Robert Niles: April 2011 archive
The changing relationship between reporters and sources
April 29, 2011
I'd like to point you toward a post from Dallas NBA team owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban which I hope will get you thinking, but might just get many of you mad instead:Here it is, and here's a taste:
In the year 2011, I’m not sure I have a need for beat writers from ESPN.com, Yahoo, or any website for that matter to ever be in our locker room before or after a game. I think we have finally reached a point where not only can we communicate any and all factual information from our players and team directly to our fans and customers as effectively as any big sports website, but I think we have also reached a point where our interests are no longer aligned.
What Cuban writes could have been written by someone representing just about any major source covered by the news media today - not just sports teams, but businesses, as well as community, social and religious organizations... even government.
By this point, we all know that newspapers and TV stations have lost their traditional "gatekeeper" role in selecting and distributing information to the public. But don't dismiss Cuban so quickly; he's not writing simply about that. Cuban's noting how disruptions in the news publishing industry are changing the interests that individual publishers covering his team now serve.
Most journalists I know hate thinking about this, but reporters and sources have a symbiotic relationship. Put yourself in a source's position for a moment. (As the director of the USC School of Journalism has said, every reporter should have journalism done to him or her at some point during a career.) Why would you talk with a journalist? More...
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Are full RSS feeds now more trouble than they are worth?
April 25, 2011
Are full RSS feeds now more trouble than they are worth?I wondered that last week as the umpteenth Google alert hit my email in-box with a link to another "blog" that had scraped the full content of my posts. Curious this time, I clicked through and found something interesting at the bottom of the post.
It was the same list of social media links that I've opted into appending to the bottom of my posts in my Feedburner RSS feed. Their inclusion confirmed to me something I'd long suspected, but shoved to the back of my mind, that scrapers are using the convenient XML formatting of RSS feeds to populate their spam webpages.
(Let's continue down the stream of consciousness, shall we?) That prompted me to wonder how many actual human beings are reading my site via RSS feeds today, versus spam bots harvesting those feeds to steal my content for their websites. With the rise of Twitter and Facebook, those have become the go-to sources for me to push new posts to my readers. Does anyone still use RSS?
It's tough to answer that by looking at Feedburner stats. Perhaps an OJR reader with this information might inform us in the comments, but I don't know of a good way to parse that data to separate human readers from scraper bots.
But the presence of so many scraper sites on the Internet, even after Google's much-hyped Panda update, inspires me to consider cutting off their source of content. What if I killed my RSS feeds? Would the scrapers leave me alone? Would Google and Bing still find my content? Would my readership suffer?
Sitemaps provide a superior way to use XML to alert search engines and legitimate aggregators to new posts and content on a website, so I don't believe the loss of an RSS feed would hurt you there. As I mentioned before, Facebook and Twitter provide new, more popular avenues for pushing new URLs to your readers and fans. But without an RSS feed breaking down your site's content into easy-to-parse XML, scrapers likely would have a harder time extracting readable content from your website to put on theirs.
One interesting fact about the way that scrapers mine RSS feeds: They take only the headline and content, never the link. So as an interim step before killing off my RSS feeds, I've tried modifying them instead. I've rewritten the script that generates my feed to add the following line to each post in the feed:
"The article originally appeared at HYPERLINKED_URL_HERE. If you are not reading this post on a personal RSS reader (such as Feedburner) or on HYPERLINKED_WEBSITE_NAME, you are reading on a "scraper" site that has illegally copied our content. Please visit HYPERLINKED_URL_HERE for the original version, which includes all the reader comments."
This places the original URL, and links it, within the copy of each post. Not only should that help search engines to know the canonical URL when the piece is scraped, it should help drive some of the scraper sites' traffic back to my website. Ultimately, I don't care about scraper sites if they drive their traffic back to me. It's just when they take my content without returning traffic that offends me.
I just made this switch, and I'll report back if I see any change in traffic, search engine placement or scraper abuse of my websites, as a result. In the meantime, I'd like to hear what you're doing (or not) with your RSS feeds to fight scraping.
Comments welcomed! More...
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More on ethics, criticism and paying the bills, adding the FTC this time
April 22, 2011
Rhonda Shearer of StinkyJournalism.org called earlier this week in response to my previous post on who pays for things reviewed by critics to remind me of the Federal Trade Commission's rules on the subject.I wrote about these rules in 2009, and should have acknowledged them in my piece earlier this week. In summary: The FTC said that online writers who accept freebies or payment from businesses they review must disclose that in their posts. The rule does not apply to those employed by "old media" news organizations or freelancers working on assignment for them.
Advertisers and bloggers aren't the only people responding to these rules. I've heard from my theme park website correspondents that Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida has asked online reporters attending its press events to sign a statement acknowledging that they will mention in their posts that they attended the event at the park's invitation, in order to protect Busch Gardens' corporate parent, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, from action under the FTC rules.
As much as I'm uncomfortable with the idea of agreeing upfront to include something in coverage as a condition of access, I absolutely see Busch Gardens' point. Any organization inviting online reporters to cover an event or product has to take steps to protect itself in this legal environment. Personally, I think it's a good idea to note when a review of coverage is of a press event, or a sample prepared for and sent directly to the press. Such products and events are't always representative of what a consumer might buy off the shelf or get when he or she visits under "normal" operation. That's why I've permitted my correspondents to sign such agreements, and gone ahead with such disclosures.
The FTC has been taking action on its rules, reaching settlements with some advertisers. The FTC seems especially to be focusing on retailers using online affiliate marketing, where publications are paid a commission on each sale to its readers. More...
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The ethics of who pays the bill for criticism
April 19, 2011
When a journalist reviews something, who should pick up the tab?Old-school journalism ethics provide a simple answer: The journalist's employer pays for the meal, hotel room, trip, admission or whatever expense the writer incurs in reporting his or her piece. By not accepting a "freebie," the journalist can write about whatever he or she is reviewing without the appearance that he or she's been comprised by not paying his or her own way.
But there's a problem with that standard of journalism ethics.
The reviewer did not pay his or her own way. The employer did.
I thought about this last week, when I posted to my theme park website a review of a $400-a-night hotel. Those 400 bucks came out of my pocket. Since I am the owner and publisher of my website, there is no employer to whom I can submit that expense for reimbursement. (I can deduct the payment as a business expense for tax purposes, but so would an employer, too. And there's a huge difference between getting a $400 reimbursement and being excused from paying income taxes on $400 that I still have to pay.)
When I write about theme parks in other parts of the country, I pay for airfare or gas to get there. I pay for the admission tickets, hotel rooms and my meals. Together, these expenses add up to thousands of dollars a year - all coming out of my bank account.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining about the expense. Fortunately, my website generates enough advertising income that I can pay these expenses and have enough left over to provide myself a decent (though not spectacular) income. And I get to do something I love.
But when I pay those credit card bills at the end of the month, I feel that. Every time I sign a charge receipt, or open my wallet to pull out some cash, I know that's my money going there. Sure, paying up is part of the cost of doing business as a publisher, but you still feel it, nevertheless.
That affects the way I write. More...
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What are we trying to save here?
April 15, 2011
So what is it that we're trying to save here, anyway? Journalism? Certain journalism publications?Or certain journalism publications' executives?
Even as newspapers lay off and furlough employees, or put up payrolls to squeeze money from readers, some of the nation's top newspaper companies can still afford to cut multi-million-dollar checks to their executives.
The New York Times this week wrote about the leadership at Gannett, which paid $3 million in bonuses to its top two executives last year, as well as stock, options and deferred compensation worth as much as $17.6 million more.
This is while the nation's largest newspaper chain has been forcing its employees to take mandatory furloughs, costing workers weeks of pay so that the company can save... $33 million over the past two years.
Gee, that's almost enough to pay for Gannett's top two executives for that time, at their current rate.
Of course, the New York Times isn't much different itself. As we noted two weeks ago, the Times needs to sign up 51,000 annual customers for its new paywall just to cover the expense of the $9.2 million it paid its top two executives last year.
I don't care if I offend the suit-wearing readers among us, but I've got to take a hard line here. It's offensive to ask an employee, earning a salary that makes it difficult to live beyond paycheck-to-paycheck, to give up one of those checks so that you can pocket a huge chunk of that sacrifice.
To be fair, Gannett's executives did take a pay cut this year. But cutting insanely overpriced salaries to make them lower insanely overprices salaries isn't a personal sacrifice. Nor is it fiscal discipline by the corporation. More...
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When to hyperlink within an online news story?
April 11, 2011
When to hyperlink within an online news story?That's a question that challenges even the most experienced online writers. Hyperlinks imbue a news story with the power of the World Wide Web, allowing writers to source information, explain detail and provide depth in ways unique to the medium.
Hyperlinks also allow writers to clutter stories, and to distract and mislead readers away from the narrative of the piece. No wonder that many writers ignore hyperlinks, leaving them to automated scripts in the site's content management system, or a lame list of (sort of, maybe) "related links" at a post's end, selected by an online editor who wasn't included in the process until the very end.
Professor Ronald Yaros of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism has completed a study that offers online journalists and educators a bit of needed guidance on when, and when not, to use hyperlinks in a news story.
Yaros' study tested two versions of New York Times stories: an original version, written in traditional "inverted pyramid" style, and a rewritten version in which background and explanatory information appeared much earlier. In each version, Yaros tested whether reader comprehension improved by using traditional links to related websites, or by linking technical terms instead to explanatory text that opened in smaller windows.
The explainer stories with the links to explanatory text did best. But the explanatory links didn't perform so well in the traditional, inverted pyramid version of the story. In that version, the one with the traditional links performed better.
In other words, the type of story you are writing should influence your linking strategy.
I asked Yaros about the practical implications of this research, via e-mail. More...
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Page views offer only a small part of the picture in a newsroom compensation plan
April 8, 2011
How should the pay for online journalists be determined?Pay for work is always a sensitive question. Pay, after all, quantifies work. And since most people pour more than a bit of emotion into their work, quantifying it can feel uncomfortable, and even a bit offensive.
But writing and reporting are work. And if a marketplace has determined that one's work has some significant economic value, it has been quantified already.
The job of the manager then, is to divvy up the economic value created by her or his workers and distribute it among them.
This week brought two reports of news organizations dividing pay based on the number of pages views an author's work generates: USA Today deciding to base bonuses on page views, and a Forbes blogger explaining her page-view based compensation.
As an independent publisher, page views are my livelihood. If people don't read my stuff, I don't make money. That's simply the reality that publishers have to deal with, and I don't see any overriding reason why employed or contract writers always should be protected from that reality. (You might notice that I used an absolute there, which sharp readers should see as creating some wiggle room for me that I'm going to exploit in a few graphs.)
But I've worked as a computer developer, too, and any developer can tell you that a program always gives you exactly what you ask from it - which might not be what you wanted or intended to ask. Developers learn to sharpen the "instructions" in their programming code, to avoid errors and unintended consequences.
So it will be with publishers who compensate their writers based on the page views their posts generate. As we've seen in the recent controversy over school test scores, if people have an incentive and a means to game the system - people are going to game the system. More...
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Whining isn't winning
April 4, 2011
Dear journalists,Please quit whining about "aggregation," or whatever other phenomenon on the Internet you're blaming today for the fact you no longer enjoy the monopoly over local publishing you once had.
To be blunt, whining about the competition is the act of a loser. The publications that win in the information marketplace will be the ones that won't get bogged down in snit fits over the competition because they're too busy focusing on - and meeting - the information needs of their audience.
So it's been with increasing frustration that I've been watching the New York Times' ongoing tiff with the Huffington Post.
I find this verbal battle especially frustrating for as I've written before, all reporting is, in essence, aggregation. Otherwise, you're writing fiction.
Reporting is the act of collecting information from multiple sources for inclusion within a news report. Isn't that simply a form of aggregation?
I don't get the complaint that certain online publishers (i.e. Huffington Post) don't always pay the sources from which they are getting their information, either. I've been interviewed by reporters from the New York Times, as well as the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC and CNN. I don't remember any of them cutting me a check, either. But they used my words to fill part of their pages and broadcast time.
If journalists really feel the need to distinguish themselves from their competition, let them make a case for the value of their reporting over someone else's. I do believe that there are real differences in value between the various ways that publishers collect, select and present information.
But the focus needs to remain on that value and not simply on the process that a specific publisher follows. If that process creates value for someone, then it's worthwhile. And if it doesn't, then it's not. It really is that simple.
If you want to move beyond the playground name-calling, let's talk about some of the ways that a publisher might create better value for its readers: More...
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Make 'engagement' your mantra as an online news publisher
April 1, 2011
The Web publishing business is a bit more complex than "more traffic = more revenue." While years have watching ABC circulation figures have trained many journalists to want the largest circulation possible, business-savvy journalists long have known that not all audiences generate the same revenue. But how do you reach the audience that will allow your publication to stay in business?Before I go any further today, let me again make the point again that the audience is not your customer. Your customer is whoever writes you a check. In most cases, that means our customers, as publishers, are the advertisers who pay for placement in our news publications. A customer also can be the non-profit foundation or angel investor that funds a news website. It even could be, as the New York Times hopes, the audience itself, if there's a paid content scheme in place.
But keeping that audience/customer distinction in mind, even in the case of paywalls, is essential for journalist-entrepreneurs to have any hope of success in the news publishing business. Let's take a look at a diagram I whipped up:
The beige circle is all the available audience out there that might be interested in your website.
The red circle is all the available audience out there that your customers (advertisers, foundations sponsoring your grants, etc.) want to reach.
The yellow circle is your current audience.
The orange overlap is the audience that you are reaching and that your customer wants to reach, too. Congratulations, that's where you are making your money.
The rest of the yellow area? You might be doing public good by reaching that audience there, but it's costing you money to publish to them and your customers don't care. And if you are charging your customers to reach those audience members, reaching them is costing your customers money, too.
You goal, as a news publisher, ought not simply be to expand the size of your yellow circle. It should be to expand the size of that orange overlap area - meaning that you are attracting a larger number of the audience members whom your customers wish to reach. More...
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