Today Salon published a piece about a flawed polling procedure ad what it could mean for the November election. Because the majority of pollsters only place calls to landline phones, the article argues, key demographics are being under-represented:
“…(a) sample that’s predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners (Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a Starbucks Obama thing to me) — and, for good measure, includes a higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population does.”
Seems like a pretty boneheaded move. But I have a hunch many newspaper companies are making the same mistake, skewing our research and leading us to make poorly-informed decisions based on false majorities.
I’d be curious to hear what people learn if they actually go take a look at internal research. I’ll kick it off: Gannett uses landline phones only for the massive readership surveys conducted for all papers.
Ryan Sholin, Steve Yelvington, Shannan Bowen and others have been weighing in on the journalism generation gap. Got me to thinking of exceptions.
Tom Warhover, Executive Editor for Innovation (or something like that) at the Missourian. 50ish. Gets it. Wants more multimedia. Wants more data. Wants to provide it in ways that aren’t measured in inches. Gets excited by the new and wants to try it out.
He has the job of teaching the majority of students at the Missouri School of Journalism (and I’m sure are prevalent in other, similar school around the country), who, you know, want to write for a living and can’t see why they need to do all this other stuff. Oh. My. God. To tell you the times I heard these people prater on about their want to write, and travel, and… that’s about the brunt of it. Take photos? Video? Out of the question. The typical reaction to industry layoffs could be summarized as “More jobs for us!” Er, no. Not you, oh clueless one. Can they ever get it? Sure, but being young is by no means the equivalent of being clued in.
Don Wyatt, Executive Editor at the Springfield News-Leader. Gets it in a big way. Instituted online goals for reporters… reporters! Asked me about the feasibility of providing cell phone interfaces to data. Where’d that come from? His subscription to ESPN mobile, of course. (Are we supposed to acknowledge that 50-ish folks have cell phones?) Made sure to work recorders for every reporter into a tight budget, and even instituted some in-house training. Yeah, he’s 50ish, too.
To cast this split as generational is to ignore key truths. It creates a false Us v. Them along age lines that just doesn’t exist.
You can start cooking up ideas no matter your age. You can fail to see their use no matter your youth. There is no easy litmus test, the proof is in the pudding.
</Soapbox>
The thesis of that last post would probably be something like, “Free, useful APIs are routinely overlooked in many newsroom, a policy that should be re-explored.”
APIs offer free content. They’re typically intriguing. And they’re built to be torn apart and rebuilt as you see fit. The negative image of them might be the new thorn in my ass: Sports stats.
“Stats,” in this instance, is all-encompassing. It’s the stats that make up the back of the baseball card. It’s W-L record. It’s divisional standings and game scores, league leaders and historical info. It’s ridiculously compelling, and with so many sources, they’re easy to get and can be rebuilt as you see fit.
The problem is that this time, you’re not getting permission. And that’s a whole new can of worms.
The dichotomy comes into play when we start flipping through the print edition. Vendors typically supply the staples, things like box scores and standings. But the minute we start rolling out aggregated statistics not collected by the vendor, we’re delving into new territory. And often the only way we can do that is by giving credit to the source we stole them from, typically ESPN, FOXsports, cbssportsline, or some other online wealth of sports knowledge. We could even go to the league homepage, where solid, reputable stats are aggregated.
But for some reason, we scoff when the same sourcing must be used for an online application. And that’s a shame. Maybe it’s a residual effect of growing up listening to some version of this before every game:
“This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated, without express written consent.”
Does anyone have examples of getting around this Catch 22? It’s like we’re going thirsty in the ocean — surrounded by sports stats, unable to use any. Sports information seems like it should be the holy grail of online journalism, a creative, telling visualization would almost certainly draw repeat traffic. It’s continually updated information, it’s highly relevant to a specific demographic. If you don’t believe me, try starting a fantasy football league in your office and start batting away the takers.
The possibilities with this stuff are numerous. But our hands are tied.
Where does fair use begin and end? What’s the public domain, what’s proprietary, and is there any middle ground?
I get a little silly over a good web service. If there’s an API involved, all the better. Programmableweb has a prominent place in my feed reader, and I try to keep fairly abreast of what the rest of the online world is cooking up and how best I can use it.
What worries me is how little of it is allowed to translate into my industry. Even more depressing, I think, is the reasons so little of it is allowed to take root. I think they can be boiled down to a simple character flaw: Pride.
Maybe the best example of this is Yelp. Yelp is a great site, which, at its least advanced, is basically a phone book. But on top of that, it adds a layer of user reviews and social networking, powerful features that have made it the peer-review go-to source on the Internet.
About a year ago Yelp released an API that allows pretty much anyone to bring the site’s reviews, ratings, neighborhood searches, etc. into any other Website.
To me, that’s an application that begs for a newspaper.com to take advantage:
- Few news orgs have truly worthwhile dining/entertainment/calendar sites.
- Almost all, though, make an attempt.
- With resources being what they are, it seems like a natural fit to take what Yelp is offering and use it to cut down the jobs to be done. The cost is zero, and meanwhile, you’ve added a great feature to your site.
In return for having access to Yelp’s data, all a news site has to do is slap a Yelp logo on the results.
And that, unfortunately, is where the wheels fall off the bus. I’ve heard publishers say things like, “If we do this, we’ll legitimize Yelp. And they are the competition.”
Maybe it’s a sign of ow far to the Dark Side I’ve come, but I don’t see it that way. In fact, I see it much the opposite. showing that we are willing to use free data from a “competitor,” when offered, will make us seem that much closer to getting this whole Web thing. Using their data, I think, legitimizes us to the early adopters that have already embraced the useful tool.
To be sure, Yelp is probably the most controversial example of this. Other services based more on functionality than content would probably be an easier sell within a newsroom. But even then, I don’t think we’re taking advantage as much as we could and should.
Take Twitter. Totally, 100 percent free. Great functionality, out-of-the-box SMS support, solid and growing base of users, etc. Those are things any news site could use. Slowly, I think, we’re coming around to that. We tweet blog posts. But there has to be more there, more that’s available to us because, again, they’ve given us the keys.
It seems like a simple script could turn the Twitter API into something much like OhDontforget. Does that have a place on your newspaper’s entertainment site?
There’s another argument to be made here, but I’m late for work. More to come.
Lots of work done over the past week:
- I did float my own revenue project, and it got a favorable reception. Hopefully I’ll be able to unveil the plan sometime over the next few months, lest anyone think I’m just talking here.
- Rolled out a Suns Draft History in record time. I’d been working on a bell and whistle-laden version to compare NFL draftees from ASU and U of A. It was slated for August. Then someone said, “Hey there’s an NBA draft coming up, can we do something for that?” Two days later, voila.
- Wrestled with Caspio. Tried to make a Google map using instructions on site. Here’s what I got:
-Threw up some working Caspio nonsense, including University salaries, Gas pump violations (again. It’s always in season!) and Executive Pay. Keep an eye on those, as existing non-Caspio templates will be replacing many of them as they are approved.
My conclusion on Caspio is that they do one thing very well. But other, cheaper alternatives do it just as well. Further, to learn to make it do otherwise seems pointless, especially seeing as we would be paying for the luxury of learning to hack it.
And this is just an outright lie. It’s not even as powerful as old faithful, MySQL and PHP.
UPDATE: Wouldja lookit that! ASU salares is already free of its Caspio chains!
The news industry is broken. A business model based on 100+ years of being the only game in town has left us slow on the draw, slow to compromise and scared to try anything new without knowing exactly what the results will be.
But we’re merely slow and scared. Not incapable. Lately I’ve seen more ideas bring thrown around and tried out. I hope this becomes a trend.
Last week I met with a couple Marketing/advertising poobahs from the Des Moines Register. They talked, believe it or not, about James Wilkerson — a newsroom journalist — and the work he did to webify their garage sale listings. It’s a pretty cool application that allows people to search for sales in a certain location or with certain keywords and print out matches to a map.
I think it exemplifies an idea covered here about how the Internet might make money. The trick?
“The way for Main Street Web ventures to make money is to help other people to make money.”
I like that idea, and think our organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage. The argument is that it’s not enough to simply deliver an audience to your advertisers in hopes they make a purchase, but to cut out that middle process entirely. Sell sales to your advertisers. Instead of something passive like CPM, we could turn it into something far more tangible… CP$?
That idea makes a lot of sense to me. It’s doable. It makes advertising with us valuable in a far more tangible way that a Google ad, TV or radio spot. But it’s far from the only idea out there. And I may be missing that’s a better fit.
With that in mind, I present the mechanisms of Time’s 50 best websites 2008 and the way they make money, thieved fiendishly from Valleywag.com.
- GasBuddy — Google AdSense and a display ad.
- Howcast — Google Adsense.
- iliketotallyloveit.com — Google Adsense
- Omiru — affiliate accounts with vendors such as Amazon and Bluefly
- PsychCentral — Google Adsense.
- TripKick — ValueClick banner ads.
- Wikitravel — Google Adsense.
- Yahoo! Answers — Yahoo display and search results.
- Zeer — Google AdSense
- Afrigadget.com — run by volunteers.
- AskMen.com — Google search ads and Google AdSense.
- ConcreteLoop.com — Google AdSense
- Health.com — Display advertising, served by DoubleClick, sold by Health magazine.
- PopSugar — display ads, sold internally.
- ProFootballTalk — Sponsored by Sprint, Valueclick display ads.
- Rate My Professors — display advertising and Yahoo contextual ads.
- Serious Eats — diplay advertising from BlogAds.com network.
- The Nest — display ads, sold internally.
- Geni — ad-free.
- MapJack — Google AdSense.
- Mint — affiliate marketing.
- NexTag — sells its own search ads.
- Nymbler — Google AdSense.
- Picnik — sells premium accounts
- Pixelgirl Presents — Volunteer run.
- SearchMe — Doesn’t make money.
- TinyUrl.com — Google AdSense.
- Mobaganda.com — Doesn’t make money.
- Urban Dictionary — Microsoft display ads, Google AdSense, Amazon Affiliate.
- Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project — Volunteer-run.
- Hulu — Pre-roll video ads.
- Imeem — affiliate sales, in-house ad sales and video ad networks.
- Kongregate — Google AdSense display ads.
- ffffound.com — Display ads from The Deck ad network.
- Lookybook — Affiliate links to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.
- Someecards — Google AdSense.
- WebSudoku — Google AdSense.
- Penny Arcade — Google AdSense display ads, internal ad sales.
- Gaia Online — Sells virtual goods.
- CarbonRally — Volunteer run.
- COLOURlovers — Display ads from The Deck ad network.
- Apartment Therapy — Glam ad network, AdBrite text ads.
- Digital Vaults — Volunteer run.
- Free Rice — Volunteer run.
- HypeBeast — Google AdSense display ads.
- Kiva.org — Volunteer run.
- Net-a-Porter — Sells clothes.
- Open Source Food — Google AdSense.
- Petfinder — Sponorships, display ads, sold internally.
- WikiSky — Donations.
I’ll also tack on one more link with some ideas.
FINALLY, SOME CONTEXT:
Lest anyone think otherwise, I do commit journalism for a living. I hope to continue doing so well into senility. The recent rash of business-related posts (from a clueless dude whose only business-sense comes from his small-business owner mommy and investor daddy, no less) is because I’ve decided things like this have very little to do with bad work in the newsroom. I don’t think doing more video will save the industry. I don’t think Twittering beat reporters are the magic bullet. The product isn’t broken, just dated, and it’s changing fast.
It’s the business side that’s utterly damaged, and I don’t see enough — ANY — discussion, navel-gazing, twitter updates or general rowdiness because of it. These past few posts have been my attempts to change that. I’ve been dropping my bucket of substandard water into the ocean in hopes others will do the same.
Go pass along your thoughts to the Columbia Missourian, which is weighing its options.
I didn’t post in the comments, but I did send along an e-mail to Tom Warhover, who has some fancy title over there. I advocated for going digital-only, which should be about as surprising as molasses. My thinking was, well gee, that’s where we’re all headed, anyway. To throw a driven, massive, dedicated staff at an online-only endeavor would be the best argument to-date for other papers following in the Missourian’s footsteps, at least on a journalistic level.
But I took it a step further. Bear with me.
One reason few papers have made his switch is because online ad revenue barely begins to pay for coffee, much less salaries, capital, etc. It’s simply not financially possible. Worse, I haven’t heard of many publishers who are really driving hard at growing online ad revenue. It’s a big Catch 22 that’s going to leave us at status quo for the foreseeable future.
The Missourian serves a number of purposes. Foremost, it’s the community paper for Columbia, Missouri and the surrounding area. Second, it’s a training ground for budding young journos. Third, it’s the canary in the coal mine for this entire industry. This is a paper that’s not afraid to fall flat on its face in the interest of moving forward. (*cough* Emprint *cough* Seriously, will you kill that thing already?)
If I were king for a day, or just a member of UM’s Board of Curator’s, I’d chart out something like this:
- Go online only. throw the full manpower of hundred or so staffers at making it the best dam community paper there is, and train the most competent journalists in the country. Employers want slideshows? Audio? Video? Put their desires to shame.
- Serve that community in a way no other local media outlet can/is willing to, because they don’t focus online. Take the best of hyperlocal and own it. Take the best of online magazines and own it. Throw turds at the wall and see what sticks. Make the rest of this industry excited to copy your work (and believe me, I’ll be first in line to do so).
- Last, but perhaps most important, make this work financially. That’s the big hairy audacious goal. I feel bad for saying it, because I have no vision of how this plays out. Zero. Nada. But that’s the point. I don’t trust myself; I trust you. I have no doubt that the concerted efforts of the most reputable J-School in the country can come up with something. With minimal overhead (no paid reporters!), the Missourian is in a special position to figure it out for all of us.
You will find yourself at the receiving ends of such fine Google searches as:
- Making money in journalism
- Journalism Money
And my favorite:
- Leave journalism, make money
Good luck, guys…
May 2nd, 2008
8:01 am
Misc
It’s been in the works for a couple months, but now it’s for real. I’ve agreed to take a position at the Arizona Republic, and get started May 21. I’ll be doing pretty much the same thing I’m doing now, only I’ll get the added benefit of the Republic’s commitment to CAR/First Amendment collaboration. To me, that means the best of both worlds. I’ll still get to putz around on the web, but I’ll also get a hand in investigations — which is where my heart has always been. I’ll also have the extreme pleasure of working with Ryan Konig, who I’m fairly sure is one of the smarter folks I’ve ever met.
I’m pretty excited to get in and get started, but this wasn’t easy. I honestly believe that Springfield is in a position to be the next great non-metro — they have good folks in all the right places, and every day they’re adding more. If anyone wants to talk about what’s going on there, give me a shout and I’d be happy to spill the beans.
Over the past few weeks, a sort of taboo subject has continued to bubble up. More buyouts at some of the best news orgs in the country. Plunging stock prices. An intriguing article on the relationship between the newsroom and print advertising.
As if fated to be seen in contrast, the Pulitzer winners were announced, and some fantastic work got the credit it was due. Google beat out Wall Street projections and posted a profitable first quarter. And some yayhoo railed against Rob Curley, calling him a schlub because his products don’t make money (I have no clue whether that’s true or not, but, regardless, the barb was lofted).
So I ask, with both feet firmly planted in the journalism camp: At what point does all of this become our problem? At what point do we, as journalists, as the webby voices in the good ol’ MSM, start actively thinking about how we can make it better?
If there was a theoretical continuum mapping out the stance on this problem in the average newsroom, I’d wager the needle would be staunchly on the “Not my job” side of things. Any product of a worthwhile J-School has heard the horror stories: Staples Center, the CBS New Year’s Eve gaffe, various examples of ad placement for story coverage or spiked stories to preserve an advertising relationship. The overall message many students walk away with is, “If you think about how any of your work will make money, you’re dirty.”
This isn’t true. What’s more, it’s hurting us. Go over to TechCrunch and check out the list of startups. The plurality of those applications would have been ideal undertakings for a news organization. Those ideas were cooked up to make life better or more interesting, sure, but they were also meant to make money. Generally, they’re succeeding at both.
We’re doing good work, too.
But too often, we’re leaving it in the hands of advertising people to see that it makes money. Their solution, inevitably, is, “Slap an ad on it!” “Upsell X, Y and Z!” or my favorite, “You can’t do that, we sell something similar in print.”
These aren’t wrong answers. Well, except for that last one. Unfortunately for all of us, it isn’t working. It’s time for a new plan. What about allowing subscription cell phone updates for our best apps, or a choice for ad-supported and free? What about harvesting user information and allowing for targeted, premium advertising (The Facebook model)? What about sponsorship?
The journalists who are doing this kind of work are spilling over with ideas. We’re passionate. We love what we do and we want to keep doing it. And I honestly believe that if we started thinking about this, from Project Day 1, we’d come up with something that could work.
To be clear, I’m talking about turning our best ideas into sources of money, not building ideas around sources of money. That’s an important distinction, and a tougher pill for our bosses to swallow. We don’t have to compromise our passions to make this go. Doing so would subvert the entire undertaking. But the belief that our employers should let us do good work because that’s just what news organizations do is somewhere between dead and dying. We have to prove ourselves.
And we can.
ADDENDUM #1: Any and all comments appreciated. If you think this means I lost my soul, please say so.
ADDENDUM #2: Heard from an advertising/marketing person who was looking to repair a relationship with a news editor after mentioning that a new product was mostly being created because it would lead to new revenue. At the very least, that denial of the business side of this business gotsta stop.