Robert Niles: August 2010 archive
Why I am skeptical of Patch.com
August 27, 2010
AOL is rolling out its Patch.com "hyperlocal" network around the country. Having watched similar efforts since Microsoft launched Sidewalk in the 1990s, I remain skeptical.Look, we all agree by now that the Internet's changed the economics of the publishing business. One of the ways that's happened, however, makes it much more difficult to create a workable business model for a national network of local websites.
Why? Let's try this question for an example: How much money does Howard Owens at TheBatavian.com have to ship out at the end of the month to his national corporate bosses?
Of course, owner-operated sites like Howard's don't have to share any of their earnings with a national corporation. Nor do they have to pay for national and regional bureaucracies that oversee the network of local sites. Everything a local news website publisher earns goes right into that local news website.
That gives independent publishers a huge cost advantage over their corporate competition. So why did the newspaper industry evolve toward national corporate ownership?
Because of the economies of scale that used to exist in the newspaper business. A larger chain could get a better deal on syndication contracts. It could centralize design and IT work and share national bureaus, reducing duplication of effort. It could employ a national sales team, earning more income than individual, local papers could get on their own.
But the Internet's changed those opportunities. More...
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This year's advice for journalism students
August 20, 2010
Students will be arriving (or returning) to journalism schools over the next month, providing me with a convenient excuse to offer students some beginning-of-the-year advice.1. Don't believe that journalism school will help you prepare for your career. Why? Because your journalism career's already started. The moment you first posted a comment, photo or status update to the Web, you began your work as a journalist.
Doesn't that make just about everyone on the Internet a journalist, you might ask? Well, yes. Even if most folks never post anything newsworthy or of interest to anyone outside their immediate circle of family and friends, everyone who posts online has the potential do create journalism, should they happen to be in the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) place or hear the right thing at the right time and post it. Immediate access to a global publishing medium allows any source to become a breaking news reporter, if only for just a moment.
You're going to journalism school to help you improve the journalism career you've already begun, not to launch it.
2. Audience equals power for journalism job-seekers. This might be the most important lesson you learn in your journalism education, but most instructors aren't prepared to teach it to you. They began their careers under a different model, when reporters earned their first gigs based upon the work they did in the classroom, on the student newspaper (or radio/TV station) and, perhaps, during an internship.
They'll steer you toward those same options today, and there's much to learn there, still. But place yourself in the position of an editor, having to hire a recent graduate for his or her newsroom. Do you take the one with the great clips and enthusiastic recommendations? Or the one with the great clips, enthusiastic recommendations, and the 5,000 daily unique visitors to her video blog?
Given that traffic becomes your traffic one you hire her, you take the second student. Every single time. So be that second student. Start building your audience now. More...
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Lessons from launch: How TBD.com is trying to engage the community to build its business
August 11, 2010
This week, Allbritton Communications launched its new online portal and news website for the Washington D.C., metropolitan area: TBD.com. TBD.com draws upon the reporting staff of Allbritton's DC-area ABC affiliate, WJLA, and its existing cable news channel (formerly known as News Channel 8), blending them with an expanding online reporting staff, as well as a network of dozens of local blogs and websites.
Broadcasters have been attempting to build local online portals for more than a decade, following a variety of models - including nationally-branded networks, outsourced websites, and lavishly funded local staffs. By aggressively soliciting local bloggers to participate in this network, TBD.com is building upon the experience of a team of online news veterans, who've won praise and honor for their efforts at other "old media"-affiliated news websites, including general manager Jim Brady, late of washingtonpost.com.
This week I interviewed TBD's director of community engagement, Steve Buttry (a former colleague of mine in Omaha and for American Press Institute training, for disclosure's sake) about the launch.
Q. You, Jim and several others on the staff are veterans of previous online efforts by "old-media" companies. What have you learned from those efforts that's changed the way you've approached the development of TBD? More...
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The only metric that matters
August 6, 2010
In the nearly 15 years that I've been working online, I've watched the most popular metric among Web publishers change from "hits," to "page views," to "unique visitors" to "time on site."But none of those metrics really matter. I've seen sites post phenomenal numbers for each of those categories, and fail. There's one metric, and only one, that truly matters in determining your websites's commercial success.
Revenue.
Your visitors can spend hours per month on your website, but a huge "time on site" value by itself won't entitle you to a dime (see Twitter). I suspect that one reason why various Web metrics fall into and out of favor over the years is that managers talk up or down those metrics based on their website's individual performance. Someone notices that people are spending more time, on average, on the website, then he or she gets on a panel at a news industry conference and - boom - "time on site" becomes the metric everyone needs to consider.
That's nice for such sites, but, ultimately, nothing matters but money. (Some might publish for other reasons - to exert influence or win votes, for example - but for most of the news publishers who read OJR, the ultimate criterion for a publication is whether it makes enough money to justify remaining in business.)
Non-profits might consider them exempt from this rule, but non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. Try running a non-profit without donations, without grant funding or without a trust fund sometime. If content on a non-profit website doesn't entice funders to continue funding it, that publication won't last long, either.
Money matters. To all news publishers. More...
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On the Internet, no one has to be a gatekeeper, but everyone can be
August 3, 2010
We've well established by now that the Internet has crippled the news industry's role as gatekeeper of information in society. News sources now can communicate directly with the public, with unprecedented immediacy and scale. When the President of the United States wants to send a message to the public, he can issue a statement, call a press conference or schedule an address. But those means require news media participation to reach the public. Today, the POTUS can bypass the media, posting a note to the fans who follow his Facebook page, or e-mailing his millions of supporters.Sports stars break news not through press agents and sportswriters, but by writing tweets. (Okay, many of those tweets might be written by agents, but they no longer need sportswriters as a go-between with the public.) Parents can examine their children's schools' test scores online, without having to read a story in the paper, or drive down to some office and ask for a secretary to pull the report. Even within journalism, reporters can make direct contact with readers through blogs and Twitter accounts, where many no longer have to go through layers of editors to get information out to the public.
So, thanks to the Internet, the information world's pretty flat now?
Wrong.
While the Internet's made it possible for information to flow more directly from source to consumer, in practice, much information consumed on the Internet now flows through many more intermediaries than before. Sources tweet information that then shows up on blogs, which are picked up by radio reporters, then make their way into newspapers, where readers post the stories to their Facebook pages, which prompts someone else to tweet about it... and the cycle begins again, taking slightly different paths with each circuit.
On the Internet, no one has to be a gatekeeper, but everyone can be.
Publishers, including online journalists, need to remember this if they're to maximize the audience for their work. More...
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