journalism
- If I say metrics are always necessary to make an informed editorial judgement, I omit the occasionally successful-despite-what-the-metrics-suggest, good-old-fashioned gut decision, and I’m not comfortable doing that. ↩
Aol dials up the stupid with 150 editorial layoffs
Aol dials up the stupid with 150 editorial layoffs
Brianna Royce, Editor in Chief of Massively, the MMORPG arm of popular gaming blog Joystiq, which is also going away, talking about Aol Corporate’s most recent stupidity:
I would like to be able to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and just decision that makes some sort of logical sense, but the reality is that our overlords’ decisions have always been unfathomable. I know more of what I know about corporate from reading tech and finance news than through my own job. We all suspected this was coming eventually a year ago when a VP whose name I don’t even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering, hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by… hacking our budget in half. There’s nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air.
Aol still depends, yes, depends on its dial-up revenue to survive. That is why these popular sites have been euthanized and at least 150 people laid off. Because Aol leadership, millionaires all, can’t figure out how to run their company.
Aol owns The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and at least a couple of other very successful blogs. There are people working there who know how to run a profitable blog. Is it executive hubris that prevents the brass from asking someone what the hell to do?
I hate to be morbid but thetruth is that some day relatively soon everyone willing to endure dial-up will be dead. What will Aol do then?
I don’t know, but more importantly, and infuriatingly when it means people lose their jobs, neither does anyone at Aol.
The ethics of reporting on the Sony hack
The ethics of reporting on the Sony hack
Emily Yoshida (@emilyyoshida), entertainment editor at The Verge, one of my favorite tech news sites, on the publication’s ongoing and deep contemplation of the ethics of reporting on unethically leaked information:
The contents of the leak are already public; they’re just not in a very user-friendly format until a news outlet decides to amplify a piece of it. Which means, one could argue, that the press is merely drawing lines of best fit through a dataset. It could also mean that the press is essentially finishing what the hackers started.
Perverting the Metric: The Role of Metrics in Editorial Strategy
HuffPo and BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti recently said in a long and fascinating interview by Felix Salmon published at Matter:
I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, particularly for a single metric, you end up finding that the best way to optimize for that metric ends up perverting the metric and making the metric mean the opposite of what it used to mean.
This reminded me of an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while about how best to approach digital editorial strategy: it requires an ability to wield metrics, vision and instinct in just the right proportions.
It’s something I’ve been a part of for my own tiny blog here, an arts and culture website I co-founded, and even a business journal’s web presence. I’ve learned a few important things from my experience with editorial strategy, and while none of them are particularly surprising or mysterious, I think writing them out will be helpful to myself and perhaps to others.
Contribute to the conversation
Metrics are a great place to begin a conversation about editorial strategy but a terrible way to end it. I’ve seen metrics substituted for thinking critically about editorial direction all over the web, and what’s worse is I’ve been in the room when some of those poor decisions were made and I failed to object. It’s not a mistake I’m proud of, nor one I would make again.
But it’s easy to criticize after the fact. True leadership demands urgency. Whenever metrics are the deciding factor in an editorial decision, someone is making a mistake and it’s your responsibility to tell them.
Be respectful when their name is closer to the top of the org-chart than yours, but be direct and back up your assertions with evidence. Even if you’re outranked by everyone else in the room, at worst, you’ll be ignored, and at best you’ll show initiative and concern for the publication’s success.
I’m not saying there is no place for metrics in editorial strategy. They should absolutely be involved in the decision-making process, but they should never be the sole ingredient. In other words, these days metrics are usually necessary1 but never sufficient to make an informed editorial judgement.
Reactive vs. critical thinking
Pure reactivity is the wrong way to use metrics, and looks something like this:
“Everyone clicks this type of story, so let’s do more of this type of story!"
Don’t use metrics to narrowly define editorial strategy. After all, an algorithm could do that with little or no human intervention (and, as I’ll discuss below, they often do). Popular topics don’t need much additional promotion. They surface organically and allow you to focus on promoting lesser-known work of equal quality. This is a powerful concept if you’re wiling to use it in your strategy sessions.
Use metrics as one factor in your strategy. After all, the numbers are way to read between your own lines and to learn what drives popular content beyond mere keywords. That looks something like this:
“Everyone clicks on this type of story. What about it, beyond the mere subject matter, makes it so appealing?"
One problem, many possible solutions
There are many reasons some content does more pageviews, higher time-on-page or lower bounce rates than other content. Here are some illustrations of the problem of a narrow band of popular topics getting the majority of attention, and some ways I have thought up and in some cases successfully implemented to solve the problem.
The “Top Post” Filter Bubble
Eli Pariser popularized the idea of the filter bubble, an explanation for how tailored web content reinforces viewpoints with which we already agree, and insulates us from alternative perspectives. Metrics are often used to do this on websites.
The most-read stories of the previous day might be featured prominently in the sidebar. This additional exposure gets them even more clicks, and even if the software causes articles older than one day to “age out” of the featured-posts box, it still severely limits the potential for featuring other articles.
This may be the problem at some sites: your digital publication doesn’t know how to surface its best content. Consider adding to popular posts some links to less popular but equally valuable content. This will combat the filter bubble and help expose readers to good stuff they may otherwise miss.
The Slideshow Site
Slideshows are a dangerous game. They are almost guaranteed to turn your steady daily traffic into a big spike. If even half your daily visitors go through even half a 20-slide show, you’re doing five times your usual traffic that day. If you’re not careful, you risk becoming known as the slideshow site, instead of the news site.
If you insist on building slideshows, use myriad internal links to point your slideshow viewers to your substantive content. Better yet, work with in-house or outside developers to automate internal links to archive pages. For example, if you run a site about New York, the first time the name “Michael Bloomberg” appears in an article, your content management system could auto-generate a link to a page listing all articles mentioning his name.
10 Things About Headlines You Have to Read to Believe
Sorry to mislead you, but I’m only to going to talk about one. Slideshows often have numbers in the headline by definition. That is one explanation for why they’re so popular. People like headlines with numbers, as a quick search for “numbers in headlines” will illustrate.
I don’t advocate making every article a list. In fact, that’s a terrible idea, at least for news sites. But it’s worth incorporating numbers into headlines where it doesn’t look forced. For example, instead of “CEOs cite multiple syngeries as key to upcoming merger,” try “3 reasons Hospital 1 and Hospital 2 are merging, straight from the CEOs.”
On-point but out of sight
Maybe topics clearly within your site’s wheelhouse don’t perform well, no matter how many headlines, reporters or A/B tested tweets you use to produce and market them. This may simply mean the audience for those topics is substantially smaller than your broader audience. Don’t wait for the audience to find you.
I had great success finding an audience for some very niche stories because I sought it out on Reddit, in web forums, in Google+ Communities, with Twitter hashtags and more. The idea is that there are groups of people who self-select for interest in topics otherwise lacking broad appeal. Those audiences are smaller, but they are also more engaged, so the time spent finding them is worth it.
These are just examples, and the problems differ from site to site. But I think they explain the value and the limits of metrics in evaluating and improving editorial strategy at digital publications.
Journalism and tomatoes
From a May 2013 editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review:
Perhaps journalism can learn from the mistakes of the food industry, which bred a perfectly red, flawless-looking tomato, giving the edge to looks over taste, since that’s what consumers were buying.
Redesigns focusing on side door web traffic will all be for naught if the product in that shiny new package languishes under clickbait headlines and SEO-heavy ledes.
The true Julian Assange
Andrew O’Hagan reads his essay Ghosting, about the failed ghostwriting project during which he got to know WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange as few do. The full text is also available at the link.
Om Malik on digital advertising
Om Malik on digital advertising
Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so.
I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if you have an auto-refresh (as many news sites do) and your average session duration is equal or nearly equal to that refresh interval.
Anyway, Mr. Malik always has safe advice for business owners and writers alike, so go read the rest of his article.
Down the aggregation rabbit hole
This began as a link post pointing to Joel Achenbach’s Washington Post blog entry Journalism is aggregation. But, like more and more link posts lately, it got away from me and merged into its own article.
Achenbach decides journalism is aggregation, and that’s okay. Or maybe he decides it’s not really aggregation, or that it’s at an acceptable point along the continuum between valueless aggregation and value-adding aggregation. I’m not actually sure he settled on a conclusion, and that’s okay, too.
Achenbach had reminded me of my recent post on the topic, which prompted the author of the post I was commenting about to leave me a nice comment of his own. (So meta!)
And then I found this post by Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab expressing some disappointment with Achenbach’s aforementioned lack of a conclusion, or more precisely paints his conclusion as a bit of backtracking. I’m not sure I agree with Benton’s take, but both men raise interesting points.
Some journalism is aggregation, but most good and all great journalism is more than mere aggregation. It’s a synthesis of the anecdotes, data, facts and perspectives of as many reliable sources as you can fit into your word limit. Right? That’s an accurate description of much of the best journalism I’ve read in the past year or two.
To me, pure aggregation on the web involves sharing a link and perhaps pairing it with an inflammatory or vapid comment. Sometimes, that’s actually fine with me. Twitter is a good example of that. But no one would call it journalism, even when journalists do it. That’s important to keep in mind, I think: not everything a journalist does online or off is, or is intended as, journalism.
Achenbach wrote about the interview process, which most journalists use to offer different perspectives on a piece of news from experts of different disciplines or schools of thought. Interviews, collecting the commentary of multiple sources, are an aggregation of those opinions. But that’s just one activity in the composite of activities which together compose an act of “journalism.” The result is an article in which, as Achenbach also says near the end of his post, the reporter has drawn on personal knowledge, research and experience beyond the interviews and facts aggregated.
Aggregation, then, is the collection and presentation of opinions or facts, adding little or no context. Journalism, I think, is an equation like this:
Journalism = aggregation + context
I want to know what you would add to, or remove from, that equation. I realize that aggregation on the web generally, and as an issue in digital journalism and publishing specifically, predates my humble blog posts on the topic, but I want to explore it with other interested folks.
Margaret Sullivan takes her NYT colleagues to task like it's her job, because it is
Margaret Sullivan takes her NYT colleagues to task like it’s her job, because it is
Margaret Sullivan is Public Editor at the New York Times. She is tasked with taking the Times to task when it falls short, overreaches or otherwise misses the mark.
And sometimes it does miss the mark, like when it failed to mention successful litigation by the Wall Street Journal which resulted in publication of Medicare data the Times used in crafting a recent feature story.
Sullivan’s candor and diligence are a service to the paper’s readers and reporters alike. Subscribe to her RSS feed here.
Jay Rosen on the "View from Somewhere"
Jay Rosen on the “View from Somewhere”
The quarter-billion-dollar news company Pierre Omidyar is founding will be fascinating: a digital-first journalism outfit with old media money behind it.
It’s an odd flip of the Jeff Bezos/Washington Post play, which involved a digital-first entrepreneur putting the same money as Omidyar, $250M, behind an old media organization.
If I had more free time, there would be a good article in there somewhere about what exactly it means to see that kind of money converging on the old/new media dichotomy from opposite directions.
But I don’t, so there won’t. For now, at least.
A new kind of freelance journalism
A new kind of freelance journalism
This is essentially journalism à la carte: Peter Jukes offered to continue live-tweeting the News of the World phone-hacking trial if the crowd would fund it. Interest was strong enough to do just that, and his Indiegogo funders ordered up some trial coverage, funded through Christmas.
He’s probably not the first and certainly not the last, but I predict this is just the beginning of a trend and this sort of thing will be far more common in the years to come.
Correction: This blog correctly uses the same title I gave this post to describe this long-form article. So, it’s not so new, after all.
FBI asks DOJ to investigate source of Calderon leak to Al Jazeera
FBI asks DOJ to investigate source of Calderon leak to Al Jazeera
It could be that I’m new to the journalism industry and only recently interested in its developments. But it seems to me as if journalism and law are converging like never before, and on an international stage.
While Al Jazeera America is unlikely to face direct legal action, the American arm of the Qatari news network only launched in August 2013. It’s new, and if its current sources face investigation and potential federal charges, prospective sources may decide not to become sources at all.
Jim Roberts joins Mashable as executive editor, chief content officer
Jim Roberts joins Mashable as executive editor, chief content officer
Jim Roberts on his new role at Mashable:
To some it might seem a bit of a departure. You might imagine a headline like: “Longtime New York Times and Reuters veteran forsakes legacy media for digital upstart.”
Interesting. Roberts is suddenly a living metaphor for the future.
Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience
Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience
That’s a shame. This image alone illustrates the design strides made by the Next team (the cancelled redesign is on the right).
The Reuters iOS app is better than that of Associated Press, for what it’s worth.
NYT managing editor: Guardian story on Israel and N.S.A. Is Not 'Surprising' Enough to Cover
NYT managing editor: Guardian story on Israel and N.S.A. Is Not ‘Surprising’ Enough to Cover
New York Times news editor Dean Baquet suffered a serious lapse in editorial judgment. I mean, he can’t be serious, can he?
Daniel Victor of the New York Times shows us how to be a reporter even on Twitter
Daniel Victor of the New York Times shows us how to be a reporter even on Twitter
This is a great story precisely because Victor wasn’t writing a blog post about how to properly commit journalism on Twitter, he was properly committing journalism on Twitter.
How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room
How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room
Eliot Higgins’ work is a prime example of how the Internet and user generated content are changing journalism on a molecular level.
What a fascinating read.
Legislative failure to define essential terms
Legislative failure to define essential terms
The definition of terms essential to the application of a law is the most basic requirement for competent lawmaking.
Sometimes one or more terms are appropriately defined in an open way, to provide flexibility in the application of a law. This is not one of one laws. The shield law is meant to protect reporters, so defining what exactly a reporter is should be done wi surgical precision.
I am open to arguing how broad or narrow the definition of journalist should be in a shield law, but that conversation but result in a specific outcome that is codified in the new law.
It is impossible to have that discussion and achieve that specific codification when legislators shirk their fundamental responsibility.
As Morgan Weiland of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in the article linked above, Senators Feinstein and Durbin, and all the legislators who contributed to the poorly-drafted law, have failed in their duty to their constituents and the rest of our country. Hopefully a competent legislator will step in to correct their shortcomings as the law progresses.
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz: Open source, anonymous tips
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz: Open source, anonymous tips
There is plenty of Google news today coming out of their annual I/O conference, but this looks far more important and big-picture, if it actually gets used.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News splitting into separate paywall sites
Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News splitting into separate paywall sites
Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan’s theory of the paywall suggests a local paper of high caliber can survive erecting a paywall.
Maybe he is right, but can two local papers survive?
It will be good to see the Inquirer and the Daily News broken out into their own websites, if only for the fact that they have very different voices. But, as Philly.com is currently an amalgam of the two, with its own original content as well, I’m curious to see what it will look like after the websites split.