Robert Niles on OJR

If you think you can do better than Patch, go ahead

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:49:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Many online journalists have been clucking about AOL's Patch this week, after Jim Romenesko posted on reported changes coming at the network of local news websites.

According to Romenesko's source, Patch is asking its local editors to run additional formula stories (lists, best-of tournaments, etc.) to goose traffic while also implementing employee review procedures that will result in the dismissal of workers who don't improve their performance (in the eyes of higher-ups) within 30 days.

Sorry, but - yawn.

Any journalist who believes that Patch is doing something here that newspapers never did before the Internet either (a) never worked at a newspaper before the Internet or (b) has developed a convenient case of amnesia about that era. Newsrooms have been creating and running gimmick stories to attract readers since, well, long before I was born. As they should.

If you want readers to develop a habit of reading you, you need to give them content that grabs them, whatever their mood. That means mixing longer, in-depth investigative pieces with shorter stories, news-you-can-use tips and a variety of other features, including comics, lists and yes, even ads and coupons. Online, it can mean shaking up your front page with polls, discussions, lists and infographics, as well as blog posts and links to longer stories. If Patch wants to change focus and go with easy, formula pieces for a while to pump up the traffic, so be it. They wouldn't be the first site to do so and won't be the last.

Newspaper managers have been cooking up excuses to ride reporters out of town for decades, too. I'm reminded of the urban legend about sharks that quit swimming will die. Our industry's version? If a news editor doesn't can a reporter every few weeks, he or she's just gonna drop dead at a budget meeting.

Sure, the humor's dark, but if you don't want to live under the constant threat of layoffs, you need to either start publishing for yourself or finding another field in which to work. Arbitrary dismissals are now part of corporate journalism's DNA.

Hey, I'm no fan of Patch. As I've written before, Patch's corporate overhead puts the network as a huge cost disadvantage versus locally owned and operated hyperlocal websites. It wouldn't surprise me if what Romenesko wrote about this week didn't turn out to be the first step toward Patch's inevitable collapse.

But don't think for a minute that many of those locally-owned and operated hyperlocals Patch competes with aren't trying many of those same cookie-cutter, gimmick, formula stories in an effort to boost their own traffic. (Full disclosure: I'm running my annual "best theme park attraction" tournament right now.) Heck, like Romenesko, I think that the "what's happening with the vacant storefront?" feature is a brilliant idea. That's an excellent example of the type of local news people want to read from their neighborhood.

And the local publishers I know are even tougher than corporate publishers in holding the line on labor costs. I've paid for freelancers, but am much more parsimonious about handing out assignments than the newspaper editors I know. You get extra tight with expenses when it's your money that's getting spent.

If you want to attack Patch, hit 'em for attempts to gag their reporters after Romenesko ran his piece. Hit 'em for the futility of running hyperlocal sites through a top-down, national network. But spare me the "holier than thou" stuff.

Do you want journalism to succeed? Do want to see more money for more investigative reporting? Do you want to see more attention paid to good work from skilled reporters?

Then you'd better get working on building a community of engaged readers - with whatever tools or gimmicks you need. Patch will live or die on its own. If you think you can do better - do it. Then Patch can either step up its game and compete with better content, or die the death that so many of us have predicted for it.

You've got to know the truth to tell it

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:56:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Inherent within the whole "truth vigilante" meme lies a tough question for many journalists:

"What if I don't feel qualified to decide who's telling the truth?"

If you've ever asked yourself that question, give yourself a well-earned point for honesty. The best journalists remain ever skeptical, not just of their data and sources, but of their own biases, roles and decision-making in reporting a story. But even as journalists challenge themselves, they must be able to meet those challenges.

Stenography isn't journalism. "He said, she said" isn't journalism. Throwing your reporting at the page and hoping that the reader figures it all out isn't journalism. Journalism demands judgment - decisions whether a story is newsworthy, and judgments about the truth of information included within that story.

So, yeah, if you're going to do this job effectively, you've got to be able to tell who's telling the truth - and have the confidence in that decision to make it public in your reports.

Why is this even an issue? Why would journalists be working on beats where they didn't have the deep knowledge and experience they'd need to be able to make consistent calls on the truthfulness of the information they collect?

As usual, the answer is "money."

For more than a generation, newspapers have been going cheap on newsroom talent - laying off experienced (and relatively expensive) reporters in favor of inexpensive rookies to keep profit margins fat. And it's not like many newsrooms have been bringing in people with law degrees to cover the courts or physicians to cover health, either. That'd cost money, of course.

But readers can find those experts online now - people with advanced degrees and years of professional experience reporting on their fields. Think that people lose their "objectivity" if they report upon a field in which they've trained and worked? Well, ask yourself how "objective" it is to be played by a source because you didn't know any better. In readers' eyes, experts beat stenographers, every time.

Sure, it's tough to write a story with the detail that will satisfy fellow experts and the simplicity that will engage a broader audience. But it's the news industry's failure to do that consistently over the years that left the market open for many start-up blogs and online communities to exploit.

So now the industry's years of going cheap on newsroom recruitment and retention comes back to haunt it. Not only don't we have enough experts in newsrooms, we've developed an industry culture where we're second-guessing when, or even whether, journalists ought to be making expert judgments.

I can't lay this on journalism educators. I've taught in a j-school, and have seen first-hand how students sculpt their school experience in anticipation of what they believe future employers will want. If they see employers demanding deep knowledge and experience in specific subject areas, trust me, students will respond. But even if every journalism student loaded up with a second major and relevant work experience, the more they see other employers paying more for that same education and experience, the fewer of them will choose life in a newsroom.

Of course news organizations need to stay in the black. That's why online start-ups without multiple layers of middle management and corporate profit requirements will continue to enjoy cost advantages over the major newspaper chains. If newspaper chains are to get leaner, they can't continue to try doing that at the cost of newsroom expertise. That decision just drives away readers, as they look elsewhere for the truth vigilantes who can help them make sense of their daily information overload.

The days of general assignment reporters and rotating beats are over. The level of competition online simply won't allow them anymore. Journalism is no longer a field unto itself, practiced by people who have no substantial experience in other fields. Journalism is now a skill practiced by experts in many fields, for the benefit of readers throughout their community and around the world. The news business that understand that change, and adapt to it, will be the ones that survive and profit in the years to come.

Look at the bottom, not the top, of your traffic analytics to boost your website's readership

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:20:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

Use your traffic data to show you what coverage to dump, and not what to duplicate. Why waste precious reporting and writing time on articles that no one's reading, no one's linking to and no one's engaging with? Stop publishing content that your market's rejected and use the resources you'd spent creating that to do something else instead.

Be careful when making those cuts, though, to be certain that you're not eliminating something valuable due to bad analysis of your traffic data. It's not enough to look at raw page view numbers over a limited time period. Some very valuable articles show few initial impressions, but continue to build traffic to your site over years. It's worth the staff time to report and create those "evergreen" articles. Other types of articles might suffer due to the time of day that they're posted on the site. Certain feature pieces that hit your homepage in the early evening due to production habits, only to disappear from the home page before the next morning's traffic rush might draw more attention if you moved their online publication times to mid-afternoon, for example.

So be sure to take a long view when analyzing traffic data when making decisions about cuts and reassignments on your website. And consider what other factors, in addition to topic popularity, might be influencing unpopular articles and pages on your site. Are the pages consistently hitting the site at an unpopular time of day? Are the headlines not engaging? Could you put a different writer onto that beat who would command more respect, attention and engagement? Should does the audience for content want to see it in a different medium, such as a podcast or video blog instead?

You might not choose to walk away from a content topic altogether, but your focus should remain on the bottom of your traffic analytics. If something's not hitting with the audience, work to change that. And if changing publication times, formatting or voice isn't drawing more traffic to an area of the site, don't be afraid to shift the focus of your reporting to something that your audience finds more important to their everyday lives. (Here's my piece on the five most important beats for a local news website, to encourage some creative thought on what your beat mix should be.)

Like a gardener pruning the flower beds, cutting away withered elements of your publication can help encourage more growth elsewhere on the website. That's a healthier way to pursue new traffic than endless trying to clone what's worked best in the past. And it allows you, or your staff, to remain creative in trying to find new ways to lead your community by showing them fresh news and insight that they didn't have but will embrace, instead of always feeling like you are reacting to that community, pandering to what was popular in the past.

Traffic data tells you what your community thinks of the work you've done on the past. You should respect your audience by paying attention to what they're trying to tell you. Great news publishers lead - they don't pander - but you can't be a leader if no one follows you. Use your traffic data to cut what's not working on your website, then spend those resources trying to find better ways to connect with your audience instead.

It's not the medium - it's the market

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:49:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

The traditional publishing houses, like traditional print newspapers, built their businesses as gatekeepers. And despite its development of the Nook to expand into the digital marketplace, Barnes & Noble appears to be playing along. I've written before about Barnes & Noble restricting independent eBook publishers to its hard-to-find PubIt! ghetto on the BarnesandNoble.com website. I suspected that decision was driven by a desire to protect traditional publishing houses and the Times article only strengthens the impression that Barnes & Noble and the publishing houses have tied their futures together.

But by favoring print publishers in its retailing, Barnes & Noble is under-utlizing the one unique tool it could be using to lure eBook publishers and readers from Amazon.com - its physical stores. Instead of consigning eBook publishers to a tiny link on the BN.com home page, Barnes & Noble could be incorporating titles by independent publishers into section by section best seller lists, and individualized product recommendations, as Amazon does. Barnes & Noble (or its book publishing partners) could be offering a seemless ePub-to-print-on-demand option for indie publishers, as Amazon does through CreateSpace. But one thing that Amazon cannot do is to move the best-selling indie-published print-on-demand books into physical stores, located throughout the country. Only Barnes & Noble can do that. Nor can Amazon conduct book reading and signing events for indie authors at bookstores around the country. But Barnes & Noble could.

A decade ago, newspapers had a similar opportunity. They could have used their print publications as a lure to encourage would-be bloggers and smart commentators to publish on newspaper website community portals instead of independent websites, denying those competitors many voices with which to grow. Just select the best community content from the website each day, and print it in the paper. But papers were slow to embrace web-to-print, and now they've lost too much of the brand-name appeal and traffic advantage they once enjoyed over online start-ups.

Sure, book publishers don't want to lose market share to independents. But book consumers want to select from the broadest possible selection possible, with easy to find links to both the best and most popular selections in desired categories, whether they come from New York or an indie publisher with just a PC and an ISBN. Ultimately, retailers like Barnes & Noble have to decide: Do you work for your customers, or your suppliers?

The book publishers could have a future. Beyond controlling access to the marketplace, book publishers provided one other, very valuable service to authors - book editing. And the demand for editing, guidance and advice for authors is growing as the number of authors grows. Book publishers could find ways to transition their business models to serve the growing number of eBook publishers, instead of hoping that Barnes & Noble shuts them out. But it's becoming clear that they won't.

Don't be fooled by the industry's attempt to distract from their failure by conflating their future with that of authors in general.

While publishers' fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, it�s not all about them.
"Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt," he said, "if Barnes & Noble does not prosper."

I call B.S.

If you are an author with a New York publishing house contract, perhaps your fate is tied to the publishing industry's. But if you are not, well, you shouldn't waste a moment of time rooting for a business that's not rooting for you.

Is Apple's iBooks Author the right eBook creation tool for journalists?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:02:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

The iBooks Author app offers several templates from which to choose in creating an & nbsp; ~~eBook textbook~~ & nbsp;~~eTextbook~~ & nbsp; ~~TexteBook~~ book. Your new book doesn't have to be aimed strictly at students to use iBooks Author, but it seems a waste to use iBooks Author to create a novel or other text-driven book with few or no graphics.

So why not try taking advantage of all that the iPad can do better than a printed page? Most newsrooms at this point have multimedia associated with major story packages. The iBooks Author app allows you to add those some of those elements into a pre-formatted book template with drag and drop ease. (You'll need to convert to AAC from MP3, if your media files aren't in Apple's preferred formats already.)

The templates are quite nice, though if Apple doesn't expand the selection soon, there's the danger they will become cliche from overuse. It appears possible to alter Apple's templates, though I didn't spend a great deal of time investigating that. I suspect that anyone capable of doing that intensive of design work won't be messing around with the aimed-at-beginners iBooks Author tool, anyway.

If I had a hot story package with several must-see multimedia elements that would play at book length, I'd give iBooks Author a try to throw that eBook out there and see what I'd get. (Here's a good, in-depth guide from Lifehacker.) Remember, you'll need to promote your work aggressively through your own publications and social media channels. Chances are, no one's going to find your book on the iBookstore, unless you send them there to look for it.

While the iBookstore continues to have a supply problem that limits its market share relative to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the store's biggest challenge is that its interface simply doesn't enable readers to find additional titles of interest as effectively as those competitors do. Adding more title to the iBookstore, through iBooks Author's exclusivity requirement, won't address that issue.

If Apple wants to get more authors submitting more title to the iBookstore, it'd do better to improve the store's interface so that it encourages more sales by books that aren't in the Top 10 in the iBookstore's limited number of categories. (I wish that Apple would spend a little of its huge pile of cash to buy a service such as Goodreads, then use it as a base upon which to build a social recommendation engine for the iBookstore.) That, plus a one-click publication function within iBooks Author, would be enough to make the iBookstore every bit as attractive to new authors as submitting to Amazon.

For what it's worth, I hope that Apple succeeds in shaking up the print textbook market. Watching my children struggle under the weight of their backpacks when they go to school every morning frustrates me, as does the political process by which textbook contracts are awarded by states and school districts. I'd love to see students freed from the burden of heavy, out-of-date, static, printed textbooks and better engaged by frequently-updated multimedia texts, contained on an easy-to-carry tablet. I'd also like to see schools freed from having to install, maintain, assign and monitor lockers, which (outside gym class) would become unnecessary with tablet-based textbooks. And I'd like to see the political influence of textbook manufacturers diminished, which will only happen if the barriers to entry into this business are reduced by a disruptive technology such as eBooks.

So while I wish Apple success in disrupting the textbook market, I also hope that the company will further develop its iBooks Author tool, adding templates for other genres of publishing as a well as an ePub export tool. While I understand Apple's desire to use the app to boost its share of the book sales market, I think that Apple's best approach for doing that lies not in restricting authors, but in encouraging consumers to buy more of the books that Apple does sell.

Should journalists be truth vigilantes? Hell, yeah!

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:29:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Charles Bronson stars in...

Photo by Fish Cop at en.wikipedia

Truth 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!

And on the website? Well, now when we say we a piece had a thousand hits, we're gonna mean that literally. Find those lyin' PR guys and punch 'em out. We wanna see black eyes. Maybe some blood. And don't forget the video, either. Have you seen the CPMs we're getting for pre-roll these days?

For years, "reporters" have been trying to serve truth to their readers, only to learn that the only way to get their words into the paper is to ensure that every fact comes paired with a challenge, every data point with contradiction and every sharp conclusion with someone else's dizzying spin. No longer.

Now, ~~reporters~~ truth vigilantes are going to fight for the truth. It's not enough to have the truth buried in there somewhere in a news story. Like a team of well-trained social scientists, our truth vigilantes are going to find, isolate and test for the truth. And when they find it, they'll be out there - on the mean streets of the city and the blogosphere - defending the truth against all those who would spin it away.

For years, people in the journalism industry have been trying to pretend that "real" journalists don't have a point of view. Screw that. We're admitting now that we do - and we always have. Our mission is to find the truth, report it and defend it. If we can't pack heat, our weapons will be research, empiricism and logic instead. Don't like the results? Challenge us with your own data. We'll shoot it out and see who's left standing.

This ain't no Washington inside-the-beltway dinner party anymore. We're not here to make nice with our sources. We're here to defend our people - the readers who are counting on us to make sense of this flood of information that's drowning them every day.

One way we protect those readers is by not reporting every last damned thing some spin doctor says on behalf of a political candidate. We set the agenda for our story-telling - not the campaigns. Sure, if a campaign launches a new TV commercial or print ad in our market, we'll send the truth vigilantes to take it on. But we initiate our own stories - in-depth descriptions of what candidates propose to do, and solid reporting on how that's worked out for people in the past. No more he-said, she-said from people in the game. We're looking at real data on how policy proposals will affect people's lives. That's it. Want a horse race? Drive to Santa Anita.

Should journalists be truth vigilantes? Hell, yeah!

Wanted: human editors. Scrapers and robots need not apply

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:52:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

I know it's possible, because there used to be a scraper-free search engine - one that searched just hand-picked Web sites created by actual human beings. It was called Yahoo!, and if they're smart, the latest crew of new managers at Yahoo! could do far worse than trying to recreate a 2012 version of their Web directory, then using it to populate a Google-killing search engine.

For an example of the garbage polluting search engines today, this site came up high in the SERPs when I searched recently for my wife's name and the name of her website.

If you know anything about the violin, you should be ROTFL now. For those who aren't violin fans, allow me to explain that Ivan Galamian, one of the great violin pedagogues of the 20th century, has been dead for over 30 years. While we would have loved to have someone of his stature working for us at Violinist.com, only an idiot scraper script would think he works for us now.

It kills me that good websites, blogs and journals written by thoughtful correspondents get pushed down in the SERPs - and overlooked by potential fans - because of this garbage.

I want a search engine that knows better - that excludes Web domains populated by scraped data and instead searches online sites written by actual human beings. I wouldn't limit such a search engine to sites written by paid, professional staff. There's too much rich content to be found in the conversations of others. But blogs, discussion boards and rating-and-review sites included in this search engine should be composed of information submitted by human beings, not scraped from other websites and edited together by bots.

The original Yahoo! lost when start-up rival Google indexed more pages than Yahoo, giving Google an edge over its established competition. But I - and, I suspect, many others - don't care about the size of a search engine's database any longer. Google's right on in its attempt, announced today, to build a more human-driven search engine. But I'm not convinced that adding Google+ links to the SERPs is enough of a change to make a difference in quality.

First, not enough people use Google+. Its 18-and-over-only age limit also disqualifies the millions of teen-agers who help drive the digital conversation. And I fear that Google's new "Search Plus Your World" approach simply will encourage spammers to flood Google+ with even more bogus accounts and friend requests, in order to boost their reach into the Google SERPs those new "friends" see.

It's great to use social media to help bring more people into the process of selecting which websites should be indexed in a search engine. But, ultimately, at this point organizations still need more aggressive in-house human oversight in back-checking the results.

Google lost its quality control over its SERPs long ago. Whether it's search engine results or business lead lists, there's too much crap data on the market today. That illustrates the continued need for more, and better, human leadership of data cultivation. There's a market need out there. So who's going to step forward to fulfill it?

Independent online journalists should stand up to be counted by the industry

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:59:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

"We invited some online-only news websites to participate in the census in 2010 and 2011, so this will be the third year we've done it," Karpel replied. "The only difference is this year we've invited a much broader range of news websites."

This year, Karpel wrote, ASNE added websites listed in Columbia Journalism Review's News Frontier Database (which included my website), which is why I got onto the invite list. But you don't have to be in that database to be counted in the ASNE census. If you work for a general-interest news website that hasn't been invited to join the ASNE census, just email Karpel with a description of your site for an invitation. (The address is rkarpel at asne.org.)

"The Newsroom Employment Census is one of the most important and valuable services ASNE provides," Karpel wrote. "We want to keep it that way. It will maintain its relevance and value only as long it follows the news wherever it goes. It's obvious that including news websites will provide a much fuller picture of newsroom diversity and employment patterns."

ASNE will break out data from online-only newsrooms, as well as traditional print one, to help researchers make apples-to-apples comparisons with previous years' data, as well as to see emerging trends in independent and online newsroom hiring.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is for journalists who move into independent online news publishing not to drop off the journalism industry's radar. Accurate data that includes the full range of modern news publications can help counter narratives that journalism is in decline. They also can help advertisers, funders, academics and others who support the industry to see more accurately where they should be providing their support.

Journalists who start new news publications instead of dropping out of the industry when they leave a newsroom are helping strengthen journalism for the 21 century. They deserve recognition and support for those efforts. But, as with many things in life, you get recognition and support not just by deserving it, but by asking for it. Sometimes, you've got to ask to be counted, and this is one of those cases.

I've warned in the past against spending too much time hanging out with other journalists after moving into independent news publishing. You've got to devote the bulk of your time to your business, your beat, your readers and your customers - not your colleagues. But don't take that to mean you should cut yourself off from your field. Keeping yourself in surveys like ASNE's, databases such as CJR's, and in the address books of media buyers and other journalists helps you maintain the public profile that a successful publishing business needs to draw the support that keeps it alive.

How Best Buy can teach you not to run your news business

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:31:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

What kind of "shopping experience" are you creating for your customers? Are you encouraging them to do business with you, and then rewarding them for that? Do your customers look forward to interacting with you, or do they dread it as an obligation they can't wait to end?

Have you ever spoken or written the phrase "fiduciary obligation to our stockholders" to justify doing something that will frustrate your customers? Do you start using passive voice when justifying your business actions to customers (as Downes shows Best Buy doing)? Are you willing to trade customer goodwill tomorrow for extra revenue today?

In short, do you make things sometimes difficult for yourself so that they'll always be easy for your customers, or do you place obstacles in front of your customers to make life easier for you?

If you do, you could be on the same path to oblivion as Best Buy.

Keep in mind, as always, that your customers are the people who write you a check. If someone isn't paying you, that person is not your customer. That can make life a little confusing - if not troubling - for a journalist writing for an advertiser-supported website. Your customers aren't your readers, after all - your real customers are those people buying the ads.

But don't forget why those people are buying those ads. For the most part, it's so that they can reach your readers. So anything you do to make life difficult, unpleasant or frustrating for your readers will someday make attracting and retaining advertisers more difficult for you. Free sports tickets, dinners and "thank you" presents for your biggest ad clients might delay that inevitability a bit, but if your advertisers want to stay in business, too, they can't afford to keep advertising with a publication that's not delivering the readers they want to reach.

So in 2012, let's resolve to make our publications the "anti-Best Buy" - let's make them aesthetically pleasant places to visit, sites that respond with information that engages, informs, delights and challenges readers. Hunt aggressively for input forms, navigation structures and article narratives that frustrate or confuse readers, then eliminate them from your site.

Work on customer service, as well. How easy do you make ordering and payment? Can customers do that online, over the phone and in person, whatever they prefer? How many steps does a new order or payment take? Have you tried it yourself recently?

Do you thank customers for their business? How often do you listen to your customers' problems and challenges to get ideas for new products and services, instead of simply looking for hooks to sell them something you already offer? How willing are you to refer customers elsewhere if there's a better place for them to find as solution they need? When customers do business with you, you should want them to feel like that's the highlight of their day.

And not like it's a dreaded trip to Best Buy.

Why we need advocacy journalism

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:58:00 MST

By Robert Niles: 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.

Objectivity is a means to an end - that end being truthful reporting. And if truthful reporting leads to an obvious conclusion, a reporter and publication cheat their readers if they pull back and don't follow their reporting to that conclusion, and fail to advocate for their community reading it - and acting on it.

We cheat our communities - and our profession - when we decide first what we're going to advocate for, then cherry-pick reporting to make a case for it. And, yes, Fox News, I am writing about you. (Isn't it time yet that Fox News becomes a resume stain that disqualifies its employees from future work in J-schools and reputable news organizations?) Our disdain for propagandists shouldn't turn us against advocacy - it should embolden us to become even more aggressive advocates for the truth that propagandists (such as Fox News' shills) attempt to deny.

Of course, that cause isn't helped when self-proclaimed fact-checkers in our profession decide to rubber-stamp Fox News talking points. This week, PolitiFact selected as the "lie of the year" the Democratic claim that votes for a Republican plan to replace fee-for-service Medicare for everyone under age 55 with a completely different voucher system were votes to "kill Medicare." (See the link above for why PolitiFact's conclusion is pure B.S.)

My favorite response to PolitiFact's selection? This tweet: "If I kill a man and take over his identity, I actually did not commit a crime. Thanks PolitiFact!"

Journalism deserves better than this. Our communities deserve better than this. But they won't get better than this if journalists decide that our primary professional goal is to always remain neutral in everything - to never take a stand. That just leaves us as ineffective bystanders while propagandists set the public agenda.

The only way that we will better serve our profession, and our communities, to become advocates for the truth. And that means calling out those voices in our community - including PolitiFact - when they get things wrong.

I'm glad that some professors are teaching advocacy journalism. We get into this field to raise some hell and make things right. Let's never forget that - let's embrace it.

Robert Niles on OJR

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