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Web natives and journalism

Thursday | May 8, 2008 | 5:37 pm  

The Journalism Iconoclast » Web natives need to lead Web operations: “I mean honestly would you stick a bunch of Web people with little print experience in charge of a print publication? I guess if you wanted to fail you might consider that a viable option.

Let’s be real here: Web operations can only thrive when they are staffed by people who get the Web and enjoy using the Web. These are people who categorically prefer the Web over print publications. If this doesn’t describe your journalism organization, then you are doing something wrong.”

He gets my +1

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management, MarsDraft

What is Web 2.0 and why do (some) journalists fear it?

Friday | April 25, 2008 | 5:50 pm  

I thought the guys from the O’Reilly Insight Group did a really good job of summing up what “Web 2.0″ is:

• Listening - To your customers, readers, partners, etc.
• Participation - Joining into the conversations and relationships that those folks are having, and letting them participate in your conversations and relationships.
• Transparency - Opening yourself up, being honest about mistakes
• Ongoing inquiry - Continually asking your audience about what they’re looking for from you, ways to improve, etc.

Don’t those four points sound an awful lot like things that are core to journalism?

• Listening - To your sources, to your readers.
• Participation - Providing information to create better participants in a democracy. Participating in the society via an Op/Ed page.
• Transparency - Isn’t it every journalist’s goal to make as much of the public and private sectors transparent to the community they serve?
• Ongoing inquiry - Beat reporting, investigative journalism. We are an industry of ongoing inquiries.

So if “Web 2.0″ and journalism are so similar, then why are so many journalists afraid or hostile toward “2.0″ features on their Web site and “2.0″ sites in general?

I don’t have an answer, and the Web doesn’t need any more speculation, so I’ll just put that question out there and hope some smarter folks have answers.

Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management, Technology

My favorite Web development laws

Saturday | February 9, 2008 | 7:25 am  

From the great list over at Blue Flavor:

Lister’s Law

People under time pressure don’t think faster.

Hofstadter’s Law

A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Management, Programming

For journalists, it’s less about business, more about audience

Monday | February 4, 2008 | 1:35 pm  

Yelvington is talking about a bias against the business side of journalism and a class called Business and Future of Journalism.

I would tend to agree that too many members of the Fourth Estate are phobic when it comes to dirty words like: profit, return on investment, and revenue.

I applaud the idea behind teaching more journalists more about the business side. Why wouldn’t you want to know everything there is to know about your profession — at the very least it’d make it easier for you to argue a point to management.

If you can’t know it all, know your audience

If you don’t have the time or the interest to learn about everything, then the most important thing for aspiring and practicing journalists to learn about is the audience.

In my limited travels it strikes me that a lot of journalists either don’t know, or don’t care about the audience research being conducted. The “don’t know” camp can be helped, but the “don’t care” camp scares me. If we’re not here to write, shoot, design and code for our audience… then who are we doing it for?

If you write a perfectly crafted, exquisitely shot and artfully arranged multi-part public service piece about your local government abusing it’s power but no one read it, did you every really serve the public?

(Snarky comment: If we’re not serving the public, and we’re not making money then what are we doing?)

Obviously the business of journalism can’t be summed up as “get lots of readers, get lots of page views” — niche products, advertiser interest and the long tail all serve to make it more complex than that.

However, if you can only know one thing shouldn’t every journalist in a newsroom know about their audience?

In my twisted brain it’s easier to express the idea in code:

while profit > 0:
    knowledge = conduct_user_research()
    newspaper.staff.improve(based_on=knowledge)
    profit = newspaper.revenue - newspaper.cost
 
    if profit = None or knowledge = None:
        raise GameOverMan

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management

My day is wide

Tuesday | November 13, 2007 | 2:41 pm  

Just read a great post on the differences between being a programming and being a manager of programmers.

My days have become increasingly wide, I’d like to think my developers days are deeper.

And while I do long for days full of implementation details, there are also days, like today, that it’d be nice not to worry about Unix permissioning schemes.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Management, Technology

Human nature vs. good business sense

Tuesday | October 2, 2007 | 9:40 pm  

I was home sick the other day with an awful sinus headache and stomach flu.

About the only bright side was that I got to watch Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

I thought to myself, “Boy this is a really great show. It’s a shame they never put it on NBC in the summer as was rumored on the Internet.”

Then I caught myself. Here I am enjoying a fine, fine television show — the visual and dramatic equivalent of a fine bourbon) or scotch — and yet I somehow think it’s a shame it wasn’t put on an over-the-air network for mass consumption.

Which got me wondering — does human nature, at its very core, conflict with what is sometimes good business sense?

Humans are social animals. It’s one of the characteristics of our species the enables us to do so much good, and harm.

Allow me to list some common business idioms that fit within that framework:

• Grow a larger audience

• Add more employees

• Add more clients

• Attract more investors

And yet there are plenty of times and plenty of businesses that could probably have been better served by:

• Focusing on a tight, niche audience

• Keeping the same number of staff and enabling them to work smarter/harder

• Keeping the same number of clients and improving quality or revenue-per-client

• Stayed self-funded, or not gone public and avoided the associated detrimental market pressures that come with those “growth” routes.

Nothing terribly insightful here, I suppose.

Just got me wondering if that primal instinct to grow/expand our social network — even cloaked in a business setting — leads us to judge the first set of points as “sexy” and the others as “wimpy.”

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Management

Great quote on philosophy

Monday | October 1, 2007 | 5:49 pm  

Trust your passions less, your reasons more, and your limits most.

From Prof. Daniel Robinson, Oxford University, via an NPR podcast.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Management

Whither the newspaper?

Monday | March 7, 2005 | 10:33 am  

Acts of Volition has some great commentary, by way of Peter Rukavina about how the decentralized nature of the Web affects our thinking and culture.

What struck me is that newspapers have traditionally been a force for centralization.

Newspapers go out into the community — be it literal, like Atlanta, or figurative, like pop music — and gather news and information from disperate sources.

Then they bring it back, in the old days to one central building — though now it may be a bureau, write it up and push it back out to readers.

So, in the future, as our culture adapts to one where media consumers are also media producers, what’s the future of newspapers — or any information collecting/dissemenating institution for that matter.

I don’t have the answer, it’s a question that’s always a background process running in my head.

One thing I do know: power in the hands of consumers has almost always proven to be a good thing in just about any industry.

But the product we peddle one that’s so vital and important to the health of a democracy, information.

I may not know the answer, but I’m optimistic that I’ll like the outcome.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management

It’s stupid, on purpose

Friday | February 20, 2004 | 3:31 pm  

Anyone who works in the Internet biz, especially us newspaper types, should check out World of Ends.

This is a great article by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, that really gets at what the Internet is and what stupid (not in a good way) mistakes companies keep making.

One that’s particularly applicable to the online newspaper industry is this:

Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages — their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we’re trying to read — will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Web’s architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say “Hi! We don’t understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you.”

I’ve talked before about how easy it is for your users to leave your site. One click of the close button and… poof!

It takes more effort to take the newspaper and drop it on a stack, that I’ll recycle once it falls on my fiancee and I hear her cries for help, than it does to close a browser window.

It’s about the users, stupid!

Give them what they want, when they want, how they want. Whatever your business model, this is the key to success.

For the newspaper business, happy users means more return visits, users who are more likely to pay attention to ads (if they’re ads that users want, when they want them, and how they want them…), which means more revenue.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Management, Technology, Web design

News industry should donate to open source projects

Tuesday | December 23, 2003 | 2:36 pm  

While the discussion on XUL vs. XAML has quieted down a bit, I think it’s worth bringing the issue to the attention of the news industry.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever be in the business of making “news applications” with either XUL or XAML — the Web site seems a perfectly good way to do that, for now.

But the discussion should serve as a wake-up call for the news industry. Micrsoft has a very public policy of “embrace and extend” — the trick being that extend means “make proprietary.”

As an industry we’ve had, essentially, open access to our audience. If you can read, and you’ve got $.50 you can pick up our print product, and even now if you’ve got an ISP and a browser you can read our Web product.

But Micrsoft’s relentess march toward “embrace and extend” threatens a vital factor of the news industry’s success — open access to the audience.

Here’s a what if:

1. What if XAML/XUL applications become the way of reading news online (substitute XAML for any other technology you like)?
2. What if Microsoft makes XAML proprietary?
3. What if the browser market remains the same, with Microsoft controlling virtually 90% of the browsers?

The once-freely-accessible audience may now come with a Microsoft license-fee price.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look like a pretty picture.

What can we do?

• Can we change Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” policy — the courts failed at that.
• Can we make sure Microsoft doesn’t charge licensing fees for (name of future publishing technology here)? See above.
• Can we change the browser market? There’s a lot more promise with this one.

Why don’t we, as an industry try donating money to open-source projects. Initally Mozilla would make a likely candidate.

With a strongly-supported alternative browser, that’s committed to open-source, the news industry would be in a better position to have guaranteed access to an audience.

But, it should go beyond the browser as well — change is constant on the Web and there’s a good chance we’ll be using something other than a browser, (for doubters, see RSS), in the future.

I’d say the industry should be donating to the Free Software Foundation and other groups that could further the goal of an openly-accessible audience.

The new industry needs to realize that the course of the software industry will affect our business, now and in the future, in the same way that the price of newsprint has for the past century.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Management, Web design