From the category archives:

Online Media

News As A Comment-Driven Social Network

July 30, 2009

Last time out, I talked about the New York Times’ proposed membership plans. I like the fact that they begin to move away from charging for content and creating deeper offerings for Times fans. But, with the possible exception of ‘BackStory’, none of the things on offer are closely tied to the online news experience and they do nothing to drive or reinforce the use of Times content.

One of the problems news organizations face in attracting paid subscriptions in any form is that users are not invested in the same way they are with social Web services that are built around users’ own content. These services, while valuable to users individually, tend to become more useful as more users enroll and upload more content.

For example, users can upload photos to Flickr for free up to a specified limit. At the point a paid subscription is required, it can be more convenient (by design!) for users to pay to keep all their photos in one place than it is to start from scratch somewhere else. In addition, the more people and the more photos that are uploaded to Flickr, the more useful it becomes as a resource for users to search and be searched.

In contrast, the online news experience (whether it’s a paid model or not) doesn’t promote buy-in from users and doesn’t capture the effort users are already putting in. Harnessing user participation has the potential to transform news from a transactional product – formerly a newspapers, now atomized content – into a service that users have a stake in improving for themselves and that becomes more useful for everyone else as a result.

The biggest investment users already make in news content is comments. The best comments take more time to write and presumably reflect some knowledge or passion around the topic or event they relate to. I’m not trying to discount the value in sharing articles because social distribution is a big deal. The value produced by sharing news is not being captured very well either, but comments are more personal and represent a bigger part of our online selves.

Obviously, not all comments are informed, thoughtful, constructive or even civil, and perhaps a greater portion on highly trafficked news sites are not. But by embracing comments, I think news organizations can start to harness the investment their most valuable users are making in their services.

I don’t think any amount of higher quality or more unique content can differentiate news services, but a connected network of engaged users can. Other users are what make Facebook and Twitter so useful and even addictive, not whether they have the best features.

These things may determine the type of people that show up in the first place but quality is a prerequisite to developing a relationship with users. Network effects emerge from connecting users to each other and that is the piece that becomes difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The good news is that these things have already started to happen. The Times has TimesPeople which they even call a social network for news. Similarly, BusinessWeek has BusinessExchange which goes a step further and allows users to import and comment on non-BusinessWeek content.

However, both have a long way to go before they become fully-functioning social networks. For example, TimesPeople needs to more personal information in profiles, much tighter integration with article pages and whole host of features to improve comment threads and that is just for starters.

A comment-driven social network for news could provide the kind of platform needed to create deeper services and ultimately new revenues whether they come from users, advertisers, other third parties or all of the above.

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Posted on July 30, 2009

New York Times Memberships

July 28, 2009

The New York Times is considering two levels of paid membership packages ($50 for Silver, $150 for Gold) that offer a bundle of benefits including early access or additional background on some stories and preferred access to tickets for NYT events.

Mike Masnick is experimenting with something similar (with added fun) at Techdirt based on successes he has seen in the music industry. So it’s not surprising that he likes where the NY Times seems to be going with this. Conversely, Martin Langeveld over at the Nieman Journalism Lab does not like the idea at all.

One thing these memberships do start to do is shift the focus away from arbitrarily walling off content and towards providing potentially valuable services to users. Fred Wilson made that point recently although I’m not as keen on the FT model he uses as an example.

The Times’ membership packages focus specifically on Times enthusiasts in so far as the actual services on offer are conceivably things that might appeal to loyal Times readers. However, I think there is an important distinction to be made between active users and people with an affinity for the Times brand.

From that perspective, the membership packages look like a mixed bag. BackStory and FirstLook might appeal to news hounds. Tote bags, crossword puzzles, discounts on Times memorabilia and perhaps even TimesEvents to the latter group.

Perhaps most importantly, the benefits don’t appear as though they will scale that well individually and there is no collective synergy or network effect to promote further engagement with Times content. For example, the value of preferred access to tickets for Times events will diminish as more people enroll.

Attempting to derive revenue from users rather than content and extending offerings for the most valuable users are good ideas but I think both need to be woven into the fabric of using the Times online.

Connecting users to each other and harnessing their participation might be one way to achieve that goal. I’ll talk more about what that means and how it might work in the next post.

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Posted on July 28, 2009

An Alternative Proposal for Excerpting

July 16, 2009

The common case for excerpts is that they send traffic to the original source. The case against is that users don’t click through to the source because so much content was excerpted that readers don’t need to.

This debate has emerged in various places over the past six months including a New York Times article, a terrific discussion among professional and independent bloggers, and more recently a rather extreme proposal to ban all excerpting of (and linking to!) content without the permission of copyright holders.

A significant portion of the discussion has revolved around determining some “fair” amount of content that excerpts should not exceed. The best answer is that “good” excerpting is a question of intent and the O’Reilly Radar post behind that last link is an excellent one. But, how can intentions be measured or molded into practical guidelines?

My proposal is this (I’m assuming clear attribution and links to sources are a given at this point): instead of trying to curb the amount of content that can be excerpted, expect excerpts to be matched with the same amount of original content summarizing, interpreting, explaining, analyzing, opining or otherwise adding value to the meme.

I think the ratio of excerpted content to original content in an article could prove to be a more effective measure of intent than looking at the percentage of the original article that was excerpted or setting arbitrary word count limits.

If the intent is to filter the Web and point users to interesting, valuable or otherwise newsworthy stories just post a link, a short description and an excerpt of a few lines. If the intent is a longer explanation or critique I think the added commentary would at least match the length of the excerpt.

If the intent is to boost traffic and ad revenue using the content of others it would require additional work at the very least. Those extra words could either be made to count or articles would meander and provide less value the longer excerpts become.

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Posted on July 16, 2009

Google and Relationships

June 23, 2009

John A. Byrne, Executive Editor at BusinessWeek, spoke at the 140 Characters conference last week and he made some powerful statements about Google and the media industry that offer stark contrast with the views expressed by some other media organizations in recent months:

Google is fantastic because it allows people to discover you. But when people type in a query in that simple little box, they’re agnostic as to brand. They want the information, they don’t care where they go. And so, essentially it’s a machine to destroy relationships that people have with either yourself or your brand…

I think it’s important to think about Google in that way, not in the negative sense, but in the way that makes you to do something to counteract that transactional nature that breaks down the relationships.

And that’s why I think engagement is the single most important thing we need to work on because we have largely been divorced from our audiences…FOREVER, we don’t have enough respect for the people who read us and are even influenced by us. I think we truly need to deeply engage and collaborate with our audience to expand it and to protect it from this major transaction mechanism…

I think this is an excellent way to think about Google, particularly the attitude towards solving the problem Google presents. Although, Google doesn’t necessarily destroy any real relationships as much as it highlights where there were none to start with and creates its own.

Engagement may help, but it sounds like an attempt to build (or rebuild) old relationships that are based on an affinity with news brands by involving users as collaborators. This may help to align the actual collaborators with a particular news brand. It may also improve the perceived value of that content by other users, but I’m not sure it’s enough to help large numbers of users bypass search engines.

Collaboration and other forms of engagement are important because they create interactions. But there are lots of other, user-driven interactions that are already taking place – commenting, bookmarking, posting, tweeting etc. Remembering all of these interactions and by extension remembering and distinguishing between users can lead to real relationships, and it scales.

Amazon knows who I am, what I’ve bought and what I’ve looked at. It uses that information to suggest what else I might like (as well as knowing how to charge me and where to ship etc). Media organizations could do exactly the same thing by knowing what I’ve read, what I’ve commented on, what I’ve shared (as well as where I live etc) to recommend articles and what ever else they can offer me based on what they know about me.

If you truly know your users and have real, learned relationships with them, they shouldn’t need to go anywhere near Google unless it’s to search for you specifically because they need an exact URL.

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Posted on June 23, 2009

All Newspaper Content Is Not The Same Either

March 30, 2009

Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, wrote a terrific post on SAI last week about three competencies – aggregation, curation and networks – that he thinks represent the future of newspaper organizations.

I agree with the sentiment of Mark’s post and I think all three of his pillars will play a role in establishing the new best way that a lot of content is efficiently created, organized and distributed online.

However, I don’t think it represents a complete solution for newspaper organizations. It probably wasn’t meant to because Mark only talks about local news but the title of the article was rather sensationalist (although this may well have been edited by SAI).

I’d take the curation part of the framework one step further and add increased journalist interaction with readers and the subjects they cover. I’d like to see a world where journalists add explicit gestures to the content they curate in order to collect followers and build communities.

Like readers, the content formerly found in newspapers is not all the same. Content that used to be separate sections of a newspaper is produced online by lots of different types of companies and individuals. It’s also presented at different times in different contexts and is used for different purposes.

Reviews of books and restaurants might be found on blogs, user review sites or social networks or in the case of Amazon reviews at the point of sale. A Frank Bruni restaurant review serves a completely different purpose than a user review (or ten) on Yelp.

Real estate listings from brokers are written up on neighborhood blogs, aggregated directly online and found using searches multiple, changeable criteria and some use maps to help people visualize precisely where properties are in relation to local transport or amenities.

Different revenue models have already started to emerge in some verticals. Online job boards are mostly driven by search and alerts that might be ad supported but some are also charging companies to post jobs and charging applicants to view jobs.

Newspaper organizations face stiff, vertical competition in most areas including sports, entertainment, business, technology and politics either from native online media or the online outposts of cable television stations, magazines and trade publications. This is before even getting to blogs and local news.

This means the idea that there will be a single, industry-wide solution that will replace existing newspaper revenue streams and enable everything else to continue as normal represents a very narrow view of the problem.

Jeff Jarvis says as much in this blog post while reporting the creation of an investigative journalism fund by the Huffington Post which could help to support another part of the news puzzle.

Academic researchers in most if not all fields are forced to spend a lot of time trying to get research projects funded. It’s not beyond belief that a similar model might be necessary for journalism projects that are socially important but need to be funded rather than bought.

While the problems newspapers face are ostensibly related to the medium and the business model, it is also hard to separate the type of content they produce from those two things because newspaper content is constrained by its context.

The Web has enabled us to find and use information efficiently in the context that we need it, whereas newspapers present information in only one context at the start of each day and that is ‘what is happening in the world?’

Just as it made sense for newspapers to aggregate content on a wide range of subjects to broaden their appeal, online content has become organized into deep verticals online because it helps to place it in context in the moment.

As a result, solutions to the current problem need to address all of the content types found in newspapers differently because online technology is being applied to content verticals in different ways and (different) people are using it to do different things.

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Posted on March 30, 2009

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