar to Evernote users). Inside a notebook, a user can add streams from multiple sources and activate filters to refine by keyword, time (past few minutes, last week), location, and language.
Spundge extracts links from those sources and displays headlines and summaries in a blog-style river. A user can choose to save individual items to the notebook or hide them from view, and Spundge’s algorithms begin to learn what kind of content to show more or less of. A user can also save clippings from around the web with a bookmarklet (another Evernote-like feature). If a notebook is public, the stream can be embedded in webpages, Ã la Storify. (Here’s an example of a notebook tracking the ONA 2012 conference.)
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/09/first-look-spundge-is-software-to-help-journalists-to-manage-real-time-data-streams/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b5bbac0ff5-DAILY_EMAIL
Many power users of Twitter consider TweetDeck essential for managing multiple streams of data. Once you adapt to its overwhelming user interface, the software becomes essential. And addictive.
Imagine
being able to add more real-time sources to TweetDeck — RSS feeds,
Facebook, Flickr, YouTube — and you have something like Spundge,
a web app that launches in public beta today. The software is being
marketed initially to journalists and is being tested inside a few news
organizations.“The problem is today’s journalist has to use too many products and applications to do their job, and very few of these were actually built with newsrooms or journalistic workflow in mind,” said Craig Silverman, the corrections guru who is working with Spundge to help develop the product for journalists.
“Spundge is a platform that’s built to take a journalist from information discovery and tracking all the way to publishing, regardless of whatever internal systems they have to contend with,” he told me.
A user creates notebooks to organize material (a scheme familiar to Evernote users). Inside a notebook, a user can add streams from multiple sources and activate filters to refine by keyword, time (past few minutes, last week), location, and language.
Spundge extracts links from those sources and displays headlines and summaries in a blog-style river. A user can choose to save individual items to the notebook or hide them from view, and Spundge’s algorithms begin to learn what kind of content to show more or less of. A user can also save clippings from around the web with a bookmarklet (another Evernote-like feature). If a notebook is public, the stream can be embedded in webpages, Ã la Storify. (Here’s an example of a notebook tracking the ONA 2012 conference.)
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/09/first-look-spundge-is-software-to-help-journalists-to-manage-real-time-data-streams/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b5bbac0ff5-DAILY_EMAIL
Monday, April 30, 2012
Gatekeepers need to find new value when the fences have blown away
Teh Buttry Diary reporting:
The gatekeeper days of journalism were fun. But they’re over. And they weren’t as good as we remember them.
In a Facebook discussion today, Arkansas State journalism professor Jack Zibluk wrote, “By abandoning the gatekeeper role, I believe you are abandoning the profession.”
I replied: “Jack, no one abandoned the gatekeeper role. It became irrelevant when the fences blew away.”
Jack asked me to elaborate:
....But for better or worse, as the fences blew away, journalism has changed forever. We don’t compete with just another newspaper or two and a few local TV stations. People can get their news from a seemingly endless selection of blogs and social media accounts, some of them from independent journalists with the same standards we have, some from newsmakers trying to cover themselves (some to spin the news, some to provide legitimate journalism in areas we traditionally undercovered), some of them from the general public.
In a February address to the Canadian Journalism Foundation, John Paton, my boss, explained the realities that Digital First Media if facing:
The gatekeeper days of journalism were fun. But they’re over. And they weren’t as good as we remember them.
In a Facebook discussion today, Arkansas State journalism professor Jack Zibluk wrote, “By abandoning the gatekeeper role, I believe you are abandoning the profession.”
I replied: “Jack, no one abandoned the gatekeeper role. It became irrelevant when the fences blew away.”
Jack asked me to elaborate:
If journalism and journalists are no longer gatekeepers, then what ARE we? Nobody I know of has made a cohesive explanation of what our role is any more in society.I initially begged off, saying I might blog about gatekeepers in a week or two. But another gatekeeper discussion on Jack’s Facebook wall and an exchange of private Facebook messages prompted me to blog now...
....But for better or worse, as the fences blew away, journalism has changed forever. We don’t compete with just another newspaper or two and a few local TV stations. People can get their news from a seemingly endless selection of blogs and social media accounts, some of them from independent journalists with the same standards we have, some from newsmakers trying to cover themselves (some to spin the news, some to provide legitimate journalism in areas we traditionally undercovered), some of them from the general public.
In a February address to the Canadian Journalism Foundation, John Paton, my boss, explained the realities that Digital First Media if facing:
We have accepted we are no longer the old-fashioned agenda-setters or gatekeepers of information for our communities...
http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/gatekeepers-need-to-find-new-value-when-the-fences-have-blown-away/#more-8074
Friday, February 24, 2012
Graphic designers are ruining the web
Guardian reporting:
What happens when you click on a weblink? Here's one answer: a request goes from your computer to a server identified by the URL of the desired link. The server then locates the webpage in its files and sends it back to your browser, which then displays it on your screen. Simple.
Well, the process was indeed like that once – a very long time ago. In the beginning, webpages were simple pages of text marked up with some tags that would enable a browser to display them correctly. But that meant that the browser, not the designer, controlled how a page would look to the user, and there's nothing that infuriates designers more than having someone (or something) determine the appearance of their work. So they embarked on a long, vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to exert the same kind of detailed control over the appearance of webpages as they did on their print counterparts – right down to the last pixel.
This had several consequences. Webpages began to look more attractive and, in some cases, became more user-friendly. They had pictures, video components, animations and colourful type in attractive fonts, and were easier on the eye than the staid, unimaginative pages of the early web. They began to resemble, in fact, pages in print magazines. And in order to make this possible, webpages ceased to be static text-objects fetched from a file store; instead, the server assembled each page on the fly, collecting its various graphic and other components from their various locations, and dispatching the whole caboodle in a stream to your browser, which then assembled them for your delectation.
All of which was nice and dandy. But there was a downside: webpages began to put on weight. Over the last decade, the size of web pages (measured in kilobytes) has more than septupled. From 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB.
You can see this for yourself by switching on the "view status" bar in your browser; this will tell you how many discrete items go into making up a page. I've just looked at a few representative samples. The BBC News front page had 115 items; the online version of the Daily Mail had a whopping 344 and ITV.com had 116. Direct.gov had 71 while YouTube and Wikipedia, in contrast, came in much slimmer at 26 and 15 respectively.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/19/john-naughton-webpage-obesity
What happens when you click on a weblink? Here's one answer: a request goes from your computer to a server identified by the URL of the desired link. The server then locates the webpage in its files and sends it back to your browser, which then displays it on your screen. Simple.
Well, the process was indeed like that once – a very long time ago. In the beginning, webpages were simple pages of text marked up with some tags that would enable a browser to display them correctly. But that meant that the browser, not the designer, controlled how a page would look to the user, and there's nothing that infuriates designers more than having someone (or something) determine the appearance of their work. So they embarked on a long, vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to exert the same kind of detailed control over the appearance of webpages as they did on their print counterparts – right down to the last pixel.
This had several consequences. Webpages began to look more attractive and, in some cases, became more user-friendly. They had pictures, video components, animations and colourful type in attractive fonts, and were easier on the eye than the staid, unimaginative pages of the early web. They began to resemble, in fact, pages in print magazines. And in order to make this possible, webpages ceased to be static text-objects fetched from a file store; instead, the server assembled each page on the fly, collecting its various graphic and other components from their various locations, and dispatching the whole caboodle in a stream to your browser, which then assembled them for your delectation.
All of which was nice and dandy. But there was a downside: webpages began to put on weight. Over the last decade, the size of web pages (measured in kilobytes) has more than septupled. From 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB.
You can see this for yourself by switching on the "view status" bar in your browser; this will tell you how many discrete items go into making up a page. I've just looked at a few representative samples. The BBC News front page had 115 items; the online version of the Daily Mail had a whopping 344 and ITV.com had 116. Direct.gov had 71 while YouTube and Wikipedia, in contrast, came in much slimmer at 26 and 15 respectively.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/19/john-naughton-webpage-obesity
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Forbes New Newsroom for the Digital Era Is Now Up and Running
Forbes reporting:
So, what exactly is The New Newsroom? Well, it all started a few years ago with a diagram first scrawled across a white board (you can see it here, in my initial post on our Newsroom plans). It soon became part of a presentation explaining what we were up to at True/Slant, the digital news startup I founded that was purchased by FORBES a year ago. We knew we were onto something when we saw how our investors reacted to it. Tim Forbes, a board member, removed the page from the deck, folded it, then slid it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Jonathan Miller, the former CEO of AOL who had been a board member before going to work for Rupert Murdoch, nodded with knowing approval when we discussed it over lunch. He made me promise to send it to him.
At its core, The New Newsroom we’re building at FORBES is made up of four different teams (in red) working together to harness real-time data, effectively the “News Signals” that are absolutely vital to running any digital news business today. The data forms a powerful feedback loop that informs departments in every corner of our company — and the new breed of entrepreneurial journalist that is key to powering our content engine. The New Newsroom is about collaboration — between editorial, product, design, production — and, yes, the advertising sales and marketing departments, too.
Here’s who occupies The New Newsroom:...
http://blogs.forbes.com/lewisdvorkin/2011/06/12/forbes-update-our-newsroom-for-the-digital-era-is-now-up-and-running
So, what exactly is The New Newsroom? Well, it all started a few years ago with a diagram first scrawled across a white board (you can see it here, in my initial post on our Newsroom plans). It soon became part of a presentation explaining what we were up to at True/Slant, the digital news startup I founded that was purchased by FORBES a year ago. We knew we were onto something when we saw how our investors reacted to it. Tim Forbes, a board member, removed the page from the deck, folded it, then slid it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Jonathan Miller, the former CEO of AOL who had been a board member before going to work for Rupert Murdoch, nodded with knowing approval when we discussed it over lunch. He made me promise to send it to him.
At its core, The New Newsroom we’re building at FORBES is made up of four different teams (in red) working together to harness real-time data, effectively the “News Signals” that are absolutely vital to running any digital news business today. The data forms a powerful feedback loop that informs departments in every corner of our company — and the new breed of entrepreneurial journalist that is key to powering our content engine. The New Newsroom is about collaboration — between editorial, product, design, production — and, yes, the advertising sales and marketing departments, too.
Here’s who occupies The New Newsroom:...
http://blogs.forbes.com/lewisdvorkin/2011/06/12/forbes-update-our-newsroom-for-the-digital-era-is-now-up-and-running
Journalists and Statistics: Paying Attention to the Data of a New Media World
Forbes reporting:
I’m pretty obsessed with watching our traffic on Forbes.com....
The image below is one of my Droid’s “home” pages. In the third row, far left, you’ll see my “shortcut” to Newsbeat, a product from Betaworks. It’s my real-time fix to see which Forbes posts are popping; how consumers are pathing through the site; where they’re coming from on the Web; how deep into the page they’re reading and much more. Next to that is a site-wide report from Omniture (a data reporting service) on unique visitors. It’s great for slicing and dicing our cumulative traffic, by channel and section, every 15 to 30 minutes and on a daily basis, too. Next to that, Omniture page views. I use it much like I do the UV report. And next to that is the mother of all Forbes Omniture stats reports. It updates at 1 am with 23 daily, monthly and annual tables — just perfect for when I can’t fall asleep or I wake up in the middle of the night either excited or worried about meeting our traffic goals.
Like I said, it’s a bit obsessive, but it is very much part of the new world of digital journalism. Our full-time staffers and contributors each have their own personal dashboard to tell them how they are doing. And, of course, each of their posts has a page-view counter in full public view. Over the last few months we’ve had some technical snafus with the public counter. When we did, our staffers and contributors expressed disappointment. They’ve come to depend on it as a feedback loop and feel somewhat in the dark without it.
Let me be clear… as I’ve said in previous posts, all these statistical reports are meant to inform our journalism, NOT to rule it. The new content engine we’re building calls for each full-time staffer and each contributor (all topic-specific experts) to be responsible for attracting and building an audience of repeat visitors — that is, loyal readers — around their brand name and their knowledge. Pandering for traffic is not brand building. Winning the respect of your audience is.
To achieve that, journalists and other experienced content creators need to apply their professionalism to the new ethos of digital publishing. They need to build a bridge from traditional media values to all those traffic numbers.
Frankly, numbers have always been a part of the news business, and the most renowned media professionals have made their peace with them. I can remember as a young journalist being taken to Abe Rosenthal’s private woodshed, a small sitting area with a black-leather-bound-sofa, to be lectured about accuracy. The next day the infamous executive editor of The New York Times was planning new “lifestyle” sections to attract more advertising dollars. At Newsweek, we talked in terms of “subscriber covers” to build the brand and “newsstand covers” to sell copies. At The New York Herald Tribune, once considered the reporter’s newspaper, similar economic issues were top most on the mind of one of my mentors, Jim Bellows (the Trib’s last editor). I can assure you he balanced the needs of that business without compromising his considerable journalistic beliefs. He did so again when he moved on to TV and had to deal with the constant fixation on Nielsen ratings
http://blogs.forbes.com/lewisdvorkin/2011/06/26/journalists-and-statistics-paying-attention-to-the-data-of-a-new-media-world
I’m pretty obsessed with watching our traffic on Forbes.com....
The image below is one of my Droid’s “home” pages. In the third row, far left, you’ll see my “shortcut” to Newsbeat, a product from Betaworks. It’s my real-time fix to see which Forbes posts are popping; how consumers are pathing through the site; where they’re coming from on the Web; how deep into the page they’re reading and much more. Next to that is a site-wide report from Omniture (a data reporting service) on unique visitors. It’s great for slicing and dicing our cumulative traffic, by channel and section, every 15 to 30 minutes and on a daily basis, too. Next to that, Omniture page views. I use it much like I do the UV report. And next to that is the mother of all Forbes Omniture stats reports. It updates at 1 am with 23 daily, monthly and annual tables — just perfect for when I can’t fall asleep or I wake up in the middle of the night either excited or worried about meeting our traffic goals.
Like I said, it’s a bit obsessive, but it is very much part of the new world of digital journalism. Our full-time staffers and contributors each have their own personal dashboard to tell them how they are doing. And, of course, each of their posts has a page-view counter in full public view. Over the last few months we’ve had some technical snafus with the public counter. When we did, our staffers and contributors expressed disappointment. They’ve come to depend on it as a feedback loop and feel somewhat in the dark without it.
Let me be clear… as I’ve said in previous posts, all these statistical reports are meant to inform our journalism, NOT to rule it. The new content engine we’re building calls for each full-time staffer and each contributor (all topic-specific experts) to be responsible for attracting and building an audience of repeat visitors — that is, loyal readers — around their brand name and their knowledge. Pandering for traffic is not brand building. Winning the respect of your audience is.
To achieve that, journalists and other experienced content creators need to apply their professionalism to the new ethos of digital publishing. They need to build a bridge from traditional media values to all those traffic numbers.
Frankly, numbers have always been a part of the news business, and the most renowned media professionals have made their peace with them. I can remember as a young journalist being taken to Abe Rosenthal’s private woodshed, a small sitting area with a black-leather-bound-sofa, to be lectured about accuracy. The next day the infamous executive editor of The New York Times was planning new “lifestyle” sections to attract more advertising dollars. At Newsweek, we talked in terms of “subscriber covers” to build the brand and “newsstand covers” to sell copies. At The New York Herald Tribune, once considered the reporter’s newspaper, similar economic issues were top most on the mind of one of my mentors, Jim Bellows (the Trib’s last editor). I can assure you he balanced the needs of that business without compromising his considerable journalistic beliefs. He did so again when he moved on to TV and had to deal with the constant fixation on Nielsen ratings
http://blogs.forbes.com/lewisdvorkin/2011/06/26/journalists-and-statistics-paying-attention-to-the-data-of-a-new-media-world
Note to media: We are all brands now, so get used to it
Gigaom reporting:
There’s been a lot of talk about “branding” and new media lately, sparked in part by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s recent anti-branding rant, in which the veteran journalist said that branding is “ruining journalism.” But as a number of people have pointed out in response to the WaPo columnist — and as Forbes editor Lewis DVorkin notes in a post today about what he wants his writers to do at the online magazine — branding is now an inescapable part of new media. If journalists are using social media to any extent (which they should be), then they are in the process of becoming a brand whether they like it or not.
Weingarten is the Washington Post’s humor columnist, but his post on branding seemed quite serious, and was based on a letter from a young journalism student who asked him how he had built his “personal brand.” Weingarten responded that the best way to build a brand is to “take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot [and] then apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question” (Steve Buttry of the Journal-Register Co. later found the student in question and posted the research paper she was working on on his blog).
The columnist’s antipathy towards journalists becoming brands — which he said involved writers trying to “market themselves like Cheez Doodles” — appears to stem from the idea that any kind of personal promotion is undignified, and that journalists should instead be spending their time rooting out corruption and so forth. Weingarten said it was a result of the fact that “the media is in a frantic, undignified campaign to economize while at the same time attracting more eyeballs,” and that branding was designed to cater to an age in which “the attribute that is most rewarded is screeching ubiquity, not talent.”
We are slowly redefining our craft so it is no longer a calling but a commodity. From this execrable marketing trend arises the term you ask me about: “branding.”
I hate to be the one to break it to Weingarten, but the journalism business as a whole is becoming a commodity in many ways. But it’s not journalists and media organizations that are redefining it as such, it is the market itself — and the fact that media is becoming something that anyone can do. The tools for publishing and becoming a “media brand” are available to anyone now thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, and that has made the world of media and journalism a lot flatter, as NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd noted in a recent interview with the Poynter Institute.
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/27/future-of-media-we-are-all-brands-now-so-get-used-to-it
There’s been a lot of talk about “branding” and new media lately, sparked in part by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s recent anti-branding rant, in which the veteran journalist said that branding is “ruining journalism.” But as a number of people have pointed out in response to the WaPo columnist — and as Forbes editor Lewis DVorkin notes in a post today about what he wants his writers to do at the online magazine — branding is now an inescapable part of new media. If journalists are using social media to any extent (which they should be), then they are in the process of becoming a brand whether they like it or not.
Weingarten is the Washington Post’s humor columnist, but his post on branding seemed quite serious, and was based on a letter from a young journalism student who asked him how he had built his “personal brand.” Weingarten responded that the best way to build a brand is to “take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot [and] then apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question” (Steve Buttry of the Journal-Register Co. later found the student in question and posted the research paper she was working on on his blog).
The columnist’s antipathy towards journalists becoming brands — which he said involved writers trying to “market themselves like Cheez Doodles” — appears to stem from the idea that any kind of personal promotion is undignified, and that journalists should instead be spending their time rooting out corruption and so forth. Weingarten said it was a result of the fact that “the media is in a frantic, undignified campaign to economize while at the same time attracting more eyeballs,” and that branding was designed to cater to an age in which “the attribute that is most rewarded is screeching ubiquity, not talent.”
We are slowly redefining our craft so it is no longer a calling but a commodity. From this execrable marketing trend arises the term you ask me about: “branding.”
I hate to be the one to break it to Weingarten, but the journalism business as a whole is becoming a commodity in many ways. But it’s not journalists and media organizations that are redefining it as such, it is the market itself — and the fact that media is becoming something that anyone can do. The tools for publishing and becoming a “media brand” are available to anyone now thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, and that has made the world of media and journalism a lot flatter, as NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd noted in a recent interview with the Poynter Institute.
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/27/future-of-media-we-are-all-brands-now-so-get-used-to-it
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