Sure, we’ve gotten more news choppers and better graphics on weather and politics. There are a few interesting TV news apps. But, for the most part, your local TV news broadcast looks much as it did a decade ago. It’s pretty much locked into its time slot of 5 p.m. or 10 p.m. You sit, you watch. The anchors work their way through weather, traffic, sports and the smattering of local stories brought to you from the roving news truck. If you stick around long enough, maybe there is a great story at minute 22.

But what if you could harness all the emergent technologies to reshape TV news into a brand-new product, one that maximizes audience engagement, personalizes broadcasts to your interests and allows you to dig deep into digitized news archives?

We recently put that question to a group of technology executives and TV news professionals during a day-long workshop at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. The guest list included Cisco, DirecTV and several tech startups, as well as ABC, CBS, Univision, Frontline, the Los Angeles Times and Reuters. The goal was to see if we could come up with ideas for products that would take your TV news to the next level. We did. But first, why hasn’t this happened already?

One of the big problems for TV news, especially local news, is that, well, it still kind of works. Yes, national news broadcasts grab only about half of the 52 million viewers they had at their 1980 peak. But they are still making money by owning a coveted audience of mostly seniors.

Meanwhile, local TV news is, by many measures, thriving. It often accounts for as much as half of a station’s total revenue. Many local TV stations are producing upwards of five hours of live TV news a day. Some are even expanding. Around 74% of Americans either watch or check a local TV news web site at least once a week, more than any other news source. Though news snobs may snicker, Americans also rate local TV news as their most trustworthy source, giving it higher grades than 60 Minutes or NPR.

But success can breed complacency. And in an environment of constant upheaval, there is no clear path toward successful innovation. At the same time, the costs of doing nothing are sky high. Just ask any newspaper executive.

There are a few areas where TV news cleans everyone’s clock. On the local level, it’s weather and traffic. There are plenty of easier and even more accurate ways to get traffic updates, but TV news puts a narrative behind that backup on the freeway (it’s the jackknifed tractor-trailer which slammed into the guardrail) and serves up aerial views of the scene as well.

Also, for a live event, nothing beats TV news. Whether it’s the runaway balloon boy in Colorado (a hoax, it turns out) or coverage of a DC-9 dropping flame retardant on a wildfire in Southern California, TV news produces can’t-look-away coverage.

But it’s also shackled with issues that make it such a poor fit in an access-anywhere, news-on-demand environment. During the eight hours we spent cloistered together in a room, our group of TV news folks and techies pretty much agreed on the shortcomings.

First, there’s a total absence of viewer control when it comes to TV news. They are still producing a one-size-fits-all broadcast, which feels increasingly anachronistic to the viewer.

Also, appointment viewing – with the news stuck in a time slot – clashes with packed schedules and increasing competition for mindshare. I might DVR a sit-com, but news off the DVR gets stale quickly.

The good news is that there are solutions to both of these problems. And solving them might also help TV news crack another problem: how to directly connect with its audience.

One scenario the group came up with is an app that would allow viewers to build their own broadcasts throughout the day. As soon as the sun comes up, the app pushes out a list of five video stories. Viewers can choose which ones to put in their playlist and which ones to discard. As the day moves forward, viewers are given more choices. Some come from pushed breaking news alerts; others come from the viewers’ own social network or favorite topics. The playlist is dynamic.

Whenever the viewer has a free 20 minutes, he or she can watch the tailored broadcast on the device of choice – phone, tablet, computer or regular TV. The stories that play are the latest on a particular topic, so if you selected a story on the debt ceiling in the morning, then you’re greeted with the most up-to-date version when you decide to watch.

The goal is to create a news package that is both customized and curated. Those two characteristics often appear to be at odds with each other. But it was clear from our day-long exercise that customers want both.

Another prototype that came out of the day was a news interface that allows you to pause the broadcast you’re watching in order to go deeper into a particular topic. After watching a two-minute piece on Syria, the viewer can choose to go back in time and learn more about the rebels, the Assad dynasty or other aspects of the story by instantly accessing a broadcaster’s digital archives from a list that pops up on the screen. When the viewer has had his or her fill, it’s back to the regular broadcast.

Other ideas for innovation emerged from the discussion. As usual, the technologists saw a sea of possibility while the news folks saw a wall of obstacles, such as content rights and a newsroom culture resistant to change. But the takeaway from the day was that TV news, if it chooses, has the potential to radically enrich the way it engages with its audience. Let’s hope they seize the opportunity. So stay tuned.

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.

a) a powerful upgrade that gives users the ability to fine-tune their news feed, seeing only the updates they care about, and finally muting the noise from friends with whom they really aren’t that close.

b) a classic example of developers over-thinking their product, creating an incomprehensible jumble of updates in no apparent order, instead of the simple stream of posts we were used to seeing on the Facebook home page.

The correct answer (IMHO) is, c) both.

Facebook’s changes to its users’ front pages illustrates a classic developers’ dilemma: How do you balance power with simplicity in an application? Facebook’s added plenty of new features in this update, empowering users to take more control of the way news from friends and followed pages is displayed. But in doing so, Facebook’s created default settings that are leaving too many of its users confused, frustrated and angry. (Thursday night Facebook addressed some of those criticisms by adding a link to jump down to the most recent stories, bypassing Facebook’s selection of the “top stories.”)

All this is before the public launch of its new Timeline feature for users’ profile pages, now available to developers and select few other Facebook users.

Count me among the Facebook users initially ticked off by the changes. After confronting the unholy mess of my Facebook feed, I tweeted: “I like Twitter because, unlike FB and G+, it shows me all the updates from those I follow, in simple chronological order. Is that so hard?”

But curiosity (or masochism) kicked in and I decided to poke around the “new” Facebook. I soon discovered that I could alter the “weight” that Facebook gave to posts from each of my friends, choosing to get “All Updates,” “Most Updates” or “Only Important” updates from each friend. I also can opt out of getting various types of updates from those friends, including their comments and likes on other posts.

Unfortunately, the user interface to make these changes stinks. It’s a pain in the rear to have to set your preferences for each friend individually, rather than being able to drag and drop friends into one of the three priority categories. It’d be nice to be able to opt out of certain types of updates for everyone once, too, instead of having to declare you don’t want friends’ game updates individually. (Maybe Facebook allows this, but I couldn’t find where or how to do it, and I spent hours working with this new interface yesterday.)

Of course, when I and millions of other users get around to telling Facebook all this, we’ll have given Facebook an amazing amount of power to refine its social map of world. That makes me feel funny about sharing this even more detailed information about my friendships and relationships. Heaven knows I wouldn’t want Facebook to share with my friends how I’ve – in essence – ranked them. But giving Facebook this information does get me the feed I want, so I did it anyway.

What does this mean for journalists and other publishers online? I should note that Facebook now has given you the ability to allow people to “subscribe” to your updates without you having to befriend them in return. This enables Facebook to become a direct competitor with Twitter, where following never had to be mutual. (You have to opt into allowing subscriptions for this to happen, in case you are one who doesn’t want non-friends seeing your updates.)

Personally, I’m not opting in. I like having one social network that’s just limited to my offline friends and acquaintances, where I can share personal notes about me and my family. If you want to read what I have to say about the industry and other news, follow me on Twitter or Google+.

Currently, subscriptions are available only on personal accounts, and not on publishers’ pages. That’s because pages never required reciprocity. Any Facebook user has had the ability to follow (aka “like”) a page without needing the page to reciprocate. It would be nice, though, to see Facebook achieve some consistency by using the “subscribe” vocabulary when referencing pages, too. And to allow users to opt in or out of specific types of updates from pages, as they now can from personal accounts.

Here’s a warning for publishers, though. With people now able to opt out of “comments and likes” from their friends, that has the potential to dramatically weaken the power of the “Like” button so many of us have installed on our sites, if this option is widely exercised. I also feel worry for those publishers who’ve invested time and effort in building massive Facebook followings, only to have their posts lost on Facebook’s confusing new homepage.

Yet I look hopefully at the changes, too. If you’re not yet using Facebook’s Recommendations Box, give it a glance today. That feature automatically builds links to the most popular stories on your website among Facebook users. I’ve installed it at the bottom of pages on one of my websites in the hopes that it will improve time spent on site by directing readers to an automatically updated list of the most popular (not just most read) stories on the site.

I’m also hopeful that if Facebook cleans up the user interface for its new subscription preferences, it might help the visibility of publishers’ pages on the site. Once I went through the arduous task, Facebook cleared away posts from casual friends, giving more links on my news feed to the people and pages I most want to follow.

I love that, from a user’s perspective. And I love it from a publisher’s perspective, too. Sure, Facebook’s a mess now, but there’s great new power within it. If Facebook can find a way to clean up its current UI mess, it could end up helping publishers by better connecting them with their most interested readers.

Myth 1: You can’t support a publication on online advertising revenue.

When you hear this line, here’s what the speaker really is saying: “I can’t support my publication on my online advertising revenue.” Just because one manager hasn’t figured it out doesn’t mean that the solution doesn’t exist. If you want to seek foundation support, great. Go for it. But don’t fool yourself for a moment into believing that “non profit” means “no money worries.” Non-profit is a tax status, not a business model. You’ll still need to find sources of income, and in the non-profit world those sources come with many more strings attached than advertising contracts have.

Myth 1 is often followed in the same comment by Myth 1.a: You can’t make money on AdSense. Again, what the speaker is really saying is: “I can’t make money on AdSense.” People who say this typically make the lazy mistake of thinking that AdSense provides incremental revenue each time it displays on a website, so they stick it into every ad slot on the site they can’t sell themselves.

Well, if your local or small-scale advertisers didn’t want to pay to deliver their message on a page, what makes you think that the big industry pros who are placing multi-million-dollar AdWords campaigns want any part of those pages, either? Slapping ads on pages that don’t convert causes Google to cut your payment on pages that do. Adding extra AdSense slots to your site can actually decrease your revenue. The key to AdSense is to limit its deployment to pages that will attract interested readers who will click through to big-dollar advertisers. Never use AdSense as remnant inventory. Use it as a tool to attract ads to pages of interest to national and global advertisers you can’t reach with your local sales staff.

Myth 2: Readers have short attention spans, so you must break up your content.

Readers only appear to have short attention spans because the media revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries have left them bombarded with content options. They must make decisions within split seconds about which content to read or watch and which to ignore.

But once they make the decision to try your content they will stick with it as long as they continue to feel that it’s worth their time. People with short attention spans don’t spend hours without interruption playing Minecraft or Madden. They don’t read 800-page Harry Potter books cover to cover or sit through three-hour Lord of the Rings movies. But all of those were huge hits.

Breaking up content into multiple pages and components simply reminds people at each interruption that they have a choice and could be doing something else. Invest your energy instead into ensuring that your work is relevant and rewarding to your audience. Then craft an awesome lead or visual to grab their attention.

Myth 3: Online journalism = big Flash graphics

Back in the days of shovelware newspaper websites, staffers in the online department had to justify their existence while trying to define to their print-focused bosses just what this Internet thing was good for anyway.

Enter the big Flash graphic. Hey, I had a lot of fun with Flash presentations that turned investigative reports into facile video games, too. But there’s so much more for us to do today. And with poor or nonexistent mobile support limiting the usability of Flash content, I’d question continuing to invest significant resources in Flash development. Perhaps the bigger problem is the attitude illustrated by Myth 3.a: Interactivity = multimedia. No, they are not the same. Interactivity is the inclusion of the audience in the creation of a work. Multimedia is the use of multiple media, including photos, video, audio, text and animation, in a work. That readers must decide what to click on in a big Flash graphic doesn’t make it any more interactive than a Web browser, which also gives readers click choices.

Myth 4: You need a big editorial staff to do great journalism online.

This myth is a favorite of old-media managers who are trying to define away their competition. The market is evolving. Let’s deal with it, instead of trying to pretend that change isn’t happening. Devotion to large staffs explains why so many publications find themselves believing Myth 1, too. Their problem is using old-media models to compete in a new-media space. (Across-the-board cutting isn’t the solution, by the way. Reinvention is.) One-person websites can do great work. They’ve even won Online Journalism Awards in the past.

Myth 5: Paywalls are the best (or only) way to paid content online.

Paywalls work when you offer (a) highly-specialized, unique content of tangible value to people (see Wall Street Journal or Cooks’ Illustrated), or (b) offer enough free passageways through the paywall that the pay scheme becomes a voluntary contribution system (see The New York Times).

Despite how great you think your content to be, if you’re reporting daily news, your site probably doesn’t fall under (a). And if you are not a beloved national brand, you probably won’t make much money from (b), either. If you really want to sell content directly to the reader, do as I’ve been urging for the past two months and look into eBooks, an established market where consumers have shown that they’re willing to pay for content at higher price points than many paywall schemes have offered.

Have fun at the conference. Go ahead and poke the trolls. And, as with any conference, don’t forget to give yourself a daily goal of meeting at least five new people, then talking with each one for at least a couple of minutes. You’ll learn more from those interactions than from listening to any of these old myths.

Many news websites have set up automated scripts and agents to handle a variety of tasks on their sites – from story migration to registration confirmations to page customization.

But how often do you check on your automated processes? Or do you take the Ron Popeil approach to Web publishing: “Set it and forget it”?

This week, when news of the Casey Anthony verdict broke, I just happened to be checking Yahoo! News’ mobile site. Here’s what I found:

First, a point to Yahoo! for not leading with the Anthony case, the latest media circus designed to channel public anger toward an insignificant person and away from anyone with actual power to abuse. But I take away that point and dock Yahoo! News an extra one for leading with a PRWeb press release instead.

That leads me to wonder if Yahoo! News has turned over its mobile site to an automated process that no human being is reviewing. Because I can’t imagine that any competent news producer would choose to lead what should be a major news site with a press release. Nor can I understand why a major news site would completely ignore such a popular story, as regrettable as it might be. The Anthony story didn’t show up on the Yahoo! News mobile site until it topped the “Most Popular” section about an hour later. Never did make “Top Stories” that I saw that afternoon.

Yahoo! News has been having other problems with its mobile site, too. I tweeted on June 25 that the site’s footer still read “© 2010.” A few days later, Yahoo! News debuted its new mobile design (with an updated copyright notice), and that’s when the PRWeb and other inconsequential stories began invading the front page.

Dead links began appearing behind stories, too, such as this one I got when I clicked one of the site’s designated “Top Stories”:

This is not an isolated incident. Every time I used the Yahoo! News mobile site after the new design debuted until I gave up on the site yesterday, I found at least one broken link off the mobile front page. Is anyone at Yahoo! actually using the company’s mobile site? It appears not.

Not that other news publications aren’t having problems with their mobile versions. Here’s USA Today’s front page, from the same day and hour:

The photo’s so large that it pushes the news off the front page. (Though USA Today does keep the ad up prominently, though.) You have to scroll down to get to any usable news:

I understand that frugal news managers are turning to automation to develop more and more complex services for readers and customers while keeping labor costs manageable. But automation never excuses a publisher from maintaining human control over the publication. You can’t ever “set it and forget it” in the publishing industry. All news publications should assign an actual human employee to review automated processes on a regular schedule, and give those people the power to order immediate changes when something breaks.

So assign someone to look at those mobile sites every day. (And not via a computer – they should look at them using mobile devices.) Look at the pages that your scripts are generating. Don’t rely on readers to tell you when something’s wrong. When I worked at Disney, we were told during our company training that 99 people would experience something wrong before one would complain. That’s 99 potentially lost audience members or customers before the complaint hits someone’s in-box.

Why take that risk? Use your own product. “Eat your own dog food,” as the developer cliche says.

Trying to run your website on the cheap by creating automated tasks that no one ever checks simply makes your website… look cheap.

I found out checking my Twitter feed on my iPhone. I suspect that many people first heard the same way, though tweets, mobile alerts, text messages and Facebook posts. The news was 15 minutes old on Twitter before I saw the first TV network break in to report that President Obama was about to make a statement, then soon after confirming that bin Laden, the man behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was dead.

(And if you’d really been paying attention, you might have read earlier in the day this Twitter user live-blogging the attack in Pakistan that killed bin Laden.)

I hadn’t planned, obviously, to write about bin Laden for today. (Nor had any of the journalists around the world who were tearing up old budgets and remaking their pages late last night.) But I had planned to write what I fear will become a recurring nag to online journalists to pay closer attention to how their work comes across on mobile devices.

Given how I – and millions others, I suspect – first heard the news last night, that advice seems all the more relevant to me now. So now we join our regularly scheduled post. Mobile must not be left an afterthought in a news organization; it must become the first thought. It’s the first thought already for our audience – the way that more and more people are first hearing about breaking news, or even non-breaking viral news, online.

And yet, news organizations continue to make the mistakes I complained about last year, and the year before that.

If there’s one item of advice I wish that all news organizations would be embrace, it would be this: Please, if you tweet a link to a story on your website, and I click that link on my mobile device, do not then redirect me to your mobile home page, instead of sending me to the article you tweeted.

Home page redirection is the lazy programmer’s way of ensuring that mobile users see your optimized site. Stop it, please. Stop it now. Any programmer worth employing ought to be able to create a device-sniffing script that redirects readers to the mobile version of the specific article instead.

Beyond that, most of the frustrations I have as a mobile user stem from an apparent belief in some news organizations that “mobile = text.” While I encourage news organizations to remember the millions of would-be readers out there with feature phones, we’re long past the era when anyone could assume that “mobile = ” any one thing. Mobile’s as diverse as the Internet itself now, and designers and editors must be ready to craft presentations that meet individual readers’ needs, regardless of the device that they are using.

With no visuals available as the news broke, the bin Laden story could be told to mobile users using nothing but text. (That lack of visuals put television at a disadvantage as it waited nearly an hour for the President to speak Sunday night. My children started timing the loop of stock bin Laden footage one network played in between its various talking heads.)

That’s hardly the case with all news stories of course. Consider Friday’s royal wedding in England. And before anyone sneers that the wedding wasn’t ‘news,’ lemme say that if a billion people around the world are watching a live event at the same time, that event is worth covering. Just put the event in appropriate context – in this case, as a cultural celebration that will might end up having a significant effect on the global fashion industry, the wedding industry and the tourism industry. And that millions of people around the world enjoyed as at an excuse for some fun parties.

That now said, if you’re going to tweet a story about a photo of someone’s dress, and I get a mobile version of that story, the story better include the photo of the dress. Yet many websites, as a formatting matter, automatically strip photos and video embeds from their mobile stories.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter wether the photo is of an evening gown or a battle scene, images are a part of journalism and ought to be a part of journalism on the mobile Web, as well. Even the cheapest feature phones today have the ability to show a photo. Employ smart programming that gives your editors the ability to deliver newsworthy photos to feature phone users, more liberal use of photos to smart phone users and photo-rich displays to tablet users.

At the same time, let’s also use the need to better optimize the news reading experience for mobile users as an excuse to kill some of the bad design habits that have infected some news organizations. My current pet peeve is stories that present lists as multi-page galleries when the items in the lists don’t need a visual presentation.

Galleries for a list of the top 10 news photos of year use that format well. Galleries of the 10 most useless college majors, not so much.

It’s annoying enough to click through all those panels (with the interstitial ads) on a laptop Web browser. Try doing it on a phone. Yuck.

Let’s fess up. Those types of presentations are designed more to pad page views and ad impressions than to effectively communicate information to an audience. That’s not journalism. It’s spamming.

I asked on my personal Twitter feed if anyone knew of an ombudsman or readers’ rep who had addressed online design issues in defense of readers’ interests. I didn’t get any responses. If you have a link to one such piece, send it my way, or drop it into the comments.

Let’s quit hiding behind the excuse that we need to make money with our news websites. Instead, let’s recognize that the way to make money, in news or any other industry, is to find and meet the needs of audience and customers. It’s not to annoy them, harass them or frustrate them. Pageview-inflating galleries, lazy mobile “optimization” and one-size-fits-all design might help the bottom line in the short-term by inflating revenue or cutting costs. But ours is an industry that’s too long put off long-term thinking in favor of real and imagined short-term crises.

At some point, if you fail to meet your audience and customers’ needs, you fail. We don’t have to end up that way. But we will if we don’t start doing a better job of doing things such as creating better mobile news designs.

Here’s hoping more of us learn this lesson, so I don’t have to write this piece again next year.

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.

Niles: How does a journalist decide when a story merits these types of explanatory links?

Yaros: The first question is whether the content is simple or complex for a general audience to understand? For example, does one need at least one high school course to understand this topic? Communicators have always had to impute audience knowledge, estimating what audiences know and understand. If a digital story is complex, such as news about Japan’s nuclear reactors, explanatory narrative text should be strategically combined with specific explanatory links to communicate one coherent story. That decision needs to made at the outset, not after the text is already written.

Niles: How would you suggest people incorporate this?

Yaros: When beginning a story, students need to envision multimedia, not just text. “Related” graphics, links, video, polls, and animations are not as effective when added to text later, or if they are treated as a separate “explainer.” A coherent multimedia story – like a traditional newspaper story – must be coherent to maximize a user’s engagement and comprehension.

Niles: So there is still an effective place for “traditional” linking to outside websites within news stories?

Yaros: Yes. The results from my study showed that traditional “inverted pyramid” stories about issues most users understand communicate better with “traditional” linking to outside websites. In fact, users comprehended LESS content when explanatory links were combined with the inverted pyramid (compared to an explanatory narrative).

Niles: What drew you to this topic?

Yaros: I worked in broadcast journalism for about 10 years followed by another 10 running an educational software company. When it became obvious to me in the 1990s that we were entering a new world of how information is produced, shared and consumed, I was convinced then – as I am today – that more applied research is needed if we are to anticipate changes in how future news audiences will engage with multimedia and mobile devices. Instead of keeping up with today’s newest tools, my research tries to identify trends that predict how improved video and faster speeds in the future – using new products, such as the iPhone5, iPad3, 4GS network and social tools – will influence a savvy multitasking audience.

Since beginning my Ph.D. program in 2000, the mission has been to research how audiences learn from multiple platforms. My work commenced by applying and testing the traditional ways people comprehended text then building on that foundation for the web by adding photos, video, audio, links, etc. The outcome is the “P-I-C-K News” model that simultaneously combines: (1) personalized content, (2) interactivity, such as different types of links, and (3) coherence in multiple media with (4) minimal “kick outs” (or things that terminate one’s interest in content).

Niles: What about additional research on this topic?

Yaros: The “crisscross” pattern in the results show that linear explanatory links were best with linear explanatory texts, and traditional links to other websites were more effective with the inverted pyramid. What we don’t yet know is why. My guess is that when a user encounters a news story, he or she immediately employs a particular comprehension strategy because they sense what will be needed to understand it. That’s only a guess at this point.

* * *

What strategy do you use (if any) to decide when to place hyperlinks within your posts? I’d love to hear your advice to other journalists, in the comments.

Mike Shatzkin on the Idea Logical blog said

“Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand.”

There have been some forays into news site curation. LJWorld created a Kansas Legislature page in 2005 that aggregated links to general news coverage of the state Legislature. But they took the next step of selecting and organizing stories by specific issues like Death Penalty, Concealed Weapons and Sunday Liquor Sales. The page served as a “one-stop shopping” resource by anticipating the kinds of information someone interested in the Legislature might want by including such resources as bios of legislators, legislative calendars and bill finders, and copies of the State of the Union addresses going back several years. LJWorld still has an aggregated page of Legislative coverage, but it is not longer curated – it is just a list of links to news stories.

Losing the topic focus switched the LJWorld’s page from curation to aggregation because an essential step in curation is organization, as they did with the issues, not just listing. Just as a well-curated museum has the Early Asian art area separate from the Surrealist collection, so should news sites provide some subject organization within large news topics.

Curation can also entail finding and providing resources from all over, not just aggregating your own content.

The New York Times Topic Pages are an example of this kind of curation. They have thousands of subject / event / personality specific pages which provide an overview article on the topic, links to all the NYT past coverage (with a searchable database specific to those articles), and, here’s where the curation comes in, sections on “Headlines from around the web” (a listing of articles found using the NYTimes’ news aggregation program Blogrunner which has been sent to selected sites) and “A list of resources from around the Web as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.”

We were interested in observing how this kind of curated content was used by people on an information seeking quest. We conducted eyetracking sessions with 37 undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota. The students were told that they were going to write a research report for a class and were given a selection of 10 New York Times Topic Pages from which they could choose the topic of their report: the U.S. Dollar, Earthquakes, the U.S. Federal Budget, Foreclosures, Mortgages and the Markets, Piracy at Sea, Stem Cells, Tornadoes, and Unemployment.

The students sat at a Tobii Technology eye tracking device in our research lab and were told to go to the Topic page of their choice and do whatever they wanted (read, click). After 10 minutes we stopped the session. All of the participants answered a short online questionnaire about the website and their information seeking experience after their eye tracking session.

In analyzing the eyetrack videos we designated each section of the Topic Pages (e.g., “Summary,” “Multimedia,” “Navigator,” etc.) and we coded the participant’s “attention” on the page using a construct describing the “Path to a Click” by researchers at Yahoo which characterizes activity on a site by the frequency and duration of a person’s attention to a particular part of the page. These levels are:

1. Saw: when the participant’s gaze passed across a section
2. Noticed: when a section the participant “saw,” then glanced away from, was returned to
3. Parsed: when the participant “fixated” on a section, clearly taking in the text / image

Other things we analyzed in reviewing the videos were:

• the sections that contained URLs that were clicked by the participants to figure out whether the placement of the content influenced their clicking behaviors
• the content of the items that were clicked (headline only, headline plus abstract, headline plus image, etc.)

Among the findings are the following:

ATTENTION TO DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE PAGE. The percent indicates the number of participants.

• Most parsed sections (areas where most attention and time was spent)
  • Summary (100%)
  • Articles about (70.4%)
  • Multimedia (58%)
• Most unparsed sections (virtually no attention paid)
  • top-right search box and top global navigation (both 97.4%)
  • Related Topics (83.3%)
  • left-column advertisement (80.3%)
• Zones in which the most links were clicked: (based on a 3×3 grid placed on the Topic Page)
  • left column middle row
  • middle column top row
  • left column bottom row
• Statistically, contents in the left column were seen, parsed, and clicked the most (Note: the left column was where the archived stories were displayed)

WHAT WAS CLICKED
Among the 37 students, a total of 138 items were clicked (an average of 3.7 clicks per participant) Of those items that were clicked:

• 42% were headline only
• 24.6% were a headline and story abstract
• 14.4% were a headline, abstract and photo

Of all the items clicked 85.5% were story links. Of the other items clicked, 65% of them were from the “Related Topics” box.

In the post-eyetracking survey, participants were asked a number of questions about the features of the page and their importance to them.

• 72% of the participants rated the Navigator (links to other websites) as Useful or Very Useful. Very Useful or Useful ratings of the other key areas of content on the page: Articles from the archive (67%), Headlines from around the Web (59%), Overview of the topic (64%).
• Of the existing or potential functions on the page that could aid a researcher, the following is the ranking by those considered “somewhat important” or “very important”:
  • 100% Bookmark or save an article (81% said “very important”)
  • 70% See article ratings from others
  • 64% Rate an article
  • 56% Sort articles by your rating
• When asked what it was about an item they clicked on that prompted them to click (multiple responses were possible):
  • 81% cited information in the headline
  • 27% cited a photo
  • 21% cited information the abstract
• The preference for display of stories is, by far, most recent to oldest. Articles rated highest by others or most read / emailed articles about the topic was preferred over oldest to most recent stories.
• Students indicated their preference for finding information (if they did not access something like the NYTimes topic page) as major search engines (59.4%), the school library website (35,1%), and online encyclopedias (5.5%).
• Compared to their alternate sources of information, 52.8% of the participants perceived NYT Topic Pages as being equally credible, 37.8% perceived NYT Topic Pages as more credible, and 9.4% perceived NYT Topic Pages as less credible.
• Compared to their alternate sources of information, 54% perceived the information on the NYT Topic Pages as having about the same level of completeness, 30% saw it as more complete, and 16% saw it as less complete.

Students were asked an open-ended question about what they thought of the organization of the NY Times Topic page they used. Here is an analysis of their comments:

• 49% mentioned the site was well organized and made it easy to find information
• 40% mentioned something about the site being busy / visually cluttered
• 35% mentioned the appealing design of the site

Some of the comments might serve as suggestions for other news sites looking into creating similarly aggregated / curated topic pages:

• One student said, “Without a search option, it was kind of hard to find an article that would benefit my ‘research paper’ just from looking at headlines.” Of course there was a search option for the story archive, but it is below the scroll towards the bottom of the page and, apparently, easily overlooked.
• “It was hard to distinguish between articles and opinion pieces.” This should be an important curatorial distinction.
• “Have a way to mark an article you’ve already read.” A followed link is just a slightly lighter color; maybe clicked story links could be made more distinct or could “grey out” for easy recognition.

Honing “curatorial” skills in news organizations is one area that holds potential for creating high value resources for both casual and more motivated information seekers. However, there remain many questions about how best to design and organize these pages rich in both internal and external information. It is a research area we intend to continue to pursue and we welcome your feedback about this study and suggestions for future studies.

If you would like to see “hot spot” images from the study go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/norapaul/EyetrackingHotSpotsNYTTopicsPageProject#. The areas that are red indicate the longest “fixation”, green the next longest, and yellow after that. Areas of the page with no color were not viewed by the participant.

I don’t know if it was a big techie secret that few if any journalists were let in on, but the light dawned for me when I attended (virtually) a recent webinar put on by my friend Birgit Pauli-Haack, who runs Pauli Systems, LC in Naples, Fla.

Birgit demonstrated it via Google Analytics on two attractive real-life sites. I was jolted, and appalled, to discover that one site had a scrolldown rate of 5 percent, the other 6 percent.

This means that of the readers who call up the first site, only 5 percent bother to scroll down from the first screenful they see.

Too much hard work, apparently, to click that down arrow!

I was petrified to discover what the rate would be on my own site, www.ourblook.com, as we have amassed a tremendous amount of material: 320-plus interviews of academics, journalists, business leaders and top professionals on various issue topics. You have to scroll down or move around the site to see a lot of this.

Our rate turned out to be 16 percent – gratifyingly higher than the samples, but still, this means that just one of six readers on our site scrolls down. Of course I don’t have the faintest idea what the rate would be for other sites, as this is locked into their own Google Analytics codes.

But it also means that our site, and probably lots of other sites, needs a redesign. The lesson I took away is that you have one shot – AND ONLY ONE SHOT – to get prospective readers to read, and that’s by what you offer on the first screenful that pops up when the site gets opened. The more elements (promos or items), the better. We have several elements but a Joomla template I’ve seen has 20. That’s the direction I’d like to go in.

Let’s take a look at Politico, which I think is a terrific news and discussion site. When I call it up as I write this, I see one dominant element with large photo (“GOP finds governing isn’t easy”) and parts of three video buttons. That’s all. When I scroll down another screenful, all of a sudden I see 12 promos, and many of them I’d love to open up. If Politico has a good scrolldown rate, and I hope it does, and maybe it does because its loyal readers would know they have to look around, these stories would be read. But if it has a low scrolldown rate like (I guess) many others, these stories would be largely wasted.

This reminds me of my newspaper days when we poor hacks vaguely were aware that lots of readers stopped reading when a story jumped. We didn’t think this applied to us because our efforts, ha-ha, were so brilliantly written that how could anyone not follow the jump?

Then I became a Gannettoid working in the same headquarters building with (though not for) USA Today, and while it was fashionable for the journalism industry to look down on USAT, if not sneer, in fact it was brilliantly proactive. In a revolutionary move for papers, it limited jumps to one per section front – the so-called cover story – as it attempted to get people to like the product, find it easy to navigate and read more of it.

So now we find ourselves in a similar situation: the people who can’t summon up the effort to follow a jump are the same ones who can’t summon up the effort to scroll down. It’s appalling to me, this lack of desire and effort. I frankly don’t understand it. But it is what it is, and editors who deal with it and try to beat it will probably be better off.

Oh yes, how to find that perhaps humiliating scrolldown rate:

1) Start on your Analytics Report Dashboard,
2) On the left side click on Content,
3) Then click on the expanding sub-navigation In-Page Analytics,
4) And there will be a readout at bottom saying X% clicks below.

P.S. I will respond to any reader comments (even the inevitable ones telling me how dumb I am.)

Gerry Storch is editor and administrator of OurBlook – “blook” meaning a cross between a blog and a book. He was a feature writer with the Detroit News and Miami Herald, Accent section editor and newsroom investigative team leader for the News, and sports editor/business editor for Gannett News Service. He has a B.A. in political science and M.A. in journalism, both from the University of Michigan. This is his third article for OJR.

The Gawker redesign attempts to address the fundamental challenge confronting website publishers: How do you keep your front page fresh to reward frequent visitors, while also featuring your best unique or evergreen content, which will appeal to first-time or infrequent readers?

Get that balance wrong, and you’re leaving money on the table.

While I’ve long encouraged students and beginning Web publishers to launch with whatever open-source or free available blogging tool that makes them comfortable, if you’re going to prosper over the long term in online news publishing, you need to have fine control over your publication’s user interface. Out-of-the-box templates and standard designs aren’t going to allow you the design optimization you need to maximize your income.

Whether you’re making money from advertising, grants, direct payments or a combination of those, you need engaged readers in order to make your site attractive to the people writing you checks. But designing for frequent, repeat visitors often leads you to bury content that could interest a first-time reader. And keeping your best scoops or evergreen content up top could lead repeat visitors to think you’ve got nothing fresh, discouraging them from becoming the loyal and passionate repeat visitors who keep your traffic numbers healthy.

Gawker’s proposed moving what it typically runs as blog posts over into what amounts to a headline feed on the right side of its pages. Clicks in that rail would load content in the main bar. But visitors would see the items that Gawker site editors consider their hottest current scoop or story in the mainbar on their initial page load, even if that were older content.

With this system, big-traffic scoops (such as Deadspin’s recent, uh, expose on pro football player Brett Favre) would remain at the top of the main bar longer for initial views, and not be pushed down (or off) the page by newer, though less popular, content.

The new design also is intended to have more visual appeal, plus more space for video advertising, and to accommodate better a TV-style programming schedule throughout the day. Regardless of how you might feel about the websites’ content, Gawker has found a collection of voices and a format that does resonate with readers, eliciting not just daily visits, but repeat visits throughout the day. Smart publishers need to be watching them.

Will this new design work? Heck if I know. But we need additional attempts at finding new design solutions, so that Web publishers have more real world data to guide them in selecting and creating their own front-page designs.

Currently, Gawker websites are using an overhead rail of thumbnails, linking recently popular stories in a bit of design hack to highlight top recent posts without pushing the latest blog posts down out of the main bar. I can’t wait to see if Gawker’s new design works better than that in promoting both increased page views, and more frequent visits to its websites, by changing the mix of popular and fresh content.

We’ll know by how long this new design lasts, of course.

I’d love to hear from more OJR readers how you’ve addressed this challenge. Or would like to.