WebU

America's most popular news blog goes local, takes on Chicago

Huffington Post - the fast growing US news and politics aggregator and blog machine - has launched a beta version of their new local news model.
Here's how cheif Huffer, Arianna Huffington, described the new site:

HuffPost Chicago is part local news source, part resource guide, and part virtual soap box -- featuring a collection of bloggers who know and love Chicago, and are looking to share their takes on everything from the Cubs to City Hall to the hot new local band to the best place for Greek food (and I can testify that there is a lot of that in Chicago!).

It's the first of what the Huffington Post hopes will be a long line of local news and blog packages. The model is a simple one - and very cheap to operate: one paid staffer aggregating local news coverage and riding herd on a whole pile of local (free) bloggers.
It's classic jujitsu, using your competitor's weight against him(her). Don't try and out report the well-established, deep pocketed (despite the doom and gloom newspaper news) local news outlet: repackage the best of its content. How hard is that?
The Chicago Tribune's web columnist, Steve Johnson, was suitably unimpressed:

"... the page collects and packages headlines mostly from the Tribune, Sun-Times and Crain’s Chicago Business (other sources will be used, too) and turns them into an all-Chicago front page designed to draw Chicagoans for whom a little local news is enough.

It’s Huffington’s Sampler, compared to the smorgasbord you get on those outlets' individual sites ..."

But Johnson, whose column runs under the very 1997 title "Hypertext", ended his piece with an observation that warmed my cold little heart:

"That said, all the local news outlets can and should borrow the big idea from Huffington Post like it borrows their stories. There’s no reason the Tribune, in 2008, shouldn’t be offering its online readers a Chicago page packed with the most interesting and important local news, no matter which outlet is reporting it."

If only that view was widely shared, newspapers would begin to have a chance on the web. Probably the number one job people want done is simple: find me interesting/useful stuff on the web. That doesn't mean we try and compete with Google or their mighty search index and algorithm, but it does mean we need to get serious about curating the web's information for our readers.
Bill
 

What the propane depot explostions taught me about coverning breaking news on the web

Here's probably the key lesson I learned from closely watching the Toronto media race to cover Sunday morning's propane depot blast, a breaking news story that killed two, destroyed five homes and rendered 10,000 people temporarily homeless:

Speed of delivery ain't the biggest change the web brings to the news game - duration is.The story lives in time, and your job changes as you move further away in time from the event.

This was not the case in the days of the 2x daily newscast and 1X daily press run: breaking news happened, we scrambled like hell to gather as much info as close to the event as we could, then we'd spend as much time as we could sifting and filtering and checking and producing. And at last, on deadline, we'd deliver a high value product.
But when we can talk to people LIVE from a breaking news event, the rules are different. And when people - anyone - can talk to the WORLD live from the event without us, the game has changed almost beyond recognition.
That's the thing newspapers still don't get about covering breaking news on the web.
Here's the formula:
When it starts, when the thing has just happened, think televsion news, or radio from the old days — be immediate, be instant. Tells us what you see, what you hear, what you know — and very importantly what you don't know. Be omniverous. Slurp it up and spit it out: people are desperately hungry for news of the big event and don't mind if they get fed some chalk with their cheese.
Then, slowly, bring the power of your newsroom to bear. Filter information more finely. Fact check more closely, use your superior access to seek out and broadcast authoritative voices more often.
Finally wrap it all up with a bow — package the damn thing.
Simple, huh?
But here's the trick. Newspapers in particular are very, very good at the 2nd phase - it's what we all recognize as "journalism": We flood the zone with bodies and talent who use their reporting and investigating skills and their access to dig out the facts, to contextualize the emerging information, to pull it together and make sense of it all by squeezing the pieces into narratives.
The final phase is handled by the stylists and the designers, the artists and packaging folks. Simple straight-forward skill sets - make sense of this riot of information and do it on deadline please. We're good at that.
It's the first phase we suck at.
And we suck at it because we can't compete with the resources of an always-connected city, of a populace that is plugged into the net and each other every waking moment, that is walking around with video and still cameras and computers in their shaking little hands or crammed into their pockets.
We suck at it because we don't want to admit that we can't compete, that the random, unfocused noise thrown off by connected citizens (i.e. amateur journalists) during a major breaking news event is superior to our early hours efforts.
But it is.
This was very, very clear Sunday morning when, as I pointed out in yesterday's analysis of the coverage, for the first five or six hours, ALL the best photos and videos and incident colour came from citizens, not pro "journalists".
This is only sensible — "citizens" are everywhere, everywhen. And these days they're kitted out as well as any reporter. And at least 20% of them are  used to producing content for the web — that's a lot of content when a major story breaks. It's content that published in a hundred locations: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Live Journal, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, Photo Bucket, on blogs and yes, in the comment sections of newspaper web sites. Why would anyone rail against this tide?
And yes it has, as I noted yesterday, a high noise to signal ratio, it's full of errors and myopia and it lacks perspective and maybe insight — but all of it is better than what you've got with one editor sitting behind a computer and three photogs and four reporters scrambling for their boots and their car keys.
So our challenge is how to harness that information in that first frantic hour or hours. Based on what I watched yesterday, here's my thoughts on how to plan for breaking news.
When breaking news happens:

1) Scramble your jets — Obvious. Do what you always do: flood the zone with reporters and photographers and videographers. Only keep them on a short leash - have them calling and texting and Twittering short burst of info (text, photos, videos if that's possible). They need to learn to share as they go - but to keep going, keep digging.

2) Staff your desk — Get someone listening to the scanners, working the radios, answering the phones. Get another person hooked up to your website and live blogging - with timestamps - events as they happen. (Embed Coveritlive if you can) Speed is everything.

3) Offer a platform — Open a forum, or the commenting section on a static blog post, or (if you have no other alternative) a special email address or fax or phone number where people can just show up and tell their stories;  share what they've seen, what they know, what they've felt. A place where they can see each other and talk about what they've experienced. Cull material from here.

4) Set your traplines — Quickly scour  your platform and YouTube, Search.Twitter.com, LiveJouranal, Facebook, Technorati; GoogleBlogSearch, Blip.tv; Vimeo; Photo bucket, etc.  People are posting content —find it. Invite readers stories, images, videos. Ask questions inside the live blogging stream. Let readers see themselves answering them, (that's critical to maximizing contributions).

5) Curate the web — Start filtering the citizen contributions,searching out the best content and featuring it, pointing to it, highlighting it. (Get a reporter busy verifying it, if that seems necessary). Be the place that people can rely upon to have found the best stuff.

6) Pull it all together — After the first hour or so it's time to increase the signal to noise ratio. Feature verified info (your staffs and citizens). Prepare write-thrus and best-of's. Start packaging this stuff, bringing in context, old or related stories and documents and downloads from around the web.

All the while publish to the web, telling people what you know and what you don't know. And promising to update continuously. And keep your promise. There, you see? It is simple.
Bill

Propane depot explosions expose shortcomings in breaking news coverage by newspapers living in a Web 2.0 world

photo courtesy http://www.photojunkie.ca/

About two hours before this morning's grey dawn, a series of explosions tore through a propane depot in the northwest corner of the city, shaking buildings and homes, shattering windows and waking people as far as 10 kms distant from the scene. Fire and smoke shot to heights equal to a 20 or 30 storey building and led many to think (worry? fear?) that a jet airliner had crashed, a terrorist attack had  taken place, the city was being bombed.

This was breaking news with a capital 'B' and at this point, six hours distant from that 3:30 am blast, it offers some intriguing lessons in how coverage of these events is evolving in a world where digital cameras and web access are almost ubiquitous.

Bottom line - in aggregate, citizens journalists out-performed their professional counterparts getting news out faster, offering more details, and better images and videos. They also made more mistakes and had a high noise to signal ratio. Mainstream media were slow off the mark and while they depended on the citizen journalists, they failed to make the most of the possibilities that material offered. See the bottom of the post for my thoughts on how to do that.

Toronto's a media-rich city: four paid dailies, two free dailies, several city news blogs in addtion to more than a dozen local radio and television stations. I can't cover them all, but took a look at the four dailies (The Globe, The National Post, The Star, and The Sun) and the two big place blogs (Blog.TO and Torontoist).

I did a similar comparison earlier this year (when the transit union launched an unexpected, but legal, strike on a Friday night at press deadline time) and the results are pretty similar - none of the dailies have figured out yet how to blend the strengths of their newsroom (speed, accuracy, access) with the new possibilities opened up by an always connected citizenry - but most of them are trying.

The Star, with the city's biggest newsroom (although I can't imagine they had more than a single person on duty when the first blast hit), produced the fullest account, with pretty admirable speed. Police, fire, eyewitness reports, plus links to two of the eight or so citizen videos of the blast I found online. The article had commenting enabled (they don't always) and you got a bit of a flavour of the impact on the city, which is useful, if basic.

The Globe and Mail seemed entirely asleep at the switch, relying entirely on Canadian Press for it's text story, still photos and video. (CP's video was quite good actually, blending citizen video with their own images and overlaying professional reporting and a very competent voice-over.) The Globe (and the Star) both appealed to readers to send them stories, videos and photos, but if they got any, neither acknowledged it.) Lots of comments, though, including people offering links to other sites with video of the blasts, the Toronto Fire Dept's live response web page, even academic and news references to other propane explosions and the risks the storage depots pose. Good stuff that a smart web team might have referenced in the story - but their readers did it for them. It's a stark demonstration of how people use — or want to use — the web: to share information, to learn more by sharing what they know, using the familiar web tools Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, the collective memory of the web itself.

NY Times Top Twitter-er, But Newspaper Readers Not Flocking to Sign-Up For The Service

Twitter has been called everything from a game-changing microblogging tool to a mind-boggling waste of time. 

Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

But the key to Twitter's success lies in the fact that users can subscribe to each other's tweets and receive them via their PDA's, their smart phones, as text messages, or in emails, or via the web.

It's an odd idea, but the funny (and with it's frequent outatges - infuriating) little web publishing tool caught on among the digirati during the uber-hip 2007 South by Southwest event and enjoys a still-growing popularity, espeically among the tech crowd who live in an always-on, always-connected universe and love the way Twitter allows you to connect instantly or asynchronously with your friends and followers wherever and whenever you are.

Twitter fans like to brag that users repeatedly break big news (earthquakes, election results) before the mainstream media, but I'm not sure just how much more useful is a tweet that announces "Holy crap - Earthquake!" as opposed to the US Geological Survey bulletin that arrives three minutes later with solid information about the epicenter and quake strength.

Still, newspapers jumped on the twitter bandwagon last year and by September almost 50 papers had accounts pinging readers with tweets that contained the latest headline and a link to the story as soon as they were posted to the web.

Ten months later and Erica Smith, a newspaper graphic designer and blogger has done some digging and turned up 303 newspaper Twitter accounts, offering a list of winners and losers based on their percentage gains from the previous month. (See the top ten list, below)

What really struck me, however, was how very few readers have signed up for this simple breaking news alert system. While the New York Times primary account has 5,199 followers, the average number is a paltry 131. Hell, you could almost telephone each one of them, if that's the numbers your service is pulling.

I'm not sure what to make of this: readers don't want breaking news fast? (I doubt it); They don't want to pay texting fees to get that news? (a real possibility for many); They just haven't heard of Twitter because they're not living inside the Tech bubble and echo chamber? (highly likely) or some combination of these and other reasons?

Does that mean newspapers shouldn't offer the service?

I don't think it means that at all. Using TwitterFeed or a similar service you can set this up at no cost to your company - it's a set and forget service that will keep pumping out the breaking news tweets until you tell it not to. And those few hundred (or so) readers who subscribe to the service are likely to be very happy you're providing it for them, and knowing Twitter, that means they're also likely to say nice things about you, on Twitter and elsewhere. Serving your customers and building good will is worth it anytime.

Here's Erica's list, rearranged by one of her readers to show just the top ten by number of followers:

@nytimes: 5,199 followers
@popcandy: 2,088 followers
@wsj: 1,230 followers
@nytimesscience: 940 followers
@nytimesarts: 934 followers
@nytimesnational: 905 followers
@nytimesbusiness: 896 followers
@nytimesmovies: 812 followers
@statesman: 760 followers
@nytimesworld: 756 followers

And if you're still not clear on this whole Twitter thing, here's a 2:25 long video explaining Twitter in Plain English, courtesy the nice people at Common Craft :

and if you still would like more, here's the Wikipedia entry on Twitter.
What do you think — should newspapers bother setting up Twitter feeds for their breaking news?
Bill

Is it time to buy newspapers? Or say bye bye?

It's either a very, very good time to buy newspaper stock - or time to put us out of our misery. The Washington Post fell into the red this past quarter for the first time in like, what? 30 something years? A one-time charge of $87 million to pay for layoffs is getting the blame, but newspaper sales were down 13 per cent, print ad revenue was down 22 per cent and even without counting the layoff costs, earnings per share dropped sharply from over $8 to under $6. Across the US the credit crunch, the flight of advertising dollars and the general fear that things will get worse — much worse —  before they get better, have all dealt a body blow to the newspaper biz:

The market capitalization of the Journal Register Company, publisher of the New Haven Register and hundreds of smaller papers, fell below $1 million last week, down more than 99 percent since the start of 2007. In the same period, GateHouse Media, another publisher of hundreds of small papers, has dropped almost 98 percent, to a market value under $26 million. The Sun-Times Media Group is down 91 percent, to less than $34 million.

Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying - NYTimes.com

Now, it's probably important to note that share price is reflecting people's opinions, not necessarily earning potentials, but still... Bill

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Stephen King's latest fiction released as a daily video series for cell phones

Maybe the march to mobile is finally picking up steam.
Last month saw the wildly successful Apple iPhone 3G launch (1 million sold in one weekend - alhtough the activations were a technical nightmare) and perhaps more significantly, the opening of their "Aps" store (an iTunes for mobile applications).
And now author Stephen King is releasing his latest bit of fiction via a 30 day series of short videos streamed to cell phones.

Drawn by award-wining comic book artist Alex Maleev, and colored by famed comic book colorist José Villarrubia, the episodes were adapted by Marc Guggenheim, co-creator of the ABC-TV series “Eli Stone” with creative oversight from Stephen King.

Nishero.com: Stephen King's "N." - An original video series
The series began back on July 28th and a new episode is released each weekday until August 29th.Blocks of five episodes will be released on iTunes each Monday, selling for $0.99 but you can get all the episodes for $3.99.
There's a certain irony in this - Stephen King's second last novel Cell was a post-apocolyptic horror story that pitted zomibe-like cell phone users against the few brave souls who'd never signed up.
As always, North America lags the rest of the wired world when it comes to mobile devices. I'm not sure if it's our often punative data rates, our continued love affair with our POTS (plain old telephone service, i.e. landlines) or what, but most of the real innovation is happening elsewhere. Take cell phone novels for instance. When I first heard about these short (usually romance) novels composed and read on cellphones  I thought  they were  an odd little niche. 
Wrong.
According to a New York Times story from earlier this year, they're hugely popular.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists...

In my own industry the vast majority of newspaper's have yet to develop mobile versions of their web sites, leaving the mobile news delivery service to AP and an increasing number of outsiders who are developing smart little aggregators that push content out to people's smart phones. Bill

Blogged with the Flock Browser

My four step plan on becoming a digital journalist - boiled down to a 90 sec video

Last month I was invited to speak at the Mags University, an annual conference for Canadian Magazines, to offer a Digital Survival Guide for Editors. I blogged about it including posting my presentation slides and appropritate links back in June.
After the session one of my hosts, Stan Sutter, a journalist with, among other things, a long history at Marketing Magazine, approached me and asked if I'd sit (stand, actually) for a video interview for his own blog.

He used a simple Cannon (I think) point and shoot, urged me to be brief and to-the-point, asked me couple of questions and we were done. I finally caught up with the results, which I share with you below.

Tribune chain boss endorses the river of news as online model

Sam Zell, the real estate billionaire who snatched up the Tribune newspaper chain, took it private in an $8.3 billion buyout, shocked tender journalists with his forthright manner,  promised to build newspapers, not slash them, was hailed (nervously) by some as a saviour, cut staffing levels across the chain,  shrank newsholes, started burning the furniture to heat his house, mused about (horrors!) counting bylines and setting copy quotas for reporters, ain't backing down none.
In a joint conference call with his chief operating officer Randy Michaels, and staff at the Hartford Courrant newspaper, Zell and Michaels defended their decisions to cut newsroom staff across the chain and trim editorial pages (i.e. increase the ad to editorial conent ratio) after having told the newsroom six months earlier:

"I do not believe that anybody can grow a business by reducing the number of employees," Zell said at the time. "It is not our game plan to, in effect, try and figure out how few people we can have run this business."

During his call Zell said when he made those comments last January no one could have predicted the "advertising revenue destruction" that had swept through the industry and his company. The cuts, he said, were triage, life saving.
But probably the most interesting comments came from his sidekick Michaels, a former shock jock who signalled clearly that he's not satisfied with the way his newspapers approach online news. Micheals, of course, is much, much more than a former dj — he played a key role in building a radio giant, Clear Channel, almost doubling industry growth rates as he did so, and that's the reason Zell tapped him to take the reins of the Tribune chain.
In the call Michaels said the job of newspapers online is simple: breaking news. Do that job well, he said and newspapers can reclaim the audiences they lost to radio, then television and now the net.

"We need to build — especially in markets where we have multiple media outlets — a breaking news center," he said. "And we need to re-create our websites so that instead of looking like a newspaper online, it looks like a breaking news site, with the most recent news first."

Lord love him. I've been saying for some time that the real model for newspapers on the net is something that combines Dave Winer's 2005 notion of the River of News with radio and now an ex-radio guy has embraced the same concept. This is a good sign — a very good sign — for the online news biz.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

2007 Canadian online ad revenue jumped by 38 per cent, but newspapers lagged behind

Canadian advertisers are moving more and more money onto the web, with spending continuing to grow by double digits, although the rate of growth is expected to slow this year. Alas, newspapers, while seeing healhy growth in their online revenue, are lagging behind.

From a press release earlier this week from the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (IAB):

2007 Canadian Online Advertising Revenues climbed to just over $1.2 billion for the year -- a 38% increase over 2006 actuals. Publisher revenue from Online advertising in Canada has more than quadrupled over the past five years -- building from $237 million in 2003, to the $1.2 billion mark in 2007 -- and is quickly closing in on more established mediums

The IAB data shows that online video ads are still virtually non-existent, accounting for $9 million, or less than 1 per cent of the total online ad spend. Email advertising, an often over-looked category, appears to be declining, dropping from $20 million to $9 million year over year.
The big categories are:

• Search: $478 million
• Display: $432 million
• Classified/Directory: $305 million (an unhelpful jumble of a category)

And newspapers?

According to this Canadian Newspaper Association report (.pdf), newspapers snagged $196 million of that $1.2B spending which was about $44 million more than they'd earned the year before. But the numbers also show that Canadian newspapers are failing to keep their share of that growth — while their online ad revenue grew by 29 per cent, that fell seriously behind the overall growth rate of 38 per cent.

As a percentage of total revenue, online is growing, adding up to 7.6 percent of newspaper's total revenue in 2007, as opposed to 5.8 percent the previous year.

Bill

The biggest mistake online news sites make: creating their own content

One of the big things that most newspapers (i.e. all of them) don't get about the web is that it's not all about creating (and owning) content. Pointing to good content is just as important.
Data from the Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest State of the News Media report shows that all of the top ten online news sites use newspaper content (from wire services or via the web) - but only three of them are newspaper (or newspaper chain) sites. Yahoo, MSNBC, AOL, Google etc. all produce no or very little original content, and use and rely on newspaper newsrooms and the web for their raw material.
In fact the PEJ numbers understate this simple truth because they don't seem to be treating a whole class of news aggregators — notably Digg  and even Reddit— as news sites. Going by monthly unique visitors, Digg (which has between 5 and 25 million unique visitors depending on who you believe) would easily make the top ten. And they, of course, create no news at all, merely have their readers post links to it.
In an information economy, in a society where the world's information is migrating online where it will soon be always and instantly available, one of the most important jobs to be done is not information creation— but retrieval. Find me the stuff I need/want fast. Creating useful information — which news clearly is — is also an important job, but it shouldn't be our only one. Newspapers can't expect to compete on search as such, but they can — and must — use their searching, filtering and editing skills to find and point to the best, most useful and interesting, news on the web.
Why is that so hard to understand?
Scour the web for the freshest, most authoritative, relevant news and information (news sites, blogs, institutional sites - whatever!) toss it into a river of news on your front page, a river that also includes your very own excellent local content. Mix in the very best readers picks of news on the web, and a dose of their freshest, best comments, pulled from anywhere on your site, and you have a news product that people will come back to again and again each day.
There are some news sites that are moving, slowly and cautiously, in this direction — but not newspaper sites. As always, innovation is coming from outsiders, not from newspapers themselves, culture-bound creatures that they are.
Here's one example, Crosscut, a Seattle based guide to local news and information. Here's how they describe themselves:

Based in Seattle, Crosscut is a guide to local and Northwest news, a place to report and discuss local news, and a platform for new tools to convey local news. The journalism of regular citizens appears alongside that of professionals. News coverage with detachment, traditionally practiced by mainstream media outlets, coexists with advocacy journalism and opinion.

• Crosscut finds and highlights the best local journalism and the best local commentary, whether it's the work of the biggest metropolitan daily newspaper or a part-time blogger. There is a multitude of worthy sources of information on the Internet, but few people have time to navigate them all.
• Crosscut publishes its own journalism and commentary. These are stories and angles others have missed or ignored. Our news coverage aims to complement that of other providers, to extend exploration of events and issues, to possibly encourage resolution

I think it's unfortunate that they've swallowed the "Local, Local, Local" mantra of scared news sites everywhere that are foolishly refusing to compete against the "big" boys — the top ten online news sites.
I say leverage the great content being produced online by the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and other players on the international scene — point to the best of it as soon as it's available.
Do that work for your readers, do the job of finding good stuff fast, and they'll never leave you.
Bill