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BASIC Principles of Online Journalism: C is for Community & Conversation (pt2: Conversation)

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:00:22 +0000

Continuing the final part of this series (part 1: Community is here) I look at conversation. I look at why conversation is becoming a form of publishing itself, why journalists need to be a part of that conversation, and a range of ways they can join in.

Conversation is publishing

In the first dotcom boom it used to be said that ‘Content is King‘. It’s not. As Cory Doctorow points out:

“If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

Jay Rosen, talking about journalism in 2004, noted that it was moving ‘from a lecture to a conversation‘.

And a year later Jeff Jarvis argued “Conversation is the kingdom“:

“In this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.”

Look closer, and you could argue that the distinctions between conversation and publishing in an online medium are being eroded. Everything that we say is recorded, linkable, distributable.

Conversation is publishing.

The one-to-many relationships built by print and broadcast media have been disrupted by the arrival of the internet. By mixing these with the one-to-one cultures of telephony it has created a new, emerging, culture of many-to-many relationships.

For a long time the most popular use of the internet has been email. For the net generation, that is being replaced by social networking and instant messaging. All demonstrate that people don’t want to passively consume content online – they want to use it, produce it, and exchange it.

When the Chinese earthquake (among others) happened, it was reported on social networking sites before news websites. The information moved very quickly from people talking about what was happening to them; to people talking about what was happening to their friends; to people talking about what was happening to their friends’ friends: conversation.

Meanwhile, communities formed to pass on and clarify information more efficiently than the news organisations (for example, translating accounts, mapping, and mashing up). An online journalist who ignores this is ignoring a fundamental element of their job.

Conversation and community are closely linked: any editorial plan involving one is flawed without consideration of the other. Conversation leads to community, but it’s difficult to have a conversation without a community to begin with. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

Blogs are a classic example of generating a community from a conversation. Individual posts can gather global traffic if they touch a nerve, as conversations spread well beyond their points of origin – and back again. But how do you maintain that community when the conversation ends? (Should you even try?)

Building a conversation out of a community is perhaps harder, and why news websites have not always been successful in their attempts to do so. It is like having a room full of people with shared interests but who are too shy to talk.

You need an ice breaker.

The Professional Conversationalist

An online journalist should be a mix of the ideal party guest and the ideal party host, taking part in – and stimulating – conversations in a number of ways:

Be involved in your communities, online and offline. Comment on blogs, post on forums, correct and update wikis, converse on Twitter, join and contribute to social network groups.
Open up your own work for others to contribute editorially: include an email address; allow comments. In particular, don’t structure your work as a dead end: present it as work in progress; ask questions and leave them unanswered; acknowledge gaps in your knowledge; invite contributions there and elsewhere.
Open your work up technically too if possible: make your content portable by providing an RSS feed; widgets users can place on their webpages; wikis for them to edit; or even raw data for mashups.
Not only that, but you must respond to those contributions: That means reading comments on your own work and responding to them, in the comments as well as in the occasional follow-up post. That means looking at who’s linking to your work and posting comments there, or linking to them in your own work with an acknowledgement.
You must show explicitly that you are part of the conversation, by linking to sources (who will in turn know that they are being quoted either through pingback or traffic)
And finally, most importantly: you must listen. That means reading blogs, forums and other media in their sector, and then starting from the beginning again: comment, respond, link, open up.

It’s a conversation loop:

As a journalist, doing all of these things has 4 significant advantages:

Your work will be informed by user contributions, and better for it
You'll be more likely to be 'there' when a story breaks - and to understand the context
As you talk about your work, and involve users in it, you will be distributing it as well. If your motivation is commercial, replace 'conversation' with 'distribution'. Nothing works better online.
Nobody likes a tourist. You'll be building the trust and social capital needed for other users to give you the information that you need - or to help you find it.

Without the help of your community, without an effort to engage in conversation, your work will be one-dimensional, as flat as the paper it used to be printed on. And the journalist who doesn't contribute to their communities and its conversations will look increasingly like Doctorow's sociopath. Not the kind of person people will want to talk to, or read.

Read the full BASIC Principles of Online Journalism series:

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10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers

Paul Bradshaw — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:00:19 +0000

The biggest problem for newspapers is not falling readerships, it is falling advertising revenue. It is the move from local monopolies to a global platform where competition is everywhere, and advertising less lucrative.

For all the talk of how journalists can get a grip on new media, there’s been far too little on how ad sales people can do the same. So here I present ten ways ad sales people (and their managers) can save their jobs.

1. Stop treating web ads as second class

The first and most important change is a structural one. While management enthuse about a digital future, the bottom line for most ad sales people is this: incentives are based around print ads; web ads are typically sold as add-ons, and much cheaper ones at that. When it comes to earning your wage and your bonus, web ads are simply not the priority.

If newspapers are serious about a multiplatform future, they need to look at ways to change incentive structures to better reward web ad sales.

And part of this means making web ads more lucrative – because why would you put all your effort into selling a £50 banner ad when you could be selling a £500 half page ad?

2. Stop selling adverts on static pages

Most advertising on news websites still tends to take the shape of banners, sold against particular sections. This is the ad equivalent of shovelware or brochureware.

But the web is not a brochure: it is dynamic, constantly updated, and flexible. So why not drop the print mindset, and start selling against some of the following:

how about a slot against the ‘most popular’ story of that minute (if it helps, think of it as the equivalent as the front page ad), second most popular, and so on (you could even auction these slots in the same way as Google does with AdWords).
How about a slot next to breaking news? (Obviously you would put provisions into place to prevent embarrassing juxtapositions).
Or exclusives? (If they still exist)
Or personalised services such as SMS alerts on election results, school closings or local events (as the Cincinnati Enquirer’s James Jackson mentions)?

3. Sell advertising against search terms

While we’re stealing ideas from Google, here’s another one: instead of selling an ad on a particular page, sell advertising that will be targeted at people who search for particular things.

As soon as someone searches for a particular term, that advert is served up to them. Simple.

Then, why not turn the usual process on its head and sell the print ad as an add-on? Even when people spend money on search marketing, they often back it up with print ads, and the stats on user behaviour suggest they should do more:

“Two-thirds (67%) of search engine users are driven to search by an offline channel, and 39% of those offline-influenced search users ultimately make a purchase from the company that prompted their initial search. Moreover, it also shows television advertising to be the leading offline channel that drives users to search (37%).”

4. Give ad sales people access to the internet

Incredibly, many ad sales people are not allowed access to the internet at work. This amazes me. What happens when a client calls to ask about their online ad? Do they have to put them on hold while they find a computer? What happens when a client mentions a website they’d like to imitate? What happens when a client uses a web 2.0 buzzword that the ad sales person needs to quickly look up?

Most of all, what happens if an ad sales person is expected to sell online advertising, but has never used the internet and doesn’t understand its possibilities?

If this is your future direction, it helps if the place where most of your money comes from knows something about it…

Especially when they have access to online reports which say local newspaper websites are one of the most trusted places for advertising.

5. Enable the long tail of small businesses to advertise without you doing it for them

Online advertising means that small businesses who previously were not typical print or broadcast advertisers can now afford to advertise.

In other words, there is a potential long tail of small advertisers that could prove a significant source of new revenue.

Google’s own AdSense is one (particularly successful) example of this; Rick Waghorn‘s Addiply is another (built in response to his frustrations with AdSense).

Many newspaper websites carry AdSense adverts, but if a small operation like Waghorn’s can build a service to allow local businesses to buy and place their own advertising, why aren’t major publishers? Why give more money to Google? Why ask ad sales people to spend hours cold-calling for small web ads when you can cut out the middleman and focus your ad sales team on more creative work, like…

6. Think beyond the banner: get creative about online advertising

The web is not a one-way medium. We expect interactivity from a modern news website – comments, polls, bookmarking, chat – so why do we not extend this capability to the advertising? Here are some simple ideas:

How about letting users work out their body mass index as part of an ad for a health club?
How about selling that cute little widget to the health club website as well? Or showing them how to allow users to embed it on their own sites?
How about allowing users to email an ad to a friend at a click?
How about creating a branded game for the client – again, that can go on their own website too.
How about a mobile-based weekly dining-and-entertainment advertorial touted as a roundup of things to do offered as part of a joint print/online promotional package for bars and restaurants.

If an ad sales person can pitch ideas like that to a client, they may be more successful. And they can charge more too.

Remembering that many businesses have websites too is key here – an advert can be sold twice: once on the news site, again as a piece of content on the client’s site.

As web readers become increasingly banner-blind, and CPMs/CPAs/etc. less reliable, standing out from the crowd becomes increasingly important.

7. Think about vouchers/coupons

This will not be new to readers in the US, where coupons are a big part of newspaper advertising. In the UK, however, what are better known as vouchers don’t seem to have the same importance in newspaper advertising, and I’m not sure why (if anyone can enlighten me, please do).

Vouchers online, however, are a power in themselves, with dozens of sites dedicated to simply passing on voucher codes. As a result, they can not only be a great way of driving business to advertisers, but also traffic through your site.

One publisher took this idea further at DeliveringQC.com (background in this report (PDF), p39), while the Tampa Bay Tribune took the idea mobile with XtraCoupons.mobi (background here):

“One of the biggest drivers of revenue for the [parent] mobile site has been the sales staff themselves. Media General made extra efforts to train ad sales reps to sell the mobile, including arming reps with demonstrations, PowerPoint presentations and other sales collateral.”

8. Sell advertising aimed at the non-local market

Your online audience is different to your print audience: typically only a third of local newspaper website users will be readers of the newspaper; another third will be local non-readers; and a further third will not be local.

That means you have a new market for ads, and therefore new clients you can pitch to.

The most obvious is to sell ads to local hotels, resorts and attractions for those people who read their old local paper and occasionally pop back for a break (most obvious places: sports pages; nostalgia features).

This also works the other way: with non-print readers you can create non-print products: take the old sponsored print supplement idea and do it online. Create a service. Build a platform. Do something with multimedia…

9. Sell video ads, as well as the production of video content

Video has enormous potential as a source of ad revenue – not just in terms of traditional ‘spots’ at the start of some video editorial, but as content in itself.

The drop in the cost of producing such video means that there is a new potential market for not only selling video ads, but selling the production of that video itself (and of course production of video generally). Small businesses who would otherwise not have considered video can now afford it.

Newspapers are starting to build experience in video. Production standards for web video are not expected to be as high as broadcast – a simple ‘video diary’ format can be filmed cheaply – and there’s the rub: on the web, production is incidental, but a good idea and good content is key, and newspapers could offer both.

The idea doesn’t stop at video: the NAA reports of TBO.com’s mobile operations:

“sales and online staffs are also selling services to help local businesses build their own mobile advertising and marketing campaigns. Using their experience and services in mobile, Media General is helping businesses build mobile microsites as well as offering text messaging services, which setting up and managing SMS campaigns. “That is proving to be where the major revenue is coming from,” [director of mobile Tim] Repsher says.”

10. Work in networks

We are in a networked era. A modern journalist should know how to team up with people outside their organisation, to connect with communities and readers…

Ad sales people should build the same skills.

On a basic organisational level this should obviously start with selling ads across titles, top-down – the most obvious being beer ads in football sections. That should be happening anyway. But it can equally work the other way – selling ads from one title across parts of the network, bottom-up.

Targeted advertising technologies make it possible to have ‘local’ advertising in newspapers 200 miles away from the client, if it’s relevant to the reader.

Then there’s looking outside your own organisation. A national newspaper executive recently told me they have an advertising and revenue share agreement with a number of blogs. Sounds like a sensible idea to me.

Bonus: don’t take digital growth for granted

Whisper it quietly: online ad sales by newspaper businesses are beginning to decline: “Upselling print advertisers is a losing business when those advertisers are fleeing print.”

Your ad sales staff may already be doing some of these things, or planning to – sing their praises here.

Person Rick Waghorn

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Something for the Weekend #9: create a Facebook app (and widgets) with Dapper

Paul Bradshaw — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:42:21 +0000

Every week I come across some web-based service that makes it possible to do in a few clicks what a year ago would have required anything from a day of fiddling to months of developer time. Today’s tool is one of a number offered by Dapper, a company which aims to “make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website.” The tool is the Facebook Appmaker.

It took me around 30 minutes to create a Facebook app which would allow Facebook users to display a feed from my blog. You first need to create a ‘Dapp‘ (basically a custom RSS feed), and then use the Facebook Appmaker to create an app based on that. It’s basically a lot of clicking, and copying and pasting according to the instructions.

Given the ease of use, this means there’s now no excuse for news organisations not to offer Facebook apps for any aspect of their news service – including pages which do not already have RSS feeds.

And here’s the real beauty – a basic app for your news feed is only the beginning.

Because you can create custom RSS feeds from anywhere, you can create custom apps that do any number of things. Similar to Yahoo! Pipes, you can create mashups – or ‘scrape’ web content from pages that do not offer RSS feeds (there’s even a Firefox extension that will detect RSS feeds created by other people for any site you’re on).

So, for example, although Google does not offer an RSS feed of searches (Google News and Blog Search do), I created this RSS feed for the search ‘new online magazine launches’ – and then a Facebook app based on that. You could combine any number of RSS feeds, and you can add filters too. From that you can create your own Facebook app, Flash widget, Google Gadget…

Stop there. Do you understand the implications of this? You are not just publishing content any more – you are creating a bespoke news service, built on content from elsewhere, using your journalistic knowledge and editorial experience. Do you know what you have done?

You’ve become Google News.

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Ten ways journalism has changed in the last ten years (Blogger’s Cut)

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:20:36 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with…

The rise of the amateur

The blogs of September 11; the camcorder images from the Asian tsunami; the mobile phone images of July 7; the Facebook pages of Virginia Tech. If you needed to read about any of these major events, you could do so – if you wished – without opening a newspaper or watching TV.

The spread of cheap camcorders and video- and photo-enabled mobile phones, coupled with blogs and the viral distribution of the internet made publishers realise they were not only competing with each other, but with the readers themselves. And when a big story broke in public, they needed to be in a position to harvest what became known as “user generated content”. Thankfully the NUJ’s suggestion of “witness contributions” didn’t catch on…

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

If a newspaper didn’t reach a particular newsagent, or viewers in the Cumbria region were experiencing difficulties, that simply wasn’t a journalist’s problem. Online, however, distribution has become part of a journalist’s job description, whether they realise it or not.

From your Facebook profile to the way you respond to comments on your blog, a journalist’s activity online has formed a key element in any news organisation’s distribution (although few have yet realised this). Meanwhile, newspaper webpages have come out in a rash of ‘Digg/Blog this’ buttons, and Facebook applications from the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated how important it’s become for newspapers to be where the reader is, rather than the other way around.

Just a click away

Amidst all the Web 2.0 hype it’s easy to forget the fundamental characteristic of news in the online era: everything is connected; and the reader is only a click or a search away from something else. This has created major opportunities and challenges for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists can now link to full documents, previous reports, and unedited material. On the other, so can the readers. Material culled from wire copy is more easily spotted; and, as Dan Rather discovered, holes in your story can be quickly highlighted.

And while doorstepping used to be between you and the Dear Departed’s family, its digital equivalent is so much more public. The game has been raised – but have news organisations responded?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader – and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper – or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

Mapping

2007 saw some real experimentation with mapping in UK newspapers: the Manchester Evening News mapped fatal shootings in Manchester, the Grantham Journal

tracked a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices.

But 2008 should mark the year mapping and geotagging gets serious. Leading the pack are Archant, with their much-awaited geotag-based website relaunches. Journalists, says Web Editor James Goffin, can now draw on a map when they submit a story, or supply postcodes. He argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.” The Telegraph launched the first stage of their dynamic Flash-based political map of Britain, while the BBC are using similar technologies for their proposed local website plans, which looks likely to further increase the pressures on regional publishers.

Hyperlocal, international

The internet has released news organisations from the limitations of physical distribution and broadcast – to the extent that news organisations have seen a new market for their old print products.

The Guardian, emboldened by statistics about website visitors, took its step across the Atlantic in 2003; The Times followed in 2006, and the BBC announced plans to sell advertising on its international site last year. And figures released last month showed visitors from outside the UK outnumbering the domestic audience for the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail.

Conversely, “hyperlocal” has entered the nomenclature of the news executive. Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news led to print equivalents, and likely extension to the group’s other newspapers.

Databases

The biggest untapped potential in journalism online is that of databases. So far we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations: ChicagoCrime.org famously drew information from a crime database onto a map of the area – and was followed by similar efforts at the LA Times and Washington Post (who added house sales and schools); The Herald Tribune, meanwhile, used databases in their coverage of how complaints against teachers were handled - readers could drill down to data in a specific school.

In the UK it’s The Telegraph leading the way, with football coverage that pulls up player statistics to rival ProZone, an A levels results map, and a recently unveiled political map that presents information on how local services ratings have improved or declined. Developments such as these have generated debate about whether journalists should be taught how to program. The conclusion seemed to be that it was easier to teach programmers how to do journalism.

Measurability

Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Multimedia

If the pen is mightier than the sword, what does that make a microphone, camcorder and laptop… in a wifi hotspot? Newspapers dabbled in podcasts in 2005, before really mucking in 2006 when video took off and print journalists started worrying for the first time about tea staining their teeth. Now print journalists are learning about white balance, and broadcast journalists are learning about local news. And everyone is waiting for an almighty fight.

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