These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.
February 3, 2012
How can you increase your website's traffic by looking at your current website readership data?
The answer to that question might seem obvious, but I warn you that too many news publishers approach this question from the wrong direction - and could be hurting their businesses as a result.
The obvious answer to the website traffic question appears to be... to look at what's getting the most page views on your site, and to write more articles like those.
Don't do that.
Why? Chasing traffic by trying to duplicate your most successful content ultimately narrows the focus of your website, as you try to focus on specific topics, features and tone that's drawn visitors in the past, to the exclusion of other stories and styles. It leaves you (or your staff) feeling cynical, coming to believe that your coverage is being driving by chasing traffic instead of chasing the news. Trying to duplicate past success is reactive instead of proactive - and over the long run that too often leads to a dispirited staff producing formulaic, sterile, mechanical work that runs the risk of turning off readers and advertisers.
So how can traffic data help you to create a more popular website?
Instead of looking at what's attracting eyeballs, flip your analysis around. Focus not on what's working, but what isn't. More...
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January 31, 2012
Newspapers and book publishers could learn some valuable lessons from one another. Unfortunately, it appears that the book industry's going to make the same costly mistakes as the newspaper industry did, instead.
I thought again that as I read the New York Times' story about Barnes & Noble from last weekend, The Bookstore's Last Stand. The Times wrote of the publishing industry's hope that Barnes & Noble will be able to stand up to the challenge from Amazon.com, preserving a major retailer where their companies' products are king.
Like many struggling businesses, book publishers are cutting costs and trimming work forces. Yes, electronic books are booming, sometimes profitably, but not many publishers want e-books to dominate print books. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, wants to cut out the middleman — that is, traditional publishers — by publishing e-books directly.Which is why Barnes & Noble, once viewed as the brutal capitalist of the book trade, now seems so crucial to that industry’s future. Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books. If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and — well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.
If Barnes & Noble's future is tied to that of the print book publishing houses, then Barnes & Noble is as doomed as Borders, Crown Books and the other brick-and-mortar booksellers that have proceeded it into oblivion.
The Nook alone will not save Barnes & Noble's business because the change that is roiling the publishing business today - whether it be for books or for newspapers - is not simply a transition from printed media to digital. It's a transition from a marketplace where information was controlled by a few gatekeepers to one where anyone may offer their content to a mass audience.
This isn't about eBooks versus printed books. It's about a book industry where supply is controlled by a few publishing houses or one where supply is opened to all who wish to publish something.
In short, it's not the medium; it's the market. If your business model is based upon controlling access to the information marketplace, you're doomed. If your business model is based instead upon enabling and expanding access to the market, you have a chance of succeeding. And that is what has the book industry scared. More...
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January 25, 2012
So, is Apple's new iBooks Author the solution for journalists looking for a simpler way to get into the eBooks market?Nope, not even close.
Oh…kay, so is Apple's new iBooks Author at least another option for writers looking to pick up some extra money writing eBooks?
Sure.
Apple released its new eBook production tool last week, coupled with an upgrade to its iBooks app. Apple's trying to get into the textbook market, positioning its iPad as an electronic textbook reader. But to do that, Apple needs an ongoing supply of eBook textbooks. The company's signed deals with some textbook publishers, but it's also offering the iBooks Author tool to encourage more people to create texts, as well.
The iBooks Author app's gotten plenty of attention since its release for its user license restriction that any book created with it can only be sold through the iBookstore. No Amazon. No Barnes and Noble. While iBooks Author can export files as a PDF, it won't generate the ePub file needed for best results in publishing eBooks through those and other online vendors.
That alone disqualifies the iBooks Author app as a serious option for any journalist looking for a single eBook creation solution. Better to continue creating an HTML file using your favorite editor, then running that file through Calibre to generate your ePub, which you can submit to Amazon, BN.com... and the iBookstore. The iBooks Author app also requires that you be running Mac OS Lion - it won't download to Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier versions of the Mac OS. And if you're using Windows? Fuggedaboutit.
But if you do have Lion, creating a book through iBooks Author and selling it exclusively through Apple is better than not making or selling eBooks at all.
More...
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January 12, 2012
Charles Bronson stars in...
Photo by Fish Cop at en.wikipediaTruth Vigilante
From IMDB*: "A New York Times reporter becomes a one-man vigilante squad after his story is murdered by copy editors, in which he randomly goes out and kills would-be journalists in the mean streets after dark."
(*Not really)
C'mon. If we're going to be truth vigilantes now, let's take a lesson from the star of "Death Wish" and do it right, okay? Maybe more people would buy newspapers if we juiced 'em up with some staff-on-source (or even staff-on-staff!) violence. Why should rap stars get all the good beefs?
Reporter is such a passive term. Weak. Wimpy.
Vigilante? Now, that's a word that'll sell papers! More...
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January 10, 2012
My world is awash in crap data.
Several times a week, I open my snail mail box to find bulk-mail solicitations for some member of one of my websites, but sent to the site's street address. Every month or so, I'll get a series of calls to my business phone (which is listed on my website), but the caller will ask for a name I've never heard. For the rest of that week, I'll get dozens of similar calls, from different people calling on behalf of some work-at-home scheme, all asking for the same fake name.
And whenever I'm stuck searching for information via Google or Bing, I inevitably have to scroll past link after link to scraped websites - pages written not by any human being, but slapped together by scripts created to blend snippets from other webpages into something that will fool Google's or Bing's algorithm into promoting them.
If Google really wants to make its search engine results pages more meaningful, forget about adding links from my Google+ friends. How about creating a scraper-free search engine, instead?
I have no doubt that the reason why I get all those misaddressed letters and wrong-number phone calls is that some fly-by-night "data" company scraped together a database by mashing up names, street addresses and phone numbers it crawled on various websites. That database gets laundered through some work-at-home company, which sells it to customers suckers via the Internet as a "lead list" for commission sales.
It's bad enough to take phone calls from these poor chumps, who think that they've taken a step toward earning some honest income. But I'm stunned when I see the bogus-name letters coming to my office from established colleges and non-profit institutions, who clearly also have bought crap mailing lists.
(FWIW, all my phone numbers are on the National Do-Not-Call Registry, and I'm opted out of commercial snail mail with the Direct Marketing Association, so no legitimate data company should be selling my contact information to businesses and organizations I've not dealt with before.)
Maybe it's too much to hope for a solution that frees me from having to throw away all these unwanted letters and beg off these unwanted phone calls. (Not to mention saving the people contacting the expense of pursuing bogus leads.) But maybe I can hope for a scraper-free Internet experience instead. More...
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January 6, 2012
If you've started a news website, or left a newsroom to work for an online start-up, don't let the journalism industry forget about you.
Keeping a high profile among your colleagues not only helps you personally, it can help drive attention and traffic to your site. But most importantly for our field, keeping track of how many journalists are working outside of traditional print and broadcast newsrooms helps journalism leaders to have a more accurate view of the state of our industry.
Last week, I got an invitation via email to participate in the American Society of News Editors's annual newsroom employment census. That wasn't something I'd expected, since I haven't worked in a "traditional" newsroom since leaving the Los Angeles Times in 2004.
But I'd never stopped working in journalism. Sure, I spent some time on the staff at USC's Annenberg School, but - along with my wife - we've been building an online publishing business over the past decade, too. So even though neither of us work for newspapers anymore (she spent several years on staff at the newspaper in Omaha, Neb.), we still consider ourselves full-time working journalists. (And that's not just a vanity description, either - together, we're making more income from our business than we ever made together working for newspapers.)
I completed the survey, noting that our company employed two journalists full-time, plus a summer intern. Then I emailed ASNE Executive Director Richard Karpel to ask why a small outfit like mine was getting a census invite. More...
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January 3, 2012
When was the last time you read something that prompted you to shout "Yes! That's
exactly what I've seen. I've been
waiting for someone else to notice that!"?
For me, it was last night, shortly after Rob Curley posted a link to Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually, by Larry Downes on Forbes.com.
Downes just destroys the big box electronics retailer, and in doing so, lays out some important lessons for anyone who's running a business today. (Including news publishers.) I hope you'll take a few moments today to read Downes' piece, and to think about how what Best Buy is doing might compare with how your publication treats its readers and customers.
Downes' challenge to readers? "Walk into one of the company's retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper."
More times than not, I can't do it. Downes details one recent visit to Best Buy, when friend tried to buy a Blu-Ray disc, only to be waylaid by a "customer service" rep who tried instead to sell him on a pay-TV deal.
Me? Dozens of trips to various Best Buys over the years have taught me to never make eye contact with any employees in the store. Keep other customers between myself and the floor staff. If I need a clerk to get something for me, ask only someone who appears to work in the section where the item is stocked, ask for the item using the specific model number and be prepared to walk away if they don't have it, or the clerk wants to start talking about something else.
Doesn't this sound like an awful shopping experience?
But it's worse to have to endure the sort of bait-and-switch that Downes describes - pitches for unrelated subscription services, incompatible additional products and interrogations about my personal life, designed to talk me into buying products Best Buy wants to push. Even if I manage to avoid all those, I've yet to find a way to get out of the inevitable pitch at check-out to buy an extended warranty. (Extended warranty pitches are the number one reason why I try to buy all of my electronics, software and accessories online. Two days ago, a Radio Shack employee tried to sell me an extended warranty on an iPod case.)
I don't believe that the people who run Best Buy are intentionally sadists. Downes describes how Best Buy managers have made apparently rational business decisions that nonetheless have led to their employees creating a nasty, even hostile, shopping environment. That should cause any business managers to pause in fear for a moment. More...
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December 20, 2011
When "objective" journalism decays into a cowardly neutrality between truth and lies, we need advocacy journalism to lift our profession - and the community leaders we cover - back to credibility.
That's my response to a source quoted in an item posted by Jim Romenesko yesterday. The post linked a TVWeek.com/NewsPro survey that listed Syracuse's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications as the nation's top journalism school. (USC Annenberg was listed fifth, FWIW.) What caught me eye was one of the quotes Romenesko selected from the original story to include in his post:
"One reply stated schools should teach 'objectivity. Too many schools are teaching advocacy journalism.'"
Let's dive in: Advocacy is not the antonym of objectivity. Objectivity is the goal of accounting for your own biases when observing of an external reality, so that your report accurately reflects that reality. By reporting objectively, the goal is that you be able to produce an observation that others, observing the same reality, can reproduce.
There's nothing about objectivity that prohibits you from advocating on behalf of your results. In fact, putting your work up for peer review, and being able to defend it, is part of the scientific method that influenced the journalistic concept of objectivity.
Every journalist advocates for their stories - anyone who thinks otherwise has never hung around an editor's desk or been to a front-page budget meeting. So advocacy's part of the job. And as journalism schools are supposed to be teaching their students how to advance their careers, they need to be teaching their students how to advocate for their work - whether that's getting an assignment approved, a freelance gig okay'ed, or a story onto P1 or into the first slot on the website's homepage.
When I've asked journalism students why they decided to get into the field, I've yet to hear anyone respond that they were looking for a big payday. Idealism motivates almost every journalism student - and journalist - I've met. We want our reporting to help make our communities better places and help our readers live better lives.
So we get into this field looking to advocate for worthy causes, and we use internal advocacy to get our stories heard. Allow me to suggest, therefore, that the problem some journalists have with "advocacy" is not the concept itself, but those who put advocacy ahead of the truth, instead of behind it, where it belongs.
More...
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