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For the NSA, we are the haystack

For the NSA, we are the haystack

Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at the Washington Post:

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

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Listen: This Week in Law

Listen: This Week in Law

When it comes to my own website, editorial calendars always give way to real life. I’m back with the latest in a series that would be more accurately called the “Podcast of the Month.” I really need to step it up with these, as I still have about 70 of them to which I listen with some regularity.

I’m featuring This Week In Law, a podcast covering technology, privacy, intellectual property and other areas of the law relevant to the internet and its users, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the most recent episode (embedded below), entitled Monkeys, Ducks and Unicorns, discusses the Aereo case as well as a recent Fourth Amendment case about cell phones, both decided by the Supreme Court in June.

The second reason I’m featuring This Week in Law is because I have probably listened to more hours of this podcast than any other. It got me through law school by educating, entertaining and inspiring me, even while I was studying far less interesting areas of the law. The voices of Denise Howell and Evan Brown, in a way that only happens on the internet, more familiar to me than some of my longest friends’ voices.

Subscribe to This Week In Law in iTunes, Pocket Casts or RSS.

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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.

  1. 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. ↩
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Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem

Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem

Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lamenting the recent removal of a public domain NASA clip he posted on the audio sharing site SoundCloud:

The real goofy bit is that before I started at EFF, I worked at SoundCloud. I actually uploaded this Apollo 13 clip, along with sounds from Apollo 11 and others, as part of a project to attract more historic and archival audio and really celebrate the public domain as a rich source of sounds.

Copyright law has been trending in favor of rights holders for a long time. That’s precisely why unlawful claims of copyright over public domain works are so despicable.

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Budgets and egos

Budgets and egos

Mark Headd, Philly’s first Chief Data Officer, who quit in spring of 2013, talking to Juliana Reyes of Technically Philly about why he resigned the post:

“A self-certifying website is a 20th century answer to the problem of tax deadbeats,” he wrote in an email. “An open data API is a 21st century answer to the problem. And that was my single biggest frustration during my time at the city — we were constantly using 20th century answers to problems that required a 21st century solution.”

I know from personal experience and talking with friends that this is a common complaint of tech-savvy government employees, especially leaders ostensibly authorized to do something about it but never truly empowered.

Budgets and egos slow technological (and many other forms of) progress to a glacial pace in many government settings.

I once spent valuable time collecting requirements for a piece of vital software, researching and recommending a reasonably priced and effective off-the-shelf solution.

Instead, someone decided to shoehorn the new use case into an aging enterprise software suite that had never seemed anything more than an ugly utilitarian GUI on top of a fancy backend of connected spreadsheets.

There was no line-item cost to the shoehorn solution, so it naturally looked like a winner when it came to budgeting. But the person-hours wasted reinventing the wheel easily outweighed the out-of-pocket cost of the solution I had proposed.

And aside from cost, persons in positions of power are often averse to being educated by twenty-somethings. That is especially true when it comes to technology, which most leaders know is important but few truly understand.

Budgets and egos.

Anyway, go read the rest of the article. It looks like Mr. Headd replies to comments, so it’s worth asking him any questions you might have.

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Journalism and tomatoes

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.

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AT&T, acquiring DirectTV, "vows" to stick to FCC's Open Internet rules for 3 years

AT&T, acquiring DirectTV, “vows” to stick to FCC’s Open Internet rules for 3 years

Nathan Mattise, reporting at Ars Technica:

The two companies will demonstrate “continued commitment for three years after closing to the FCC’s Open Internet protections established in 2010, irrespective of whether the FCC re-establishes such protections for other industry participants following the DC Circuit Court of Appeals vacating those rules.”

My first draft of this post was cynical and incredulous, as I am wont to be. But on second thought, it would behoove AT&T to stick to it’s “vow,” if for no other reason than to grease the skids for regulatory approval of the deal. Like I said about Moves and Facebook, it’s hard to blame a company for seeking growth.

While the FCC’s Open Internet rules have been struck down since they were first imposed in 2010, Comcast still abides by those rules pursuant to requirements imposed by the FCC on its purchase of NBCUniversal.

Now that those rules have been struck down, and we’re in limbo while a new rules proposal goes through its comment period, AT&T committing to the Comcast restrictions presumes the FCC will have similar concerns about their purchase of DirecTV. So the worst case scenario for AT&T is that the FCC achieves similar restrictions via the new rules, in which case AT&T is already prepared. And the best case scenario is that the new rules are more lenient than the 2010 rules, and AT&T is even happier.

In fact, the only losers here are consumers. While there is some question about whether this consolidation in the connectivity/content space will cause immediate market overlap and thus a significant reduction in local competition, it’s hard to see how things will get better for consumers as a result of this vertical integration over time.

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Gino Barrica on self-hating lawyers

Gino Barrica on self-hating lawyers

Gino Barrica, responding to yet another article1 cautioning against the pursuit of a law degree:

See, I’m not a self-hating lawyer. I’m not one of those who hang my head in shame when people ask what I do and I’m not someone who tells people to run for the hills when they tell me they’re considering law school. Yes, I’m up to my ears in debt. But, I’m also full of pride.

Gino is a friend and classmate of mine from Temple Law and someone who, I happen to know, is more intelligent than most people. While I plan on eventually giving my own experience with the bar exam the long-form treatment it deserves, I would like to, as lawyers like to say, incorporate by reference all of Gino’s thoughts on the value of a law degree to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

  1. No, I didn’t include a link to the article to which Gino’s post responds. That is partially because Gino links to it and I want you to read his post and partially because I don’t want to give it any SEO help. The further down in the search results such “Abandon all hope…” articles are, the better. ↩

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The true Julian Assange

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.

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Condoleezza Rice backs out of Rutgers commencement

Condoleezza Rice backs out of Rutgers commencement

The Associated Press reports:

The school’s board of governors had voted to pay $35,000 to the former secretary of state under President George W. Bush and national security adviser for her appearance at the May 18 ceremony.

Any question involving money, and therefore just about any question at all, boils down at some point to supply and demand. I understand schools want to attract high-profile commencement speakers. But the fact that Rutgers would offer, and Rice would accept, $35,000, to speak for less than an hour, is shameful.

Schools should not be willing to supply so much money, and speakers, often wealthy, should not demand it. For a more thorough treatment of this topic, read the excellent 2011 essay “Commencement Cash Cow” by Pablo Eisenberg at InsideHigherEd.

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Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt Out

Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt Out

Janet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet:

The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, the barriers for exit are high. This leaves users and consumers with no real choice nor a voice to express our concerns.

It’s a fascinating article.

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Philadelphia School District releases budget data

Philadelphia School District releases budget data

Public entities don’t often have the budget needed to attract top talent from the private sector. But exposing data to public manipulation and scrutiny, aside from fulfilling a duty of transparency too often ignored, allows anyone interested in displaying and improving their skills to bring their talents to bear on that data.

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Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne's blog

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne’s blog

Joel Gascoigne is a co-founder and the CEO of Buffer, the most powerful tool for sharing and scheduling stuff across multiple social networks. It’s a great service and one I use almost daily. But more importantly, Joel’s thoughtful blog is a great way to read about how he and his co-founder, Leo Widrich, run a successful startup.

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Gabriel García Márquez on life as literature

Gabriel García Márquez on life as literature

The recently deceased García Márquez, in an interview published in the winter 1981 issue of The Paris Review:

My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading.

I have never read his work (a sin of literary omission I will soon remedy), but in this story García Márquez perfectly described a sensation I have at least once a week. It’s why I started writing fiction again recently after a long drought.

Go read the rest of the interview, it’s great.

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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.