What's wrong with us?

May 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – I am on the road today, attending the “NewsTools 2008: Journalism that Matters” conference at Yahoo! The conference is the work of the Media Giraffe Project, which bills the event “a concept/design mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs.”

Today’s event focused on the ‘concept’ half, with ‘design’ – whatever it might turn out to be – left for tomorrow’s agenda. Organizers eschewed a traditional, panel-oriented format in favor of asking participants to design their own sessions on the fly. That format offers great potential, for keeping topics fresh and audience members engaged. The risk, however, is an event that resembles a junior high school mixer, with everyone glued to their seats around the perimeter, afraid of initiating contact with anyone.

To the organizers’ credit, many volunteers stepped forward, and the participants I spoke with reported the sessions they attended worthwhile, though not revolutionary. I meant to hop between concurrent sessions, but found myself sitting through my first choices until their end, engaged in the discussions.

We will be interviewing some of the participants about their initiatives, in future articles on OJR. And I hope to bring you reports of some of the research and production tools and operational solutions we examine tomorrow in a future column.

But today, I’d like to start with the problems — the challenges and roadblocks that I saw, or heard others describe, during today’s sessions. How many of these sound familiar to you?

Impatience with unsolved problems

I don’t know of anyone who’s launched a website, or other computer application, and had it immediately work well and serve its audience completely. Nope. It’s alpha, beta… then launch, usually followed by a quick succession of revisions and patches. With users providing valuable feedback along the way. Developers accept that a project is not complete until it has had some time to live in the field, used by actual consumers.

This, of course, is not the way most journalists work. They keep their stories internal, password-protected within their newsroom’s publication system, until it’s been desk-edited, copy-edited, sometimes lawyer-vetted, skedded and copy-edited again. That’s created a cultural expectation within the journalism business that one’s product will be complete when it goes to the public.

With the exception of a few early adopters of open-source journalism, the public beta is a foreign concept to most reporters. But a willingness to test, even to fail, in front of the public is a requirement for technical innovation. If you’ve become used to having everything “just so” before sending it our into the world, you’re bound to feel disappointment, then frustration, when that world changes and people rapidly want new and different things to try.

That’s the tone I heard underneath many frustrations expressed today (and at previous industry events). Even when the industry is making progress (with blogging and with online community management, for example) many journalists feel uncomfortable waiting for initiatives to play out in public. Journalists would do better to think like programmers in the sense of recognizing incremental success and not getting too depressed when initiatives fail. Keep what works, learn from what doesn’t and try again, a little differently next time.

Inbred analysis

One participant mentioned that she kept running into the same people at these types of conferences. That’s a problem. The journalism industry typically looks within itself for potential solutions to technical and business challenges online, when it should be looking to people outside the “news” industry who have taken on, and solved, many of the same challenges.

Newspapers have struggled for years to learn how to build and manage insightful, responsible online discussion communities, ignoring the hundreds of individuals outside the field who have built large, well-run and, sometimes, even financially lucrative, forums online. Some newsrooms have struggled to deploy multi-million-dollar content management systems, while open-source developers have created more stable and scalable systems at a fraction of the cost.

The situation reminds me of political parties keep hiring the same losing campaign managers, election cycle after election cycle. Again, it’s time to think like a programmer: If you want a different output, you need to try a different input. Just because someone is engaged in publishing content online that doesn’t carry the “Big ‘J’” Journalism label doesn’t mean that such individuals haven’t learned and can’t teach those who do use that label something valuable about publishing online.

Dinner isn’t all vegetables

Many journalists who whine about their inability to make money online for their “serious journalism” need to take a more thoughtful look at what they are offering their potential audience.

It’s a rare publication that rakes in the cash offering readers nothing but investigative pieces and serious, in-depth profiles. Even The New Yorker runs a hell of a lot of cartoons. Individual journalists may aspire to a career of hard-hitting reporting. But their companies also employ people who are shooting wild art at Little League games, publishing pages filled with comics and Sudoku, and running reader sweepstakes and giveaways.

If you’re going to publish a website, you can’t forget the gimmicks. As one of my colleagues asked, ‘where’s your Wingo?’ What fun, silly, engaging things are you going to do online to help make your potential audience want to spend more time with your website?

As I discussed with several other conference participants over dinner, journalists need to treat their websites like a dinner party. You can’t just dish out a plate of veggies. You need to invite your readers in, chat with them, serve ‘em a drink and get them comfortable. Then you can start dishing out the food, including a main course, veggies and dessert.

Reporters who worked as specialists offline need to develop and display additional skills when they move online, including the ability to entertain as well as inform their online readers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

'How do I get people to come to my website?'

April 25, 2008 By 3 Comments

A reader wrote to me this week asking a question I’ve heard from many journalists trying to make the switch from a print newsroom to independent online publishing.

“How do I get readers to come to my website?”

Great question. So let’s answer it.

First, let’s be clear that the key to gaining and retaining an audience in any medium is to provide outstanding content. Tell an engaging story, deliver an illuminating anecdote, put up a compelling photo or a gripping video — those are things that bring readers to a website.

Since most of the readers of this website are journalists by trade and training, I’m not use this column to write about doing those things. You already know. And if you need some pointers on how to do them better, well, we have unlimited “newshole” to write about that later….

No, today I’m going to write about the trickier question for most journalists: How do you get folks to notice your great work?

In the newsroom, you’ve got a promotions staff, a circulation department and years of established market share doing that for you. On your own… you don’t. And even if you’re working for a newspaper website, those offline resources often don’t help you attract much online readership. So how do you do it?

Ultimately, this boils down to a question familiar to any adolescent: How can I be more popular?

Answering that question can be tough for journalists, given that so many of us likely spent our high school lunchtimes doing homework in a favorite English teacher’s empty classroom, instead of holding court in the cafeteria with the rest of the Heathers. (Apologies for the GenX pop culture reference….)

But here goes… more people will notice you in that crowded cafeteria than in that empty classroom. So you’ve got to start by getting out and going where the people are.

Starting a Blogspot blog is easy. But no one’s going to find it. You need to begin your online publish career by socializing in established online communities related to your “beat.” Writing about politics? Keep a diary at DailyKos, blog at RedState, submit to Huffington Post, or hang out in the TPM Cafe.

No matter what you cover, from Buddhism to busking, there is an online community discussing that issue. Go there and contribute.

Author Julie Powell won a James Beard Award for “Julie and Julia,” a personal memoir that grew from her blog about cooking recipes from Julia Child’s
“Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I.” When I met her at a Beard Foundation panel we both were on in New York two years ago, she told me that she chose to publish her blog on Salon’s blogging pages, instead of through Blogger, because she wanted to connect with the existing blogging community that Salon already had established.

Those readers on Salon helped get her initial blog noticed, ultimately leading to a book contract and a movie deal. Today’s she’s got a blog on Blogspot, but starting her blog within an established community, rather than on its own virtual island, helped improve the odds of her story being found.

Okay, so you’ve found a relevant community and you are writing there. Now what?

Do not fall into the trap of trying to sound like everyone else on the site. Remember, your goal here is to stand out, so much that people will want to follow you back to your own website. To do that, you should write in a comfortable, conversational style that will blend with the other content in the community, but that reflects the solid reporting and engaging voice that you, as an experienced journalist, can bring to a piece.

Read what others have to say and listen to them as potential sources. Start humbly, adding only your own original reporting and analysis. Then, as the community allows you, step up to a leadership role. Compliment the great posts, follow-up on the interesting and do what you can to keep conversations moving.

If you are writing a blog on the community site, start using interactive tools to engage readers with your content. Use the comments tool by asking questions of your readers and inviting them to use the comments section to respond. Then do the same, yourself. Respond to your readers’ responses, answering their questions and continuing conversations.

No other step you take will better deliver the message that you are real, engaging human being, one worth revisiting and spending time with, than this one.

If you are not blogging, but just commenting on that other community, eventually you will want to start your own blog or website elsewhere and use your comments on the community site (judiciously) to point readers to it. When a community conversation relates to something you’ve written about on your blog, you can respond with something along the lines of “as I wrote on my blog this morning…” (with the underlined words linked to the blog entry). Don’t beat people over the head with it; just add a relevant link every few days.

Beyond comments, try using polls and surveys to tempt readers into clicking on your posts. Consider contests and charity drives as well. Pay attention to those house ads in the newspaper and steal whatever ideas you think you can make work to draw attention to your site.

Of course, if something doesn’t feel comfortable to you, don’t do it. A gimmick should never offend your readers and potential readers. But recognize that newspapers have been using various gimmicks to draw readers for years. It’s no sin to do the same for your site.

Finally, find a way to remind people whenever you post. An RSS feed is a must, as is an opt-in e-mail newsletter that you can use to end updates to your most interested readers.

You start, however, by getting out of the house and engaging potential readers where they are online, then showing enough leadership that they will want to follow you back to your place.

Have a question for OJR? Editor Robert Niles will answer questions in his column, or find someone else who can in a guest column. Send your questions about online journalism and entrepreneurship to OJR via ojr [at] www.ojr.org.]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Building reader loyalty, one bracket at a time

March 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment

For those of you not spending the day at work watching NCAA basketball tournament games (or for those bored by an inevitable first-round blow-out), let’s take a look at a few innovative online projects that newspapers have created to build traffic off public interest in the annual college playoffs.

Many newspaper websites offer contests in the week leading up to the tournament, inviting readers to fill out the 65-team tournament bracket with their picks for winners in each of the games. It’s the (legal) online version of the ever-opular office betting pools, with the not-so-legally-insignificant difference that the prizes are coming from sponsors and not money put up by the participants.

That’s fine. It drives some traffic, and people like making picks without having to put any of their own skin in the game. But everyone’s doing that. What else is out there?

I found a few interesting examples.

First, the Los Angeles Times offered an option on its Flash tournament brackets that I’d not seen before:

LA Times graphic

It’s a geographic map that shows where each of the 65 teams are traveling from and to for the first-round matchups. The NCAA sends teams flying all over the country in an effort to balance the competitive level in each of its tournament regions. I found it fascinating to see, in one glance, just how far some teams have to go. Plus, this graphic provides a handy way to answer the inevitable first-round question: “I’ve never heard of that school; where is it from again?”

Click on the “Bracket” option at the top of the graphic, and you return to the traditional bracket chart, which readers can fill out by clicking team names.

The Washington Post and USA Today produced their own NCAA tournament webpages, but what caught my eye is how they also spun the idea of filling out a tournament bracket and applied that to different forms of entertainment.

The Post got a head start by starting earlier this month a single-elimination tournament pitting characters from the TV show “Lost” against one another. Readers voted for the characters they thought would survive in each head-to-head match-up.

Washington Post graphic

USA Today seeded 64 entertainment celebrities and celebrity couples and created a reader-vote tournament to find the “winner”:

USA Today graphic

The WaPo and USAT tournaments exemplify the power of reader interactivity. Sure, they are fluff. But they, like the interactive NCAA tournament brackets, are fluff that get people reading, clicking and spending time on their newspapers’ websites.

Industry veteran Vin Crosbie last week pointed out on Poynter’s online-news e-mail list that U.S. newspapers have a huge problem in eliciting repeat visits from their online readers:

“If you download the NAA’s spreadsheet of the N//N data and calculate medians, you’ll see that the median user of those top 100 U.S. newspaper sites visited only 2.58 times per month and saw only 15.03 Web pages on a newspaper site per month. That’s not much: a visit only once every 11.6 days and 15 Web pages all month.”

My wife is fond of citing her Suzuki violin training that “it takes 21 days to form a habit.” (“And 12 steps to break it,” I shot back the first time she told me this.) Whether habits form in 21 days or not, website publishers help their readership numbers by creating features that inspire readers to come back to a site, and reward them for doing so, day after day.

A reader-vote tournament, such as the Post’s and USA Today’s, does this. Unlike traditional online polls, these build upon each other, sending the winners in one day’s poll on to the next’s, inspiring readers to return. Unlike the NCAA tournament, which you can follow on TVs, websites, cell phones and newspapers, these tournaments are available only on their creators’ websites. So you gotta come back there to vote, and to see who won in each round.

Take it a step further: Include each day’s match-ups and results in one of your daily update e-mails, and invite those readers following the tournament to subscribe to it. I’ll bet you many of them continue to get and read that daily e-mail, finding other news and features on your site, even after the tournament’s done.

If you want people reading the great reporting on your news website, first, you’ve got to get them in the habit of coming to the site. Don’t overlook the value of interactive reader-driven online events, such as these, in helping you to do that.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
Newer Posts »