NYO's biggest media launch of 2010 doesn't technically go live until 2011. Can you guess which it is?
If you guessed Dan Abrams’ Mary Sue, you’re right! I kid.
This is not another post about Gawker or Felix Salmon. I promise. It’s about something far more dry: weighing the comparative value of technology and content
Deep within the Felix Salmon piece on Gawker Media (Wait! Keep reading. I don’t dwell.) he explores the viability of Gawker as a technology company, focusing primarily on its content management system. While he dismisses the notion after a couple of paragraphs—noting the technical problems Gawker has had in the past—there is a lot of wisdom in the question itself: Should media companies like Gawker be as focused on technology as they are on content? Yes, absolutely.
While this may seem like an obvious point, it has yet to really catch on. Investing in technology is expensive and since the business of online publishing is still unproven, publishers are reticent to dump too much cash—at least enough to develop and support products like a content management system—into their websites.
When they first made the foray into publishing online, many media companies—especially those with print antecedents—adopted, developed and grew proprietary content management systems that are no longer supported. They invested millions upon millions in maintaining these systems, yet in the end, since the knowledge and technology is now obsolete, have little to show for it.
Media companies should be hotbeds of development and experimentation. Where else is there such a fertile ground of interesting content and imaginative people? The problem is that these companies rarely invest enough in development—and if they do, they rarely if ever structure their development departments so that they can sell their services or products to others.
It seems clear that there is as much value these days in development, if not more, as there is in content. Publishers should be stockpiling development talent. (Someone buy Instapaper and hire Marco Arment now!)
Which brings me to The Times, who started licensing Press Engine in August (something Salmon mentions). NYT seems to be one of the first major publishers to invest deeply in development and innovation with an eye to creating products. Am I right? Are there others? Who am I missing?
Lessons news websites can take from the advent of ScribbleLive
ScribbleLive is an incredibly nimble and embeddable CMS that allows news sites to post any type of content, from Tweets to text messages to voicemail to user comments, in real-time. It replaces the article with a chronological flow of information, like a Twitter feed, but with more content diversity.
The discovery of ScribbleLive lead to a couple of thoughts.
I may be a little late to this party, but doesn’t this kill the article or at the very least, wound it? I’m all for narrative and good writing. There’s nothing like a well written 500-word piece of quality journalism. But maybe this is the medium showing us how a news story is going to look, not worrying about how it has.
This leads me to wondering why the best CMS ideas are being generated by private start-ups and not newspapers and other news sites? Shouldn’t news sites be on the forefront of CMS development? Each news website dumps tons of cash into their CMS and what do any of them have to show for it? Why isn’t this a revenue stream?
I think there are multiple reasons for this. But the one that has occurred to me today, the one that seems the most insidious, is that news website content management systems have always been built around the article, this static piece of content that was designed for print. It has always been the limiting factor in the development of news CMS’s. Perhaps its time that newspapers take a good look at ScribbleLive and think about what their CMS’s should be able to do. Perhaps its time that they move away from this article-based mode of thinking.
Let’s assume Denton is right and the Web needs to be more like TV. Would the ultimate conclusion of that assumption be less content on the page? I’m not convinced.
It’s interesting. I happen to agree in part with both sentiments: the Web needs to think of itself more like TV and media websites shouldn’t be constrained by a pageview model that forces them to cram 3-4 ads on each page and a flurry of links. But I don’t know if one follows from the other.
Let’s take the TV argument. The web should more like TV in that it should strive to be its own medium. In the same way that TV content evolved away from being stagings of radio plays or shortened movies, the web has to evolve away from being a souped up newspaper or an interactive magazine. Web content has to strive to be different, not to accommodate more pageviews, but to make it more compelling, to make the experience of experiencing content online qualitatively different from that of reading a newspaper or watching a TV show.
For Denton, this means eliminating clutter and making Gawker more “magazine-like,” as Choire would argue. While I agree that these design goals would improve the online reading experience, I don’t think this is how web content becomes more like TV. The only way to do this is to start thinking about the medium and how one creates a compelling reading experience that is impossible to replicate by other sites and unique to medium. While I’m sure Gawker will continue to be successful, I doubt we’re going to see that out of them anytime soon.
College students choose print over online. This is bad for college journalists
I do believe that it’s a matter of convenience and, to a degree, exclusivity—anyone can publish online, not everyone can publish a paper and have it distributed on every street corner of campus. But the one reason this article does not raise is this: Could it be that these university papers have yet to give students a compelling reason to read their online versions? Anecdotal evidence and my own experience suggests that university papers have been slow to adopt new technologies and invest in their online versions, let alone train their staff to think about and build interesting, unique news websites. Sound familiar? There’s a legacy issue here. There’s an inertia here that is not disrupted, as this article makes clear, by the ad declines of city newspapers. The business of printing college newspapers is good. This is problematic when it means college journalists are not being prepared for the challenges of working at a modern newspaper.
[Thanks for the link, Newzed.]
The Virtual Assignment Desk and The Launch of the Local East Village
Today The Local East Village launches. That makes it a big day for me and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. And for Studio 20, which developed for the launch a new piece of software: the Virtual Assignment Desk.
Interestingly, software, not news, steals the day.
Also, it occurs to me that something that is so ambitious should look more ambitious. For all of its noble intentions and years of development, the Local East Village looks like just another blog. I don’t say this to undermine their accomplishment. It goes without saying that what they have achieved is incredibly noteworthy. But I think the ordinariness of the blog’s design points to a gaping hole in how universities structure their journalism program and what they prioritize. Information architecture and design should be a part of the curriculum, as well as development and reportage. Perhaps the LEV will focus more on design in later iterations. I hope so.
(Source: soupsoup)
Excellent summary of how ‘effed online analytics is. It’s a parade of naked emperors riding in clown cars.
Th[e] article was adapted from “Chaos Online: How a Faulty Metrics Affect Digital Journalism,” a report written by Graves, John Kelly, and Marissa Gluck. It was commissioned by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and funding for the research was provided by Mary Graham, a member of the school’s Board of Visitors. The full report is available at www.journalism.columbia.edu/onlinedata.
(via 2105)
It’s funny. Working online for news websites, I just assumed that the metrics for web traffic would eventually be standardized—it would just work itself out, in true capitalist fashion. In the meantime, it’s almost encouraged that you exploit the difference in numbers, even if ultimately, the discrepancies must hurt online news sites’ relationships with advertisers. I never gave much thought that the nature of web data itself made standardization near impossible. Not only that, I didn’t give much thought to how the vagueries of web metrics were actually undermining the business of news production. In retrospect, this seems obvious. Finally, something useful has come out of a journalism school! There’s hope for us all.
Long-form journalism and how to guard it against the induced ADD of the Internet is a hot topic recently. The Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson is the latest to tackle it. (He isn’t the first and won’t be the last.) His piece focuses on sites like the one above, Longform.org, that aggregate, promote and facilitate the reading of the feature-length articles most commonly found in magazines and the weekend editions of newspapers.
With a minimalist’s confidence, LF.org aggregates the best in long-form journalist, paying little heed to when something was published, just whether or not it’s worth your time. The site is easy to look at and fun to browse. And using something called Instapaper, it allows you to bookmark whatever strikes your fancy in whatever medium (except for paper!) you choose.
By focusing on sites like Longform.org, however, Johnson focuses on only one aspect of the problem (if you believe that there is a problem): finding it. Namely, Johnson argues that long-form pieces can be saved by good aggregation. To put his money where his mouth, Johnson started a Twitter feed called “IfYouOnly” to highlight one story a day that you should read.
What long-form journalism suffers from online is not only that it has a short shelf life, but that it doesn’t have its own design. Individualizing long-form journalism has never been the web’s priority. When space is infinite, a 500-word piece is no different from a 4,000-word piece. Each is put into the same cookie-cutter template.
For long-form journalism to survive online, this needs to change.
Editorial sites must focus more on the reading experience. Each feature-length story needs to be individualized and treated with the same care and thoughtfulness that they are in print. (Advancements in CSS/jquery/HTML make this possible to do in a short period of time.) If editorial sites would just respect their long-form content a bit more, invest more time in the design and layout of individual articles, invest more time in creating an unique experience for their readers, they would create a product, and likewise a brand, that will be remembered.
USA Today goes vertical: Reorganizes newsroom around web, dumping print buckets
“We have to go where the audience is,” USA Today Editor John Hillkirk told the AP. “If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we’ve got to be there with the content they want, when they want it.”
I just love these vintage covers [thanks CapitalNewYork and brainpicker]. Looking at them, it occurred to me that there are currently two types in the media industry: those that look at these covers and lament a golden age of magazine design and innovation that has long since passed and those that look at these covers and are inspired by its return, just in a different medium. I’d like to count myself part of the latter.
[Vanity Fair cover by Jean Carlu in 1930.]
