The Modern Journalist

Book Review: Groundswell (Part 1)

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Note: Groundswell is a wonderful road map for how — and why — you should implement social technologies. This review both pulls out some pertinent facts that I find relevant and has stories specific to newspapers that I think would be helpful for those working in online news operations. To get the full scope of this, though, you really need to read the whole book.

Part 2 of my review is here.

When I was a reporter with Wired and Wired News, I spent a fair amount of time talking with analysts for story. One of those, Josh Bernoff, worked at Forrester Research.

Truth be told, analyst firms are a bit of a joke in the reporting industry — at least they were during the boom. When I was running TechnologyReview.com, I banned the use of any statistical information from places like Forrester exactly because of the speculative nature of it.

I’m telling you this for a reason: I just finished Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Bernoff and Charlene Li, two Forrester analysists, and it’s the most comprehensive, data-driven book about implementating social technologies in business that I’ve read.

For anyone who has struggled with convincing management to move into the social media sphere or anyone who has sat through LONG meetings where gun-shy executives prattle on about their experiences with technology and use that as a weapon to avoid implementing new user-driven tools, this book is a must.

But it’s also a great roadmap for those people who are confused by the landscape, yet know it’s important to get involved.

Repeatedly I found myself wishing I had access to the case studies, the data and the step-by-step analysis and implementation processes described in the book when I was trying to push through change at Technology Review.

To quote Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Learn it. Know it. Live it.

My thoughts on the book follow.

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Book Review: The Wisdom of Crowds (Part 2)

Note: This is maybe the most important book I’ve read for my research. This review is going to be long and exhaustive. So, I’m breaking it up into multiple parts. You can read Part 1 here.

Surround Yourself with Overconfident Dissenters: “Overconfident people don’t do that. They tend to ignore public information and go on their gut. When they do so, they interrupt the signal that everyone else is getting. They make the public information less certain. And that encourages others to rely on themselves rather than just following everyone else.” (p 61-65)

Notes: Another really important discussion is that even if you don’t surround yourself with diverse opinions, it’s important to have people who openly dissent and question decisions. Surowiecki makes the case later in the book that even if the overconfident are wrong, they force the decision makers to clarify their thinking. He cites studies on juries.

This also encourages people to amake incorrect guesses, something that a lack of diversity in opinion discourages — because the Wisdom of Crowds says that very few people will out-guess the majority and no one person will do that every time. In other words, a group of wrong answers can lead to the right answer.

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Book Review: The Wisdom of Crowds (Part 1)

Note: This is maybe the most important book I’ve read for my research. This review is going to be long and exhaustive. So, I’m breaking it up into multiple parts. Read Part 2 here.

I spent the day reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, one the books in my reading list and one of the books I’m using for research for my book.

Let me start by saying that everyone involved with newspapers, online media and technology should read this book. There’s not a direct application (other than mention of predictive markets), but — as I’ll discuss — the premise of the book lays out exactly the model for what newspapers should be doing online.

Let me explain: if our duty as an industry is to inform the public, then we should focus on the areas where the best decisions get made. As Surowiecki points out, that does not sit in the hands of the single-minded expert. In other words, what papers have been doing for years is simply reporting what this person said, and this person said. Which, when analyzed, by and large comes out to be a wildly inaccurate account of what is happening.

Which isn’t an indictment of the entire industry. There are good pieces here and there; however, Crowds examines exactly where and how data is deconstructed — which at the end of the day is what we do.

This review will be different, I think. I’ve made copious notes — and below I’ll lay out the passages next to my notes to hopefully build a cohesive newspaper centric analysis of the book.

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3 Ways Hard Fun Can Sell Hard News

Hard Fun.

The first time I came across the concept was when I was reading chapter 16 of Nicholas Negroponte’s best-selling book Being Digital back in the late nineties. The idea is simple: kids will learn much more — and much more easily — if you create games and challenges and then allow them to fail, try again and repeat until they’ve successfully navigated the path to completion.

We see this in video games. Kids will continually play a level until the beat the Big Boss. They will, as I say, figure out the code. That concept is why Shigeru Miyamoto — Nintendo’s chief game developer for three decades — is so good.

But it’s not just for kids.

Adults are fascinated by puzzles. Hard puzzles. Puzzles that make us think and stretch our brains. We do crosswords. We do Suduko. We play fantasy sports and run simulations to figure out who has the best trade value. We have stocks. We balance 401Ks and do long-term financial planning.

Our lives are hard fun.

I bring this up because I’ve been reading — and discussing — the future of investigative and hard journalism with some brethren in the industry. The prevailing attitude is that news organizations can’t fund big stories anymore.

Hard news isn’t profitable, I hear. But I don’t believe that. I just think we’re approaching it from the wrong angle. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Newspaper 2.0 | 5 Comments »

Marketing Shift: Video Game Fitness, BBC Archives, Google Boondoggle and the iPhone

This week on Marketing Shift, my blog about business and marketing trends that every business should be aware.

NBA, Players Go High Tech: Touch screen technologies have transformed the way major sports leagues deliver real-time information online. Emerging technologies, which use a stylus and finger for input, allow greater flexibility for quick data entry.

Warner Backs Out of Last.fm Deal: The major record labels have always had an uneasy relationship with technology companies that sell — and deliver — music. Warner Music continued those ways by removing its artists from one of the fastest growing online music companies.

Apple iPhone: Hype or Hoopla?: Apple finally made public the worst kept secret in the mobile market: the 3G iPhone and its companion developer kit. While the new price point is much cheaper than the initial iPhone, not everyone is sold on the product just yet.

Interactive Politics: Election season is just getting under way and Americans are already gearing up for a rougher-than-usual fight. New software tools let people take their arguments online.

Bank of America: 1 Million Mobile Strong: Web banking has gone mainstream; however banks are working to extend their reach to the phone. The Bank of America just passed the one million user mark.

300 Logos: A Google Boondoggle: Normally I’m a big fan of Google. This time, not so much. The marketing department developed 300 mobile and URL icons. Then asked its users to submit their ideas, with rules that ensured the winning user logo would look just like the one the company already chose.

Metallica: A Tale of Lost Fans: Metallica’s long-running feud with its online fans took a bizarre twist this week after the band invited bloggers to listen to rough-cuts of its new album. Within hours, bloggers had posted reviews, and the group’s management team asked those folks to kindly take down their thoughts.

BBC Set to Release Entire Broadcast Archive — for Free: The BBC announced it would digitally archive its 81-year history of radio and television programming. The cool part: anyone can view it.

Subscription.com: The Art of Selling Services Online: A new service has aggregated subscriptions for services in one place, giving shopper a one-store-fits-all archive for everything from movie rentals, dating sites to magazines.

Video Game Fitness Gurus: Jillian Michaels and Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo and a trainer from The Biggest Loser television program teamed up to create a fitness game and regiment for the home.

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6 Reasons the BBC Gets the Web

I’ve loved the BBC for many years.

If I had a dream job it would living somewhere in England working with their digital teams and thinking up new ways to get people information. They are the model for what should be done.

Before we go any farther down the line, I realize their business and management structure makes them different from its U.S. counterparts in the same way I realize that our financial structure at MIT’s Technology Review made us a bit different than traditional newspapers.

I hear you. I really do.

My response is this: if you hear a new idea and think of all the reasons it won’t work, you’re doomed to failure; if you hear a new idea and think of all the ways you could implement them in your business, you’ll never fail.

Now that I have that out of my system, I want to talk about some of ways the BBC has gotten this whole modern media thing correct:

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Posted in Business, Organizations | 3 Comments »

7 Ways Your Newspaper Can Make Money Online

The past few days have been interesting. I’ve been discussing the future of journalism with former reporters, reporters and editors. And without exception, each one has posited this statement, in some form: I’m tired of hearing about money and business; I didn’t become a reporter for that.

That statement floors me every time I hear it. Maybe I’m just weird that way, but I’ve always wanted — demanded – to know how the business operates because I know if I understand that, I can find a way to get whatever project I want. You put together a rational business case, you win.

If you prefer t-shirt slogans, try this: if you exist in the black, people stay off your back.

With that in mind, I thought I’d share some basic ideas that I’ve either used — or tried to use — as I wasa building a daily, online news property.

Assumption 1:None of these are solutions unto themselves. A good CFO will tell you (I know, they’ve told me this): always have levels, multiple streams, that you can pull when one idea isn’t working.

Assumption 2: If banners and advertising are you key metric (along with page views and unique viewers), you are in serious trouble. Here’s why:

• In 2007, consumers spent $160 billion buying products and services online in 2007, a 17 percent increase from 2006.
• In 2007, companies spent $21 billion for online advertising (pdf), a 26 percent increase from 2006.

In other words, the market for selling goods and services is eight times larger than the online advertising market. That gap is only going to grow wider. If you want to make money, you need to find a way to sell goods and services while stabilizing the small banner ad market.

Call it my 50-state strategy. Here are my suggestions:

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Posted in Business, Newspaper 2.0 | 1 Comment »

2 Sides: An Online Debate about the Future of Newspapers

Image by William Couch via Flickr

Yesterday, I posted two blogs: 40 questions that determine whether you should run a news website and 8 rules for creating an online community.

The first post is a list that I culled together by digging through all my documents from when I built a daily news site at a magazine, which a reader aptly suggested I turn into a wiki (that’s coming this weekend), and the second comes from an analysis of the some of the more enlightened Web thinkers.

Both generated considerable conversation in other areas (Twitter, email, instant message). I sent the pieces to a couple friends who work at traditional, corporate media companies and one of the responses I got was this: That’s all well and good, but how do you go about building a modern news site when you’re also trying to deal with legacy print?

That’s a great question. It’s the question, actually. It’s also one that I don’t think has an answer that most traditional journalists are going to like.

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8 Rules: What it Takes to Build an Online Community

Image via Wikipedia

At 36, I’ve spent more of my life online than I have offline. I’m not sure how that happened. I was supposed to play shortstop for the Reds.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, I threw myself into the world of journalism and technology from a very early age. Throughout the years, I’ve devoured every book I could on the subject; I’ve driven around the country, writing stories and meeting the people I’ve wanted to; I’ve talked with pioneers before they were pioneers; and I carved out a nice little corner of the Internet just for me.

Along the way, I’ve picked up — through reading and conversations — a thread of what it takes to build an online community.  There are 4 Must Haves, aspects of your community that must be built into the fabric if it’s to succeed; there are 4 Rules, compliance protocols that need to be in place to ensure the health and growth.

Much credit goes to Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), Larry Lessig (The Future of Ideas and Code) and Dave Weinberger (the cluetrain manifesto and Small Pieces, Loosely Joined). These are largely culled from their work — with some refinements from other smart people who have helped along the way.

None of this is mine. Well, the stuff that’s wrong is. Anyway, here it goes:

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Posted in Issues, Newspaper 2.0 | 4 Comments »

40 Questions: Who Should Run Your News Website?

Image by Pretre via Flickr

The high profile split between part of the Washington Post’s digital team and the paper has certainly sparked a conversation. There seems to be two camps: those (like me) who see this is another colossal failure on the part of traditional media and those who believe the experiment failed because of the digerati running the show.

I’ve worked at three different places — online, television and a magazine — where I was either in charge of, or a part of, building a unique brand of content separate from what we did (online, I worked with audio in 2000; at the cable network, we developer user-created content; and at the magazine, I built a daily, online news website) and at each stop I had the exact same conversations.

I’ve even had some of those same conversations again the past few days.

There is a sense, at least in the traditional media world (and the online news source was run by a traditional print editor who I happened to like very much), that the Web doesn’t fundamentally change things and that the knowledge people have in the online world doesn’t fit with the idea that the Web doesn’t fundamentally change things.

It’s quite maddening.

I wrote about the Innovator’s Dilemma in May, but I felt the need to revisit the conversation because so many people have chimed in on this Washington Post case — but many (and possibly myself included) shouldn’t be chiming in.

The simple truth is this: traditional journalists have no business making decisions about how the web and digital properties should be developed; they should certainly be at the table, helping inform the decisions of those who know best (and knowing best doesn’t mean reading a traffic report or surfing the blog with their RSS Reader), but the decisions need to be left in the hands of those who get the emerging field.

Sound harsh? Maybe it is. But I know — and I’m thankful — that my magazine editor never invited me in to discuss how we should lay out the book because frankly, other than a layman’s opinion, I had no idea how the damn thing should look.

If I ever went into him and said “Jason, I read magazines all the time. I love magazines. Here’s what you should do because that’s how I like them,” he would have fallen out of his chair. Why? Because it’s silly to design a magazine based on my use even though I’ve been reading magazines since before I was online in 1984.

There is a language and an expectation that people have. I know this because experts in the industry have told me so (and there is a common language because we know where to go to find features –> the middle — the commentary –> the end — the TOC –> the beginning — the short news –> just after the TOC.

Yet we assume online is easy because, well, everybody surfs.

Wrong. If newspapers assume that they can train a copy editor to run a news site, they really will fade into the sunset as technologically innovative sites come along.

Listed below are 40 questions that determine whether you know enough to make decisions about a newspaper website.

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