Tagged: new york times

Context: One thing that liveblogs can’t do at the moment

Liveblogging is still a nascent writing style. There have been several discussions about its value. You can debate for days about whether or not it’s appropriate for everything, or whether covering something through process journalism is always the right decision, but liveblogging is a form of storytelling that’s here to stay.

To me the humdinger that almost every single liveblog that I’ve come across has failed to address is the issue of context.

When talking to people about Ocqur, one of the most common pieces of feedback was not being able to properly understand what had been going on in a liveblog if joining the story or event part of the way through.

This is a problem for two reasons.

First, viewers are likely to spend several minutes trying to work out what happened and when before getting back to the latest updates, which is a poor reading experience.

The second reason is a byproduct of the first, in that as long as this problem keeps occuring and readers still view it as an issue, it’s going to put people off the liveblog experience.

There’s a reason why things like Longform and Readability have done so well – because they enshrine and bring out the simplicity that long form reading used to be before we were assailed by a horde of feeds, links and social networks. Right now it doesn’t seem like the frontend of many liveblogs seem to treat their readers in the same way.

So how can it be done better?

News organisations like the Guardian, the Times and the New York Times have it easier than most in this respect, simply because they have access to thousands of articles, hundreds of tags and topic pages, video content, photo archives, commentary and analysis. This alone should make the task of contextualising liveblogs a lot simpler for them than a standalone service like Cover It Live or Scribble Live.

In fact, the New York Times already seem to be halfway there. Take a look at this screenshot of their Facebook IPO liveblog.

The right column displays a graph tracking the stock price, with major shareholders listed below and a pane offering videos, interactives and documents. The NYT come closer than any other organisation to offering a full contextual experience alongside their liveblog.

So for us at Ocqur, this is potentially the toughest nut to crack. Feature requests are small fry – we can build multiple authors, we can give you more options for embedding, and we can add permalinks for individual entries.

But when it comes to context, how do we interpret that? It’s potentially a very abstract and subjective concept. One man’s article is another man’s YouTube video, and it’s very difficult to tell how everyone reads stories when they’re being played out live.

I think the solution lies in, ironically, looking at how ‘old’ media cover things like elections. Take the BBC’s 2010 general election coverage. The main coverage consisted of rolling news in the vein that we’re used to seeing from the BBC news channel and Sky News, with reporters from various counting halls around the country occasionally doing a piece to camera and reporting the local result. This is the broadcast equivalent of the liveblog, with the liveblog author taking the place of the program producer.

Between these results, the BBC would come back to the studio, which featured Jeremy Paxman, David Dimbleby, Emily Maitlis et al filling in viewers on the bigger picture. “Here’s the result” said the journalist in the counting hall, “and this is what it means” said the presenter in the studio.

The problem with this analogy is that we don’t seem to have found our presenters yet in liveblogging. There isn’t much contextualisation of the river of information that’s flowing through a liveblog, and it’s one of our main challenges in the ongoing development of Ocqur. @socialtechno has pointed out some excellent processes on how to address this in the comments.

As mentioned in my last post, we’ll be working with our testers in the next couple of months in order to really draw out and establish what it means to have a liveblog that truly allows the reader to stay up to date as well as understand the key issues quickly.

Tumblr, Facebook, Google – Is it finally time for content?

Yesterday Brian Stelter reported that Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, is hiring two journalists. They come in the form of Chris Mohney, senior vice president for content at BlackBook Media and Jessica Bennett, a senior writer at Newsweek and the Daily Beast.

This comes at a time of significant buzz around Tumblr – it’s nearing 100 staff members and it recently passed 15 billion (!) pageviews per month. Its founder David Karp has been profiled in a national newspaper, and the type of curation pioneered by Tumblr is the type that has held journalists agog at conferences over the last six months.

Traditionally a favourite online hangout of creative teens, journalists have got to Tumblr relatively late (it celebrates its 5th birthday this year), but what does the move to hire editorial staff tell us?

From Stelter’s piece:

Andrew McLaughlin, a vice president at Tumblr, said that in telling stories about its users, the company wanted Mr. Mohney and Ms. Bennett, the only two hires for the time being, to “do real journalism and analysis, not P.R. fluff.”

Looking at Tumblr as a city of 42 million residents and telling their story has very real benefits, both to users and advertisers. Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa has shed a bit more light on what Tumblr’s content strategy might be in his interview with Bennett, where she says:

Think trend stories — the democratization of creation. Think on the ground: who are the teen tumblr users in a remote town in Ukraine, and how did they find the platform? Think big picture: how is social media changing the way we interact and engage? Think data: what can Tumblr users tell us about the current presidential race? The mandate is broad, and the format will go beyond the written word.

So is 2012 the year when players like Tumblr, Facebook and Google get into the content game properly?

In Facebook’s case, it’s a maybe. The company has just hired Daniel Fletcher, a 2009 journalism graduate with previous stints at Time and Bloomberg to become their managing editor.

Hiring a journalist isn’t a new thing for Facebook – last year they hired former Mashable employee Vadim Lavrusik as their journalist program manager, tasked with building the site’s reputation as a home for journalists. But this new hire seems like it could be closer to editorial – whether it’s creating original content or smartening up Facebook’s many corporate pages.

So what about Google? Larry and Sergey’s employees always stay resolutely tight-lipped about whether Google sees itself as creating original content in future. Some clues may lie in how it seems to be shifting its purpose on the web.

One of Google’s maxims is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. In simple terms, their search bar acts as a conduit to pass you on to wherever you wanted to go on the web – quickly, efficiently, accurately. Now Google seems to be wanting you to hang around on its services, and bring them all into one place.

It’s done this in three distinct ways.

First – making logins and business accounts one and the same – your email account will now log you in to all Google services.

Second – Reorganising search to integrate with Google+ and allowing normal searches to crawl through Google+ accounts (unlike Facebook or Twitter).

Third – An overhaul of privacy policy which means that all Google services (Picasa, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and more) are interconnected. No privacy walls, just one authoritative policy which applies to all services and means that Google have access to a wealth of interconnected data based on your browsing habits.

Newspapers dream of knowing as much about their users as Google do.

If Google were to become a content creation company tomorrow, their recommendation system would be second to none, and their ability to dictate the flow of news would be unprecedented.

Of course Google doesn’t need to take a step in that direction in order to continue to be monumentally successful, but the concept of Google producing their own content service rather than just serving up a platform isn’t too hard to fathom given how much behavioural data could be fed into such a service.

If you look at trends and buzzwords in journalism over the last few years, it’s easy to see how they link up with Tumblr, Facebook and Google.

Tumblr thrives on curation, Facebook on community and Google on data. Given the trickle down effect to the journalism industry (tools like Storify becoming popular, community managers being increasingly in demand and the growing area of data journalism) it seems like any of these companies would find that they slot into the current ecosystem rather well.

Whether any news organisations would be pleased about that remains to be seen…

Why don’t we just kill newspapers?

Newspapers, you know the things don’t you? The scraps of folded and printed paper that we all pretend to read but never actually buy? From a vanity perspective, they’re great. Lovely page design, lots of colour (in the UK, at least) and a really good package of information to digest on the way to work or at lunchtime.

That said, isn’t it time to just move on? Every time I read stuff about print being ‘dead’ I let out a big sigh. It’s the same as saying that the British waterways aren’t the primary method of cargo transport anymore, and then lamenting that the import/export trade has gone belly up as a result. The method of distribution has changed, but the journalism (fundamentally) hasn’t. We can talk about crowdsourcing, about data and about the impact of social media. But journalism doesn’t stand up unless it adheres to the age-old principles. If that’s the case, what does it matter that print is ‘dead’?

Consider this, that if tomorrow someone were to go into the Dragon’s Den and pitch the following idea;

“Well basically, it’s sort of a collection of all the news that you find on the internet, only it’s on paper. A news-paper, if you will. My idea is to collate the best of news website content into print, have it printed up at an expensive price, then sling the finished product in fleets of distribution vans that scatter around the country, dropping stacks of it outside shops. Those shops will then sell those bits of paper for a price ranging between 30p and £1. Once the consumer is finished with the product, they can throw it away, and won’t be able to read it again. And the day after we’ll do it all over again”.

Peter Jones responds: “That sounds interesting and a bit mad. How much is it all going to cost?”

The nervous wannabe entrepreneur gives the reply: “Well, it’s not actually profit making at all. In fact it would consistently force news organisations to lose money. Bit of an unnecessary expense I suppose, but look at how lovely things look down on paper!”

A bit churlish maybe, but you can see the point I’m trying to get at. With apparently no correlation between internet use and newspaper profitability, why don’t newspapers simply cut their losses and start afresh? Let’s crunch some interesting numbers.

2009′s New York Times financial report has some interesting figures. Production costs to print and distribute the physical newspaper were $644 million a year. So by killing the print run the NYT are automatically left with over half a billion dollars in their pocket. So what to do with that? Maybe invest in some kind of e-reader supplied to all of it’s 800,000+ subscribers? A kindle now costs a paltry $189, so sending one out to all the print subscribers would cost in the region of $151 million. All that extra money that can be invested back into how to make this giant of old journalism sustainable. That could be by investing in companies that are profit-making but not necessarily journalistic or otherwise.

What I’m proposing is not without its downsides. We can all agree that ebooks will never replicate the feel of a newspaper, nor can you wrap your fish and chips in them. Furthermore, by cutting production of the printed produced those who don’t have access to or understanding of the internet and digital media (low income families and the elderly) would be restricted in their ability to get information. The idea of cutting people out of the loop in order to save a business whose primary aim is to do the opposite is quite difficult to come to terms with.

Yet at odds with those negative aspects are concepts of saving money, a strong ecological argument that going fully digital is better for the environment, as well as a certain amount of planning for the future.

The other day I saw a small boy playing on a laptop in a cafe with his parents. From where I was sitting I could see what was happening on the screen. He was playing a few online games while chatting on an IM and ocassionally watching a few YouTube clips. The fact that it all seemed so intuitive to him means that when he grows up he wouldn’t even think of a newspaper being his primary news source, he’d leapfrog it and go straight online.

Without sounding morbid, when my parents’ generation dies out, we’ll be left with groups of people for whom a newspaper is just as unnatural a concept as the internet was to my grandparents. So why not start preparing now? Cut the losses, and usher in something new.

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Re:Brand

Change is in the air.

Barack Obama’s mantra may have gone stale, but it has now been adopted by the media world. The widespread economising and downsizing of newsrooms has even affected the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer.

Two weeks into its slimmed down relaunch, it has cooked up a storm with the extracts from Andrew Rawnsley’s new book, End of the Party.

It’s easy to look at the measures implemented at The Observer (voluntary redundancies, scrapping of music and sport magazines) and surmise that this is a newspaper sentenced to failure.


However, look more closely, and what you’ll see is a newspaper that is down, but not yet out. John Mulholland and his editorial team have clearly realised that there is little place for breaking news in print. Consequently they have slimmed down the news section and expanded the analysis, features and comment to be found in The Observer.

Will Sturgeon, founder of The Media Blog agrees:

“They’ve boosted the prominence of opinion and comment. Relaunching with revelations from Andrew Rawnsley’s book signalled this intent most clearly. That is the only way the papers will mitigate the fact the news game is entirely lost to online”

Find your niche. That’s what writers are incessantly told. Now it seems newspapers will have to do the same. Those who value breaking news will always find it somewhere on the internet, something that paywalls cannot stop. But what newspapers can offer is good content in abundance. Well written commentaries and adventurous features are to be found primarily within newspapers, and not exclusively online.

Will Sturgeon:

“The Telegraph’s expenses story and the subsequent spike in its circulation shows us the value of quality content. Anything where speed is a pre-requisite will break first online. However, quality content will never go out of fashion”

A media prediction, if I dare be so bold: We’ll see organisations focusing solely on what they’re best at. For The Observer, this is investigation and opinion. For Sky News, this is, and always has been, breaking news. We’ll see the breakdown of newspapers as an universal authority, instead visiting a variety of outlets for what tickles our fancy.

So where to go now? The Guardian is one newspaper who’ve broached the subject of paywalls more than most. Alan Rusbridger and Emily Bell (Director of Digital Content) are resounding in their opposition of paywalls, believing them to be against the core principles of what the paper stands for.

Guardian.co.uk receives 37 million users a month. If half of those could be persuaded to pay a paltry monthly subscription fee…well, the finance department at Guardian News & Media would look a lot more chirpy. Frequently hailed as a design success, The Guardian now need to convert this brilliant layout into a viable commercial model. Being one of the first nationals online brings merits in the form of knowing what works and what doesn’t, but where they go from here is anyone’s guess.

The second big publication to address the issue is the New York Times. It’s better positioned than most to tackle the issue of charging for content, having access to an army of commentators, reporters and analysts.

The system that’s to be implemented would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month, and then request payment for more.

This crucially allows other websites and blogs to link to the New York Times without being blocked out by a paywall, something that interests Paul Bradshaw:

“This makes a link to the New York Times valuable in itself. If you run a blog, you’re more likely to link to the New York Times. Even if the paywall scheme doesn’t actually make them any money directly, it could drive valuable traffic to the website”

The message seems to be Adapt or Die, both on a personal and organisational level. A bleak future (as chorused by every other media blog ad nauseum) certainly, but it’s good to see a few well known publications taking their first tentative steps in addressing a new business model.