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“What happened to The Daily?” quote roundup

December 5, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

The Daily, News Corp.’s general-interest iPad news product, shut down this week. Media experts (or perhaps I should say “observers”—I’m not sure the media has any experts anymore) disagree on the specific reasons it failed, but they do seem to agree that it was doomed. The columns I’ve read and rounded up from around the web cite the following three conclusions:

1. Making it available only via iPad and without access to the open social web (readers couldn’t share links) made it a walled garden.

“The Daily’s device-bound nature limited its potential…. Locking into a single platform and not having a web front door limiting sharing and social promotion.” —Joshua Benton

“Publishing for a single platform, whether print, web, or the iPad, is a foolish move, and I think we knew that before The Daily was excised from News Corp.’s balance sheet.” —Ben Jackson

“The product, its content and the conversation around it should have been porous, able to flow in and out of social media platforms and be informed by them. Content should have been unlocked, and made available to subscribers on all platforms.” —Jordan Kurzweil

“More than 54 million people in the U.S. use an iPad at least once a month, but they remain just 16.8% of the population and 22.2% of people on the internet, according to eMarketer. That put a hard cap on the number of subscribers The Daily could acquire no matter how solid its product.” —Nat Ives

2. It was overburdened with staff—despite already laying off a third of the staff over the summer—and and a “legacy” (ie, print) org structure

“Simply put, The Daily never attracted the revenue required to support a team of 120 people. Launching what amounted to a digital daily newspaper with many of the legacy costs and structures of print wasn’t the best idea.” —Hamish McKenzie

“The Daily should have been run like a startup, a digital business, not a division within a division in a corporation.” —Jordan Kurzweil

3. It wasn’t interesting content (apparently! I never read it…see No. 1)

“Though it looked quite nice and its content was competent, that content was all-in-all just news and news is a commodity available for free in many other places.” —Jeff Jarvis

“[The term general reader means] a media executive is imagining himself and his friends (you know, normal guys) and intending to produce a bundle of content for that hyperspecific DC-to-Boston-went-to-a-good-college-polo-shirts-and-grilling demographic…. This is not to say that media properties cannot be built with the goal of reaching the mainstream [but successful] sites have been built up like sedimentary rock from a bunch of smaller microaudiences. Layers of audience stack on top one another to reach high up the trafficometer.” —Alexis Magrigal

Whatever the reasons it was closed down, I’m glad someone at least experimented with new ways to produce news. Trying stuff really is the only way to learn. My condolences to those journalists who were laid off. They should consider the no doubt multitude of lessons they’ve learned and call themselves, rather than out-of-work journos, technicians in the lab of digital journalism — scientists who can take the knowledge they’ve gleaned and apply it to the next experiment.

The media’s Dust Bowl

November 30, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

It’s human nature to compare things. We put things in context for better understanding. “This thing [business/weather/process/person/event] that is happening is like this other thing that happened, and that thing turned out [good/bad/different/better/worse].”

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately surrounding the media. Specifically, I’ve spent time contemplating how to reconcile how valuable journalism is to society compared to how much actual monetary value it generates. As I’ve written about before, no one knows what’s going to happen to this business: whether it will go the way of the steamship and the telegraph, reinvent itself a la Apple, or something in between.

I’m not the only observer who’s searching for an appropriate comparison from the past in order to predict the media’s future, but I do find that some insights are better than others; does anyone really think that the envelope business, of all things, is really a good model for the Random House-Penguin merger? (Does anyone think of “the envelope business” at all?)

Watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Dust Bowl recently, however, opened my eyes to a new analogy for the media of the present day: farming a century ago. (And why not — we did recently learn that there are far more software app engineers than farmers.) According to Burns, farmers in the Great Plains around 100 years ago sold their goods, wheat in particular, in enough volume and at a fair enough price, that they kept their families fed, happy and productive before the Great Depression. Prior to the big event, they faced periodic yet persistent droughts and occasional technological breakthroughs (gas-powered plowing, for example). But year after year, they found a way to keep going, even increasing volume to make up for the deficits caused by off years. That is, until the permanently landscape-altering Dust Bowl.

Compare this to journalists and media today. For decades we plied our trade, not making big money but making enough to support our families. We changed with the times, moving from copy boys and paste-ups to computers. But the past decade has seen such a huge acceleration of technology (and a hugely inverse deceleration of jobs) that our worth is now, to put it mildly, in question. Like the farmers, we’ve tried doing more: You’re now not only a reporter, you’re also a videographer, photographer and blogger — and you will hereafter be known as a “content creator.” You’re now responsible for not only reporting your usual one-story-by-deadline allotment, but you’re also going to write six additional posts a day (and you need to know how to produce them, tag them and upload them).

But as the farmers discovered, doing more not only didn’t help them, it actually created its own set of problems. In their case, they unknowingly caused the largest man-made ecological disaster to date (you’re well on your way, though, global climate change: hang in there). In ours, the huge volume of posts was churned through by disloyal consumers, the glut and pace belittled the value of the news, and the business changed from creating newsworthy, relevant content to attracting eyeballs and lowering bounce rates and counting click-throughs and measuring social engagement and Tweeting viral videos.

Other, larger factors were also at play, including the rapid pace of technological development. The ease of use of technology meant that anyone could be a creator of content — so the process of journalism was democratized, but it was also dumbed down and its worth devalued.

“But of all our losses, the most distressing is our loss of self-respect. How can we feel that our work has any dignity or importance when the world places so low a value on the products of our toil?”

—Caroline Henderson, Oklahoma farmer during the 1932 drought during the Depression, just prior to the Dust Bowl’s worst

Now, I’m not saying it’s a perfect comparison. We haven’t had to put to pasture cattle that suffocated during “black blizzards” or bury children who caught “dust pneumonia.” But I think it’s a decent metaphor, because the media is going through its version of the Dust Bowl. Newspapers and magazines are closing up shop at an unprecedented pace; media businesses are losing money quarter after quarter and year after year, with no end in sight; those workers who are able (and I count myself among this number) are learning new skills and moving into new areas. (All of this can be said for other industries as well, by the way, particularly music.)

Somewhat brazenly, and I think disrespectfully, we’ve taken to calling tech and business shakeups, events and new models “disruptions.” Of course, since the beginning of time businesses have striven to disrupt other, existing businesses, but it seems much more ruthless to start your business with the sole intent of creating wreckage. I think it’s fair to cast our historical eye onto the Depression and the Dust Bowl and deem them disruptions, at the very least. And it’s easy to forget, but disruptions have a cost — a monetary one and a human one.

Years from now, I wondered while watching the documentary, how will journalism be perceived? Who will be the talking heads and what will they say? Which commentators will highlight which historical implications that, in retrospect, seem clear? How will the people generations from now — even one or two — talk about the media? Will we have adapted with the times and made a new reality for ourselves (and somehow have figured out a way to feed our families along the way)? Is journalism like the family farm in the Oklahoma panhandle of the 1930s, and are we farmers, continuing to plow the fields that we’ve yet to learn will never again yield crops? Is it like kerosene lighting, steam-powered train engines, millinery, fax machines, answering services, 8-tracks, the luncheonette, and the endless list of other businesses throughout history that litter the shoulders of the road toward the future? I want to believe that it’s not. I hope upon hope that it’s not.

“Hope kept them going, but hope also meant that they were being constantly disappointed.”

—Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Dust Bowl historian

Nobody knows anything

November 15, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Nobody knows anything.

I’ve suspected for a while that no one really knows what they’re doing, what’s next, what’s going on, what the plan is (“What’s the plan, Phil?” –Claire Dunphy). As I age and gain experience, I’m starting to realize the truth of it all: Everything is slapdash. Everything is last-minute. Everything is barely hanging on. Everyone is making it up as they go along and crossing their fingers.

At the highest levels of government, the military and business, it’s all perilously close to nonfunctional. (And often it is nonfunctional, not to mention dysfunctional — a distinction.) So why should the media — even the upper echelons of the media — be any different? It’s not.

Nobody knows anything.

This thought crystallized in my mind earlier this week when I attended a tech start-up job fair Monday, an all-day start-up conference Tuesday and a Meetup called “Content Conversations” Tuesday night.

The resulting emotion from this string of events was one of deep malaise. I’d gone in thinking I’d get some perspective and advice from job creators and also hear some inspiring start-up success stories. As it turns out, the companies who were hiring were seeking programmers and UX designers, not journalists (or even, as we’ve come to be known post-Internet, “content creators”). And the panelists the following day, those who were alleged successes, had very little practical advice for the attendees. Sure, there were platitudes expressed by these supposed luminaries: Stay true to yourself. Find your voice. Put the user first.

But nothing said was really actionable. Now, going in I expected tech start-up founders to speak variously in jargon and dude-speak; it’s their MO. However, I wanted more from the content-focused discussions and panelists. Unfortunately they, too, had only vague advice in terms of the future of content on the web, what’s next for those of us who create content, and how brands can use content to sell their products.

I left the conference to attend the Meetup, which was a Q&A with Noah Rosenberg, the founder and editor of Narrative.ly. He seems like a nice fella, and I agree with his thesis that the Internet’s short bursts of information are starting to zap our brains. He’s trying to remedy that with what he terms slow journalism — long-reads stuff focused on a weekly theme. But he’s paying his contributors for their many-thousands-of-words pieces not in dollars but in exposure, mostly. He regrets that he can’t pay them what they’re worth, and when I asked how he thought the Internet could help create high-quality content while providing a living wage for content creators, he said, “That’s the million-dollar question” and “There’s no magic bullet.” So no answers there, either.

I left feeling dejected and resigned. But I awoke the next morning with a realization: Nobody knows anything. No one was able to provide answers to the information I was seeking — all day long — because no one knows. Not high-ranking people, not low-ranking people. Not CEOs, CTOs, CMOs or interns. No one!

Nobody knows anything because we are in a time of extreme transition. That’s not a new or original thought, even for myself. But sometimes you have a moment when a mere notion is made real. You go from knowing it to knowing it. For me, that was this experience. I saw for myself, hands-on and up close, that in times of transition the story cannot be told, because no one knows how it turns out. You have to live it, day by endless day, until you’re on the other side. And even then, you don’t really know for sure that you’ve reached the other side until much later.

Just as you couldn’t tell that the disappearing shoals under your shoes fomented a destructive deluge that would make you question your survival, so too are you unsure, once you’ve grabbed onto a branch and tenderly climbed onto the opposite bank, that you’re truly safe.

That is the unfortunate state of the media today: We’re in the rapids, hanging on for dear life and praying. (Which I would not deem a strategy, exactly.) The media — news, advertising, marketing, TV, movies, print, online, creation, distribution — and those of us who practice it are evolving, and nobody knows what will happen. And I’m not upset about it; I’m ready to join in and try things, experiment and help in the effort of making it up as we go along.

And I don’t think anyone else has a better idea how to navigate these waters, because nobody knows anything.

Just say no to reading comments

October 25, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

A few choice quotes from Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams about why you should never read the comments on your own pieces — or ever, really. Needless to say, I agree.

I used to believe that as an online writer, I had an obligation to read the comments. I thought that it was important from a fact-checking perspective, that it somehow would help me grow as a writer. What I’ve learned is that if there’s something wrong or important or even, sometimes, good about a story, someone will let you know.

I want it to be better. But it’s just not.

[Not reading comments has] calmed the negative chatter in my head and it’s made my experience of the Internet a whole lot healthier. I highly recommend it.

Talk about (as I often do) the differences between print and online! This is one of the bigger ones, in terms of psychic drain if nothing else. I don’t know how it got this bad, but it did. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the general (lack of) discourse in the public and political arenas nowadays. Perhaps the technology has made it permissible. Perhaps I’m just sensitive. In any case, my self-protective instincts, like Williams’s, just make me want to disengage completely.

I feel about Internet comments roughly the same way I’ve started to feel about television news, with its know-nothing talking heads and lowest-common-denominator coverage made for an attention span–less public that’s apparently eager to share their opinions (about which I care very little). They’re both icky and make me feel bad, angry and frustrated.

Two recent and related stories about others who are taking the opposite stance from the “just walk away” model and are actively trying to make the Internet better:

Good luck to them — to us all.

Junk at scale vs. quality in proportion

October 12, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

SF Weekly recently published an in-depth look at the Bleacher Report, a sports-centric site whose content is populated almost entirely by its readers. As the article notes, it “[tapped] the oceanic labor pool of thousands of unpaid sports fanatics typing on thousands of keyboards.” The site is user-generated content taken to its logical extreme, for good and bad. The good being the scale of coverage; the bad, the poorly written content.

But now it’s gone pro, hired real writers and editors, and been polished up — and the “lowest-common-denominator crap,” editor King Kaufman says, has been gussied up. The site is now owned by Turner Broadcasting, which snapped it up this summer for a couple hundred mil. Not bad for a site that was built on the backs on unpaid superfans.

I’m not interested in the Bleacher Report per se, but I am interested in the idea that nowadays, crap at scale matters less than quality in proportion, because it’s part of a larger trend sparked by disparate forces in the evolution of the Internet. They’ve come together to wipe away a short-lived business model that called for garbage content that ranked well in search but left the user unfulfilled. This model’s most prominent proponent was Demand Media (and its sites, among which are eHow and Livestrong), but certainly the Bleacher Report qualifies too.

The article does a good job explaining how Bleacher Report (and Demand) initially found so much success — basically, by cheating search engines:

Reverse-engineering content to fit a pre-written headline is a Bleacher Report staple. Methodically crafting a data-driven, SEO-friendly headline and then filling in whatever words justify it has been a smashing success.

The piece also touches on the larger context of the shift from what it calls “legacy media” to the current landscape:

After denigrating and downplaying the influence of the Internet for decades, many legacy media outlets now find themselves outmaneuvered by defter and web-savvier entities like Bleacher Report, a young company engineered to conquer the Internet. In the days of yore, professional media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on information. Trained editors and writers served as gatekeepers deciding what stories people would read, and the system thrived on massive influxes of advertising dollars. That era has gone, and the Internet has flipped the script. In one sense, readers have never had it so good — the glut of material on the web translates into more access to great writing than any prior era. The trick is sifting through the crap to find it. Most mainstream media outlets are unable or unwilling to compete with a site like Bleacher Report, which floods the web with inexpensive user-generated content. They continue to wither while Bleacher Report amasses readers and advertisers alike.

But that being the case, we’re now entering a brand-new era, one that will attempt to combine the scale and optimization of the new guys with the polish of the old. And we’re seeing the end of the SEO-engineered-dreck model for three reasons:

1. The rise of social media as currency
2. Google’s Panda algorithm change
3. Advertiser interest

1. The rise of social media as currency
Used to be, back in the aughts, when you were looking for (for example) a podiatrist, you’d Google “podiatrist 10017.” You’d get pages and pages of results; you’d sift through them and cross-reference them to your insurance provider, then go to the doctor, discover he had a terrible bedside manner, and decide you’d rather keep your darn ingrown toenail. Nowadays, your first move would probably be to ask your friends on Facebook or Twitter, “Anyone in NYC have a recommendation for a good podiatrist who takes Blue Cross?” And you’d get a curated response from a dependable source (or even a few of them).

Plainly, social media users endorse people, products and articles that are meaningful. You’d never tweet, “Great analysis of how to treat an ingrown toenail on eHow” (at least not unironically). But you might recommend an article from Fast Company on the latest from ZocDoc.

There will always be a place for search — it’s one of the main entryways into any news or information site, and that’s not going to change anytime soon — but good quality content from a trustworthy source is becoming increasingly valuable again.

2. Google’s Panda algorithm change
In early 2011, Google changed its algorithm in an update it called Panda. This meant that, broadly speaking, better content ranked higher in Google’s results. Its advice to publishers regarding SEO was basically, “Create good content and we’ll find it.”

No longer could Demand Media’s and Bleacher Report’s search-engine-spamming formula win them page views. In fact, Demand Media completely retooled itself in response, saying that “some user-generated content will be removed from eHow, while other content will run through an editing and fact-checking process before being re-posted.”

In other words, quality started to matter to users, who let Google know it, and Google responded accordingly. The result was a sea change from how it had been done, leading to a completely new business model for Demand and its ilk.

3. Advertiser interest
Advertisers have long shunned poor quality content. From the beginning, they almost never wanted placements on comment pages, which can feature all-caps rants, political extremism at its worst and altogether unsavory sentiments (which is why many news sites feature comments separately — you thought that tab or link to comments on a separate page was a UX choice? Hardly). The SF Weekly article quotes Bleacher Report’s Kaufman, who says of its transformation to better quality stuff, “This was not a decision made by the CEO, who got tired of his friends saying at parties, ‘Boy, Bleacher Report is terrible.’ Bleacher Report reached a point where it couldn’t make the next level of deal, where whatever company says ‘We’re not putting our logo next to yours because you’re publishing crap.’ Okay, that’s the market speaking.”

So it is. A longer story for another time, but neither advertisers nor publishers are getting a lot of bang out of banner ads, CPMs and click-through rates. Increasingly, the least you can do to appeal to the market, if you’re a publisher, is create good content. How to do it without breaking your budget and while devising new technologies, maintaining your legacy product and operations, and appealing to readers…well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a rich woman.

Meantime, even though “critics from traditional journalistic outlets continue to knock Bleacher Report as a dystopian wasteland where increasingly attention-challenged readers slog through troughs of half-cooked word-gruel, inexpertly mixed by novice chefs,” they’re making money like you wouldn’t believe. They don’t break stories, they own them (the same is true of the Huffington Post).

Time for the “legacy” to embrace the future.

Narrative Science and the Future of StoryTelling

October 7, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

On Friday I had the good fortune to attend the Future of StoryTelling conference. Among the leaders and luminaries in attendance (whose names I will not drop here) was Dr. Kris Hammond, who is the CTO at Narrative Science, which has created an artificial intelligence product called Quill that transforms data into stories (the product generates a story every 28 seconds, per Hammond). I’ve written about Narrative Science before, and I argued in that post that Narrative Science “is not a threat, it’s a tool, and it fills a need.”

Now that I’ve met Dr. Hammond and heard him speak, I’m more a believer than ever that this is the future of journalism — and not just journalism, but all of media, education, healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, on and on. Most folks at FoST seemed to be open to his message (it’s hard to disagree that translating big data into understandable stories probably is the future of storytelling, or at least part of it). But Hammond did admit that since the Wired story came out in which he was quoted as saying that in 15 years, 95 percent of news will be written by machines, most journos have approached him with pitchforks in hand.

I went in thinking that the two-year-old Narrative Science went hand-in-hand with Patch and Journatic in the automated-and-hyperlocal space, but I now think that Hammond’s goals, separate from these other companies, are grander and potentially more landscape-altering.

I know I sound like a fangurl, but I was truly that impressed with his vision for what his product can be, and what it will mean to the future of journalism. No, it can’t pick up the phone and call a source. It can’t interview a bystander. It can’t write a mood piece…yet. But they’re working on it.

With that, my top 10 quotes of the day from Dr. Hammond:

The first question we ask is not “What’s the data,” it’s “What’s the story?” Our first conversation with anyone doesn’t involve technology. Our first conversation starts, “What do you need to know, who needs to know it and how do they wanted it presented to them?”

Our journalists start with a story and drive back into the data, not drive forward into the data.

We have a machine that will look at a lot and bring it down to a little.

The technology affords a genuinely personal story.

It’s hard, as a business, to crack the nut of local. For example, Patch doesn’t have the data, but they’re the distribution channel. There’s what the technology affords and what the business affords…. We don’t want to be in the publication business.

Meta-journalists’ [his staff is one-third journalists and two-thirds programmers] job is to look at a situation, and map a constellation of possibilities. If we don’t understand it, we pull in domain experts.

The world of big data is a world that’s dying for good analysis. We will always have journalists and data analysts. What we’re doing is, we’re taking a skill set that we have tremendous respect for and expanding it into a whole new world.

The overall effort is to try to humanize the machine, but not to the point where it’s super-creepy. We will decide at some point that there’s data we have that we won’t use.

Bias at scale is a danger.

The government commitment to transparency falls short because only well-trained data journalists can make something of the data. I see our role as making it for everybody…. Let’s go beyond data transparency to insight transparency. It can’t be done at the data level, it can’t be done at the visualization level, it has to be done at the story level.

The differences between print and online publishing

September 24, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I’ve spent the past month helping edit a book. A real, old-timey, printed-pages book, with big photos and tons of words. While it has been an all-consuming grind to move the thing from words on a screen to designed layout to perfected page, creating a book also opened my eyes even further to a handful of differences between the print and online worlds of publishing. I suppose I knew these differences abstractly — after all, I’ve worked in the print publishing world for a more than a decade and I’ve written about some of these variations before — but living the book-publishing life instead of the online-publishing one for a month solid has put these five distinctions into stark relief.

1. Standardized technology
Practically the entire print world (magazines as well) uses Adobe’s Creative Suite. If you’re a publisher, you’re using InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, period. Occasionally there are major disruptions — when the industry moved from QuarkXPress to InDesign around the turn of the century, for example, after having been Quark-centric for the previous half-dozen years. If a stranger wandered in off the street to a prepress shop or printer, they’d see InDesign being used. If a college kid majors in graphic design, she’d better be taught to use Illustrator. If you’re a photographer or retoucher, Photoshop is your go-to.

Compare this to the completely opposite world of online publishing. There’s not a standard content management system that every publisher uses. Open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal are huge and growing — they’re being selected as the go-to CMSes more every day — but they’re not widespread enough to be called a standard, at least not the way InDesign is for print publishers. More often, each Internet publishing site has its own, homegrown, cobbled together, Frankenstein half-solution, which works well enough to connect A to B, but just barely, and it is not a complete solution in the way that Adobe Creative Suite has been for print.

There’s also no standard photo-editing app: Photoshop is one option for online photo editing, but so are Pixlr, Aviary, Gimp, on and on. Even Facebook and Twitter — not to mention Instagram — offer online photo editing.

In fact, Internet publishing reminds me of nothing more than print in the 1980s and 1990s. Computers were being introduced and used to some degree for word processing, but there was no single software system for print publishing. We’d moved well beyond copy boys, news alerts coming across actual wires and traditional typesetting, but the “technology” that most publishers used then included paste-ups and X-acto knives (or some version thereof). We’re living the equivalent now online. Will the Internet standardize to a single CMS? Will there be a turnkey solution invented that takes online publishing from primordial to fully evolved?

2. Established process and workflow
The printed word carries with it an established process, one that has been more or less the way things have worked since Gutenberg. First you write the words, then you edit them, then you publish them. This is true still in print publishing. Broadly: brainstorm, assign, write, edit (line edit, fact-check, copyedit), design, prep, print, and then distribute completed, unalterable product. There are often many rounds of each of these steps, and distribution can be a months-long process. But a process it is, and one that carries a fixed order and a good degree of finality.

Online publishing, on the other hand, usurps this process from end to end; the online workflow is not fixed. Anyone can devise her own ideas and then write them. They needn’t be edited nor fact-checked, but even if they are, many people and even organizations publish first and edit later, and then republish. This doesn’t actually disrupt the distribution process a bit, because the piece is a living document that can always be changed. The immediate distribution means that readers can also respond immediately, and they do, via comments and social media, and this often precipitates yet another round of reediting and republishing.

Compare the reactions of print versus online outlets to the publishing scandal of the summer: Jonah Lehrer’s making up of quotes and self-plagiarization. His book publisher, Houghton, had to “halt shipment of physical copies of the book and [take] the e-book off the market,” as well as offer refunds to readers who purchased copies of the book. Presumably, they will actually fact-check the book sometime, then issue a new version in a new print run sometime before…who knows when.

Lehrer’s online publishers, on the other hand, merely republished his pieces with an “Editor’s Note” appended that they “regret the duplication of material” (NewYorker.com) or a “notice indicating some work by this author has been found to fall outside our editorial standards” (Wired.com).

I haven’t discussed the cost-as-expectation factor because I want to limit this post to my observances on technology and workflow as an industry insider, but I do wonder whether, because the Internet is free, the standards are lower for both process and product. Regardless, it’s clear that making corrections as you go along isn’t possible with a printed product once it’s been distributed.

I also think that because the Internet is not only a publishing business but is also a technology business in a way that print is not, editors are cribbing from technologists’ desire to embrace iterative methodologies and workflows, such as Agile (in relief to Waterfall) — more on this below.

3. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
Hand in hand with the process itself are the people who conduct the process. Print, having been around for centuries, has evolved to the point where jobs are delineated. It can be stated generally that in the world of print, photographers shoot pictures and photo editors select among these pictures. Designers marry text and art. Copy editors edit copy. Printers print. Managing editors meet deadlines, collaborating with all parties to get things where they need to be when they need to be there. There’s no such delineation in the online publishing world. Editors in chief shoot photos and video; copy editors crop art; writers publish. Everyone does a little bit of everything: It’s slapdash, it’s uncivilized, it’s unevolved.

I think that soon this madness will organize itself into more clearly defined roles, or else we’ll all burn out, go crazy and move to yurts in the middle of Idaho. This is happening already in small degrees in online newsrooms, and it’s starting to reach into online publishing broadly, but I have to believe that the insanity will decrease and the explicit definition of roles will advance as we sort out how it all fits together.

4. Focused, respectful meetings
It caught me off guard to realize that something as simple as speaking to coworkers is very different in the print versus online worlds, but the meetings I had when I was working on the book were a far cry from those I’ve had when I was working online. They were focused, with little posturing, corporate speak, agenda pushing or bureaucracy. At no point did anyone say, “Let’s take that offline” (translation: “Shut up”). At no point did I wonder, “Are you answering email or IMing the person across the table right now instead of paying attention to what I’m saying?” It’s pretty simple: No (or few) laptops and lots of respect for others and their abilities.

Technology likes to put labels onto concepts that publishing has been using for decades. For example, Agile has concepts like “stand-ups” and “Scrum.” Print has been having these sorts of as-needed-basis check-ins as long as it’s been around — it’s called “talking to your coworkers,” and it works quite well as a method of communication and dissemination of information. For all that’s going against it, print succeeds on a human level; technologists are playing catch-up in this respect. Whether this is because most technologists are men or most technologists are introverts I’m not sure, but the cultural and human-interaction differences are clear. If online publishing did a little more in the way of focused and respectful meetings — or maybe even fewer organized meetings and more on-the-fly collaboration — I think the industry would reap major benefits.

5. Frequency of disruption by and importance placed on email and social media
When I was head’s-down editing on paper for this book, and when I was on the computer editing, devising schedules or creating task lists, I didn’t check email, Facebook, Twitter, or really any other website except during lunch. Turns out, this behavior is fairly easy to do when you’re not working on a website yourself. I’ll admit that I felt a little out of the loop on the latest stupid thing Mitt Romney said. I missed the uproar about, next-day recap of, and explanatory cultural essay regarding Honey Boo-Boo. But I didn’t actually feel less engaged with the world. Having been completely engaged in the task at hand, I felt like the focused energy I was able to pour into the book benefited the work and my own sense of accomplishment.

When I work online I often end days thinking, “What did I actually do today? Meetings, emails, checking social media…now the day is over, and what do I have to show for it?” Quite distinctly, when I ended days on the book, I could say with conviction that what I had worked on mattered. I moved whatever I was working on from one state to the next, and I improved it when it was in my hands. It was a welcome departure.

—
The book will be in stores a few months. And I’m about to press “publish” on this post, which will then be live and available to anyone with an Internet connection the moment after I do. All of which serves as the starkest reminder yet about the benefits of, drawbacks surrounding and often chasm-like differences between each medium. Unlike print, for online publishing the history is being written as its being lived, and I feel privileged to be a witness to it.

The media’s 1 percent

September 20, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Filed under Things That Make Me Swear:

Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, said Thursday it would scale back the printed edition [of The Times-Picayune, a 175-year-old fixture in New Orleans] to three days a week and impose staff cuts as a way to reduce costs…. The decision will leave New Orleans as the most prominent American city without a newspaper that is printed every day. via

Donald Newhouse is the 51st-richest person in the United States, Forbes reports. The magazine places the Advance Publications chief’s net worth at $6.6 billion. His brother, Conde Nast Chairman Si Newhouse, Jr., places a little higher: No. 46, with a net worth of $7.4 billion. Donald’s net worth was $5.9 billion in Sept. 2011, Forbes estimates, and Si’s was $6.6 billion. via

The media is clearly not exempt from the tyranny of the 1 percent. Just how many billions are enough for the people who run the media? At the very real cost of important coverage of issues that matter to us ordinary have-nots? It’s indecent and shameful.

Latest magazine numbers are pathetic

August 9, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

How much longer will making magazines be a viable industry? Audit Bureau figures came out yesterday, and they’re straight-up painful. Basically, magazine profits are way, way down. And this is down not from the heyday before the economy tanked, it’s down from the post-recession numbers, which sucked in the first place. The New York Times acknowledges that the industry has been on the decline for years now, then quotes industry consultant John Harrington saying that the latest numbers were “the worst I’ve ever seen.” Great.

My summary of the ABC numbers for magazines:

↓ Overall: Down on newsstands almost 10%
↔ Digital: Up — doubled from this time last year, in fact — but to only 2% of total circ
↓ Women’s (Cosmo, O) and Celeb (People, Us, Star) titles: Down solidly
↓ Literary titles (New Yorker, VF): Down seriously
↓ Newsweeklies: Down significantly, especially Time
↑ Food titles: Up

I feel privileged to have caught the end, in the ’90s and early aughts, of the old media’s best days. The future is more uncertain than ever. I hope daily that the industry I love hasn’t seen better days, but the numbers and history aren’t on its side. “Adapt or die” is such a cliche that one tends to forget that some die. But die they do (or they start to adapt, get diluted enough from their original form that they cease to matter, and then they die).

The Magazine Publishers of America, which runs the ASME Awards, has been renamed and rebranded away from a name and logo that represents a page turning into one that looks like…well, whatever this is:

As much as I live online, I also love reading magazines, sitting with them, consuming them in a way you can’t on the Internet, or even on a tablet. (Print, though its revenues are paltry and getting paltrier by the day, does supply a massive amount of good-quality content online, let us not forget. Let us, however, try to better monetize?) I was recently away from the computer and Internet for a few days; instead I was informed and delighted by the magazines and books I’d brought with me. They were well written, well edited, well designed and well structured. I came back with torn-out bits, dog-eared pages — matter of fact, I tore out a whole article and sent it to my brother. In the mail. With a stamp.

I’m not a technophobe in the least, and I’m as much a participant in the immediate-gratification culture as the next guy. But I hope I’m not alone in my desire to see the rebirth of the magazine industry. It must find ways to matter to readers/users or face extinction, plain and simple.

Content farming and its runoff

August 8, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Content farms, or scaled content creators, have generally gotten a bad name in journalism. I know because when I worked for one — AOL Huffington Post’s Seed before it got shuttered in February — I got a lot of guff from traditional journalists. The line was that we paid writers — sometimes “writers” — a pittance to create crappy content. In truth, that did and does happen, especially at Demand Media (which creates content for eHow and Livestrong, among others sites) and other, low-quality, high-search-volume sites and site scrapers.

At Seed, we strove to find a middle ground between Demand’s formula and a slightly higher quality, slightly more expensive, hopefully higher ranking and better referring schema. This formula was experimental; I felt like oftentimes I worked at a journalism lab, where, just as a scientist might test a theory, we’d hypothesize, try, react, tweak, recast, and reattempt, repeatedly, until we had a winning formula.

I always thought of About.com as the proto-content farm, Demand as the next step (forward or backward I was never sure), and Seed as the next evolution.

Coincidentally, today brings news about both of these companies. And the lastest scoop reveals that both are in jeopardy, for reasons having to do with search rankings and algorithm changes, quality (reality and perception), user behavior changes, the rise of social media, and the evolution of the Internet at large.

About.com, which is owned by the New York Times Co. (this fact always lent it an air of ethics that the rest of its peers never shared) is being sold to Answers.com. According to Peter Kafka at All Things D, when the Times Co. bought it in 2005, it was for $410 million. It’s selling it today for $270 million.

Demand Media, according to Jeff Bercovici at Forbes, claims a profit for the quarter. Ahem. I guess $94,000 is a profit. For a publicly traded company that had loss of $2.4 million at this time last year, maybe that counts. But overall, I think we can say definitively at this point that the Internet is trending away from low-quality garbage and toward actually helpful articles — maybe even some that are well written enough that the user may delight in them and desire to share them.

Both companies would certainly benefit from not having to be so reliant on Google’s indiscriminate algorithm changes. Demand has already spiked millions of pieces of crappy content and improved others (presumably those it can win on in search) to curry favor with rankings and users. About.com, I think, due to its nature and structure, may have reached saturation, which isn’t to say that what’s already there isn’t of value — on the contrary. But the Internet is not a meritocracy, and having content that’s good doesn’t automatically mean it’s valuable monetarily.

For both companies, there’s nothing to do but evolve along with the web, take it where the Internet leads, try to keep up with the bruising pace of change, and respond accordingly. In other words, test theories, tweak them and try again, as we did at Seed, and hope that the company is patient enough (and/or its pockets are deep enough) that you come out on the other side with heads held high and a profit to show for blazing the trail. Whether that can actually happen with content farms (or algorithmic solutions to similar situations) remains to be seen.

UPDATE: About.com was sold to Barry Diller’s IAC, the company that owns Ask.com, for $300 million.