As one who believes in high-quality niche content, I’ve long been a fan of of the video game comic/commentary/community Penny Arcade. (In fact, I keep trying to slip John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory into presentations to clients curious about user interaction.)
I was therefore heartened and impressed by this post from the aforementioned Gabe about their attitude to advertising on the Penny Arcade (apologies for the lengthy quote, it’s worth it):
Other game site out there takes ads for whatever game they can get. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pile of crap, if the publisher pays for the spot IGN or Gamespot or whoever will run the ad. That’s fine but that’s not how we do it and the news posts you just read are part of the reason why..
No matter how early the build we tell the publishers that unless we can see it played in front of us or play it ourselves we won’t run ads for it. Obviously a lot can still go wrong during development but we make the best decisions we can. We do not think of the ads you see on our page as ads. They are recommendations and we try extremely hard to insure that anything we put over there is worth your time.
When Prince of Persia 2 came out and we saw that it was crap we said as much on the site. Ads for the game appeared right next to those news posts slamming it. Needless to say Ubi wasn’t very happy and Robert got some angry phone calls but our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills.
We explained to Ubi that the reason our ads perform better than any other site out there is because our readers trust us and that means we have to admit when something we advertise doesn’t turn out as good as we hoped.
How great is that? How sensible is that? They regard ads as part of the content of their site and they vet products before they carry ads for them. If they then carry negative reviews, the games companies just have to suck it up. And why do these powerful organisations suck it up? They suck it up because ads on Penny Arcade out-perform ads on other sites. And why does that happen? Because Penny Arcade’s users trust what they see on the site. And they trust the ads precisely because the products are vetted and honestly reviewed.
Penny Arcade’s been around a long time and is a huge success. They really know what they’re doing. In that one post, Gabe and Tycho demonstrate far more commercial nous than many advertising people I’ve encountered.
Imagine similar conversations at a newspaper: “You want a full-colour wraparound advertising your ‘crack cocaine for kids’ casino open day? You want it to look like it’s the real front page of our paper? You want to spend £200? No way, we’re a respectable family publication. Oh, you said £2,000. Hey, sure, no problem. We’ll throw in the editor’s mum posing nude with a donkey as well.”
Let’s focus on Gabe’s key phrase: “Our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills.” Maybe if newspapers had the spine to adopt that attitude their sales wouldn’t be going down the toilet.
Amazon has unveiled its “wireless reading device”, the Kindle (right). At 7.5in by 5.3in it’s designed to combine portability with a large enough screen to allow comfortable reading of a lot of text. Bezos & Co hope that people will read books on this device in the way they don’t on computers, which are not known for their “in the pocket” handiness.
When I’m on the move I read content through my Nokia E61 (left), which has a 320 x 240 pixel 
screen. It is certainly easier to read text on it than on a standard mobile phone but given the choice I’d still rather read paper. And this is what I think users will find with the Kindle. Yes, it’s more portable than a computer. Yes, it’s more readable than a phone or PDA. But it’s still not as convenient or pleasant to read as a book.
However, Amazon are incentivising their product with some clever pricing. They’re selling Kindle versions of books cheaper than the printed products (Run by Ann Patchett is $6 cheaper). This is where the advantage of the Kindle lies. Without printing and distribution costs, ebooks can costs a lot less. The success of Amazon’s reader will depend on whether the diminished ease-of-reading offer by a screen versus a book is offset by the lower price.
All this gets interesting for journalists because, as well as 80,000+ books, the Amazon Kindle offers access to the following:
- Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
- Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times.
- More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post.
It is worth noting that all of these are paid for services – unlike the web versions of these publications.
This aspect of the Kindle is particularly interesting because many in journalism have predicted the coming of a convergence device that combined readability with portability and provide better revenue models than the web. One such expert is new media sage Vin Crosbie (now Adjunct Professor of Visual and Interactive Communications at Syracuse University) who was quoted thus in the Online Journalism Review in 2002:
Vin Crosbie … goes so far as to predict that Web publishing will be subsumed and overwhelmed by a third wave of electronic publishing. (The first wave of proprietary online services, brought to you by Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online in the 1980s and early ’90s, was followed by the Web’s second wave.)
And what will make up this killer third wave? “Pervasive portable media,” says Crosbie, a media consultant in Greenwich, Conn. “The Web will become the lesser online medium for commercial publications beginning in the second half of this decade.”
Next-generation portable devices — which are just now hitting store shelves — will have several built-in advantages over the Web as a publishing medium, he says. Chief among them:
* They’re push media. Third-wave online newspaper editions will be delivered to devices wirelessly and automatically each day (up to several times a day) instead of relying on the user to fetch the news one page at a time. Even the most successful online newspaper, The New York Times on the Web, sees the average user stop by only 3.6 days a month, according to the Times’ latest stats.
* Prospects for advertising are more favorable. On the Web, publishers face a bottomless advertising hole with ads that are noisy, distracting and ignored. On a mobile device, newspaper editions can be formatted in a graphical layout that locks in a limited amount of display ad space, commanding premium rates.
* For the most part, the Web requires us to be tethered to a PC or laptop. Not so online publishing for mobile devices. We’re a mobile society, and we’d like to take our digital news with us.
The coming mobile revolution will require newsrooms to undergo a sea change in strategic thinking.
“Eight years ago, when you talked about online publishing, the mission for online news publishers was to use any combination of software and online technologies to promulgate the newspaper’s mission,” Crosbie says in a phone interview. “Since then, those efforts have calcified so that online publishing now means Web publishing. Newspapers have got to stop the tunnel vision and go back to original concept: Online publishing is the Web plus many other things.”
Of course, things have moved on in the five years since that article was written. RSS feeds have made the point about push vs pull redundant. The rise of mobile phones with half decent screens and the arrival of handheld gaming devices with internet access both mean that accessing the web no longer requires anyone to be tethered to anything.
However, the point about advertising display and layout of content remains valid half a decade on. This is important because the big problem for newspapers is plugging the gap between falling offline revenues and much smaller – though growing – online revenues. Perhaps the Kindle is another faltering step towards a device that will square that particular circle.
That said, the model for newspapers on the Kindle is not the answer. I can get the New York Times free through my Nokia’s web browser. Why would I pay to read it on a slightly bigger screen?
Depending on your point of view convergence means one of two things in journalism:
1) If you’re a journalist committed to using online to fulfil our sacred mission to explain, then it’s a chance to use all media platforms to tell a story, combining the expertise of writers, photographers and video journalists.
2) If you’re a media owner, it’s a chance to cut costs by making bags of journos redundant and loading extra workload onto the survivors so, as well as putting out tired, unimaginative papers (or programmes), they can pump out tired, unimaginative, low-quality video.
The problem with Route 2 is that Media Owner’s Online Property will then be filled with tired, unimaginative items that will die alone in the dark like all the other tired, unimaginative bits of content shoveled online by Media Owners’ Online Properties. And the readers will continue their long, slow (or long, fast) migration away from mainstream media.
But this is a good thing for the future of journalism.
Why? I’m beginning to notice that as many (but not all) news organisations undergo “convergence” (of the second kind, natch) the pioneers – the innovators who adopted online early – are being elbowed aside.
Why is this good? It means that the far-sighted journalists are being set free from the constraints of hide-bound employers – many set free with redundo cash in their wallets. The hope is that groups of them will come together and explore the models that will drive journalism forward in ways that are infinitely more fruitful than the “hey, when you’ve finished your shift, let’s do a vodcast” model.
This from Popbitch:
Rumours abound that the print version of the NME is to be closed, leaving the 55-year-old music paper as a web-only operation. Time for NME.com to launch some more eye-catching stunts like their campaign to “right a historic wrong” by getting the Sex Pistols’ re-released God Save the Queen to number one. It entered the charts at… number 42.
Interesting to see if this is true. (EDIT: It seems this is NOT true. As you will see from the comment from Anna Gawan below, the Popbitch homepage is carrying a comprehensive apology for the above.) It would be a desperate measure. While the New Musical Express would lose printing and distribution costs it would also lose print ad rates, which are only – ooh- a gazillion times higher than online ones.
Having said that, what’s the future for a print publication covering the music business? Must be a bummer being a product in a struggling industry which focuses on a dying industry.
After years of being dreadful, Scotland’s Daily Record has had a much-needed redesign.
My first impression is that the Record now has most of the features a half-decent news site needs but in the wrong places.
Essentially, the Record team have missed the secret truth: only the article page matters. If you have cool ideas, put them there.
Their homepage is a great improvement. But the homepage is relatively unimportant.
In terms of traffic, the article pages are where the action is. And I have to say they’ve ticked some impressive boxes there: rating articles; using tags (AKA themes or topics); lists of related articles; and links to Digg and Delicious at the end of articles (the average Record user will never bother with these but they are a clever way of boosting traffic and search engine ranking).
They’ve missed some key tricks, though. The big one is having comments on each story. Instead, they’ve gone for a very patchy approach with this only being offered on a few. (Unbelievably there is no opportunity to comment on Jim Traynor’s football column. Given that he hosts a BBC phone-in, that’s an odd decision) Now, this may be a trial phase but this feature is an industry standard and a very effective way of multiplying traffic and tying in readers – if used extensively.
Instead, the Record are pushing forums (or fora, if we’re being pedantic). The ones I checked made the Marie Celeste look crowded.
Also, their use of tags is cursory. To maximise the number of people reading each article, stories should have multiple tags, not one or two.
Another flaw: their use of puffs to promote other content through the site is poor. Also, the stories themselves are very flat, with no use of bold or itals to lift them. There appear to be few pictures or videos to lift the text.
Finally, they have some brilliant features like lists of “most read” or “most emailed” stories but have hidden them very well in section pages. These should be prominent items on the article page.
(On a positive note: thumbs up to my pal John McKie for name-checking me in his column on the Georgia v Scotland debacle:
My Hibee mate Stewart texted me midway through: “If you dress like Jambos, you play like Jambos.”
Fame at last.)
I mentioned in my last post the need for many voices in the debate on the future of journalism. The latest contribution comes from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. As he’s made what I believe is referred to as “an shedload of filthy lucre” from selling content, Mr Adams ‘s views are particularly interesting.
His opinion of newspapers? They’re a’ fecked. And it’s the mobile that will kill them. Adams does think there will be some newspapers and some professional journalists.
But not many.
Henry Blodget at the Internet Outsider has done some sums on the future of newspaper revenues and costs. Needless to say he paints a less than rosy picture. But, for a journalist, the most worrying aspect is this nugget:
Do you know why [newspapers are] screwed? It’s actually not the cost of paper, ink, trucks, printing plants, and other physical distribution expenses. Rather, it’s the cost of content creation.
Memo to hacks everywhere: when he says “cost of content creation”, he means “your salary”.
His calculations are solid and his assumptions valid. With very very few exceptions, online ad revenues generated by pieces of online content do not cover the cost of creating that content. That means when offline revenues fall (and fall they will), you’re – to use Blodget’s pithy phrase – “screwed”.
So what to do?
Hope current online ad revenues for news organistions increase enough to match offline ones? If you’re hoping like that, hope me a solid gold, eco-friendly Lamborghini Countach, the results will be the same.
Charge for content? In my experience this guarantees such a small audience that articles generate less revenue than if they were free and attracting ad revenue. Don’t just take my word for it. Ask the Noo Yoik Times.
Get a job stacking shelves and be a journalist part-time? To hear some people tell it, this is the future of journalism – amateur enthusiasts sleuthing through local issues, posting stories for prestige. There is a problem with this and not many people will thank me for pointing this out: the ability to collect information, sort it in a coherent way, present it an intelligent fashion that is entertaining, grammatical and spelled correctly is restricted to a very small segment of the population – and not enough journalists.
Amid all the (justified) excitement about blogging it is worth remembering that the vast majority of news-related blogs link to stories by professional journalists. So, after the economic meltdown of mass media, who will write the original stories for others to link to? Quis blogodiet ipsos blogodes?
The reader demand is clearly for quality journalism. Who will produce this if there are no longer professional reporters? The role of bloggers, citizen journalists and user-generated content is assured. But the current online economic models have no place for full-time experts who want to make a living out of content creation.
I’m having an “ain’t technology marvellous” moment – much like a drunken uncle in the 80s suddenly discovering VCRs.
The cause of this is that I am updating my blog while on holiday. (Despite this, I do have lots of mates, some of whom are not on Facebook.)
I’m not doing this from a cybercafe or from a borrowed PC or from my laptop via a wifi connection. I’m posting from my Nokia E61.
I know this does not put me at the cutting edge but it has made me think of an incident in my pre-online career when I was caught in the middle of an example of technology being unmarvellous. Right on deadline a correspondent in a war zone had failed to file. I finally got hold of him. He was raging, almost in tears. His laptop wouldn’t work and he was at the mercy of the IT late man. It didn’t help that the corr hated computers and the IT late man hated journalists and computers. Eventually I intervened and the journo dictated his story to copytakers.
How odd it seems now that sending words from country to country nearly brought the news process to its knees, while now I can tap this entry effortlessly on my mobile.
(That is not my most dramatic “late copy” memory of that time. That honour belongs to the impressive Chris Stephen who answered a panicked demand for words by saying: “I’ll file as soon as I can but I’m being held at gunpoint.” He was effortlessly cool about it – so cool I could tell he was, while terrified, loving it. And he filed before deadline. What a pro.)
Much has been written about the death of the headline. Search engines, RSS feeds and news aggregators rely on short, descriptive, factual headlines that quickly convey the essence of the story to a busy reader.
But what about the whimsicial, humorous headers that provide our news with unique character, that define events through near-poetic wordplay. What of them? In this age of identical bland media products news organisations that want to differentiate themselves should not sacrifice uniqueness in the name of SEO. They should preserve clever headlines in some way – perhaps as sub-heads – while at the same time deploying the more utilitarian version.
But there is a third way. The headline that both boldly seizes the imagination and also tells the whole story in a few words. And it is here that I doff my cap to whoever wrote the bills at the Glasgow Daily Record on the night of 3 July. John Smeaton, aka the real John McClane, had given an interview about tackling one of scumbags who had attempted to carbomb Glasgow airport.
This is interesting enough in itself, but the bill (the poster outside the newsagent that tries to get you to buy the paper) took headline writing to new heights. It gripped the reader. It caught the breath. It told the whole story but left you wanting to read more.
The headline? Well, thanks to a picture taken by Februus, I can show you it in all its perfect beauty:
Wonderful, isn’t it? I think I’m going to cry.
Private Eye’s Street of Shame column used to be illustrated with a Willie Rushton cartoon of a classic Fleet Street dissolute journalist slumped in front of a computer with a bottle.
(Please excuse the gratuitous use at this point of a picture of Andrew Neil – he is actually irrelevant to this post – but one simply cannot mention the Eye without using that image.)
On the hack’s screen appeared the words: “New technology baffles pissed old hack.”
That hack’s had a pretty grim time of late. The fat years of long boozy lunches, unquestioned expenses and winging it have long gone. Bustling, smoke-filled newsrooms bursting with energy and profanity have been replaced by wannabe call centres staffed with clean, ambitious journalism graduates.
Now the whole industry seems on the point of collapse: circulations are tumbling nearly as fast as ad revenues. There’s no joy left in the craft. It seems to have become some kind of profession rather than the Epicureanist’s vocation it seemed to be back in the Good Old Days (™: any pissed old hack). But fear not, here’s the good news.
1) There will always be print: There are some kinds of content that are easier to read in the printed form. Ever tried to read anything over 1,000 words online? It’s like having your retina stir fried. Paper remains cheaper and more portable than any electronic device. Finally, print layouts are an effective way of presenting information in an easy-to-understand way. (None of this means, though, that the printing will be done by enormous presses with the product shipped round the country by trucks.)
2) There has never been greater demand for stories: More people than ever are consuming interesting stories. However, a vast number are not doing it in the ways they used to. Herein lies the revolution.
3) There will always be a need for journalistic skills: Someone has to write, film and picture the above stories. While user-generated content and citizen journalism offer fascinating opportunities, the ability to identify and filter information and then present it in an interesting, grammatical and ordered form needs a set of skills that are restricted to a tiny proportion of the general population – and far too few journalists.
4) There will always be a living to be made from journalism: OK, this is a bit of a leap of faith but trust me on this. The corollary of all the above is that there will be a commercial need for journalists – if they follow what the information market is doing.
The bad news: While there has never been a better time to be a journalist, there has never been a worse time to work for a newspaper. The future will be very kind to those who get it right and very harsh to those who don’t. If, as a journalist, your work is unique, interesting and relevant to your reader, congratulations, you will survive. If you understand that your audience is everything to you, that they are central to your work and that they provide input whose value cannot be calculated then you will thrive.
If, however, you’re waiting for your parent company’s commercial people to sort it all out while you keep on keeping on filling space like you always have done, then you’re extinct already. Remember the good times…
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