Checking in on Facebook Instant Articles

April 12, 2016April 12, 2016 anna Leave a comment

Fortune media hound Mathew Ingram noted in May 2015, when Facebook’s Instant Articles format launched, that Big Blue saw it as “as a mutual exchange of goods, driven by the company’s desire to help publishers make their articles look as good as possible and reach more readers.” He went on to say:

But whenever you have an entity with the size and power of Facebook, even the simplest of arrangements becomes fraught with peril, and this is no exception. Why? Because a single player holds all of the cards in this particular game.

Around that time, Gawker’s Nick Denton, since brought low by a multimillion-dollar lawsuit loss you may have seen coverage about, went so far as to call the Facebook-publisher relationship not a distribution partnership but “abject surrender”:

So many media organizations are just playing to Facebook. They’re just catering to the preferences…expressed in some algorithm that nobody understands. It’s almost like we’re leaving offerings for some unpredictable machine god that may or may not bless us.

Almost a year after its launch, and a year’s worth of tweaks to the Instant Articles product, we have a more complete picture of the pros and cons.

Pros

Massive distribution open to many publishers
Following its closed launch with a limited amount of “partners,” including the New York Times and National Geographic, Facebook has opened the program to publishers big and small, in the U.S. and around the world, “giving every news organization the capability to publish their content on the social network,” according to Poynter.

WordPress plug-ins make it easier
After a rocky launch that required programmers to reformat every article especially for Facebook, the company was able to scale it to most new organizations through a WordPress plugin the company created, “essentially greasing the skids for mass adoption of the program among news organizations.” Per Poynter:

The plugin is being built in partnership with Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, and helps translate news stories to Facebook’s Instant Articles format. This removes a significant hurdle for news organizations.

New potential revenue streams
It’s no secret that magazines are continuing to fold and even digital-native sites can’t make the numbers work. We’ve also seen the rise of ad blockers and native/sponsored/branded content. Are content partnerships like these the answer, or at least an answer?

Cons

Only certain companies are seeing real benefits
BuzzFeed and Vox, to name two, are on board with the new format. Vox even hired media heavy hitter Choire Sicha to oversee its distributed partnerships (Facebook, Snapchat, Apple News and others, presumably). Per the WSJ, “Vox Media has long counted its own content platform as a key to its success. But now it says the future lies in platforms run by others, so it’s bringing in a digital media stalwart to help strengthen those ties.”

But others have yet to make hay from Facebook’s sunshine. As Fortune notes:

The media industry is in a “get big or go home” phase.

BuzzFeed and Vox are big, so they can play in Facebook’s Instant Articles world better than the smaller guys can.

It’s difficult (and costly) to track the audience
As AdAge reports, publishers have to pay more to track their audiences on distributed platforms. Yes, they get bigger distribution (theoretically, anyway), but ComScore apparently charges “$15,000, per platform, per year, to add tracking capabilities.” And six months post-launch, Apple News still doesn’t even have ComScore integration. This puts publishers in a tough position: In order to help their bottom lines, they want to reach the audience wherever the audience is, but doing so costs money they don’t have.

It’s not clear that publishers make money
Following on the point above, in the distributed content ad model, if you don’t know how much audience you have, you also don’t know how much revenue you stand to make. At this point, publishers are still crossing their fingers that this translates to revenue.

Jobs continue to be cut but not added back
Publishers are “re-allocating resources to build teams that produce content for specific social platforms,” per AdAge, but they’re cutting far, far more than they’re adding. Journalism is going through the kind of massive…transition, disruption, sea change, slaughter, whatever you want to call it, that is epic in scale. There are too many outlets that have closed up shop or gone through major layoffs to name. It’s especially chilling when digital-only publications like Mashable, IBT and Slant (just in the past couple of weeks) can’t even make the numbers work.

Distributed content alone isn’t going to save publishers. Maybe a combination of distribution, ads that escape blockers, native/sponsored content and cutting more staff will help. Also? Prayer. Honestly, prayer seems to be publishers’ main strategy at the moment: Please, Facebook and Google, don’t change your algorithms. Please, Snapchat and Apple News. Please, BuzzFeed and Vice. Please, someone figure this out for us. God bless us, every one.

Yahoo for sale! Any takers? Anyone? Anyone?

February 3, 2016February 20, 2016 anna Leave a comment

Boy, Yahoo this week, huh? First the company gets sued for instituting a quarterly performance review system that an ex-employee says has “been used to fire hundreds of employees since [CEO Marissa] Mayer joined the company,” per The New York Times. The accuser, Gregory Anderson, who worked at Yahoo News, says execs there “routinely manipulated the rating system to fire hundreds of people without just cause.”

Two things stood out to me in the article. First, this nugget, which every time I read it brings a wide smile to my face:

Ms. Mayer has steadfastly refused to use the word “layoff” to describe the thousands of jobs eliminated since she joined the company. She even forbade her managers from uttering what she called “the L-word,” instructing them to use the term “remix” instead.

Imagine! “We’re sorry to announce that everyone in this room is being remixed.” What?

The second standout bit is this:

The court filing said that managers were forced to give poor rankings to a certain percentage of their team, regardless of actual performance. Ratings given by front-line managers were arbitrarily changed by higher-level executives who often had no direct knowledge of the employee’s work. And employees were never told their exact rating and had no effective avenue of appeal.

Uh, that sucks. My advice to Yahoo would be: Careful what you wish for when you hire journalists. They’re gonna do what they do. And you will be called out.

Despite its left turn into eye-roll territory with this dude also claiming so-called reverse gender discrimination, it’s a hell of an interesting turn of events.

Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter notes that “Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings were overshadowed by the company’s announcement that it would cut staff as it explores a sale.” (If you’re keeping track, that’s more staff than it’s already cut illegally. Allegedly.)

In fact, continues THR:

Yahoo has outlined an aggressive cost-cutting strategy that includes reducing its headcount by 15 percent and closing offices in Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Milan and Madrid. Those cuts are expected to reduce Yahoo operating expenses by $400 million by the end of the year.

Jeez! That’s a ton of staff, 15 percent! We know from reports that this includes shuttering many of its “digital magazines,” and the company already shut down Yahoo Screen. That’s a lot of creative people out of work, which is really sad.

It seems that one bright note was for Yahoo was the growth of its new “Mavens” program, which somehow stands for mobile, video, native and social. Wow, mobile and native are growth areas? No kidding. Welcome to 2012, Yahoo!

I guess these kinds of good-idea-but-way-too-late decisions are why the board wants to sell, per Kara Swisher at Re/code, despite Mayer wanting to keep the company and keep trying to grow it:

Strategic alternatives is code for: Come on down, Verizon! Hey there, AT&T! All private equity guys welcome here!

I’m sure Mayer, like all of us, is wondering where it all went wrong with this venerable brand. (And also: WEHT Tumblr, man? No one ever talks about Tumblr anymore. So much for David Karp being the next media guru.)

I wish had an better answer than, “We’re living through a historic shift in the media and no one knows what will happen,” but I don’t. Meantime, media people: Gird your loins, prep your bunkers, and find a partner who’s a dentist or a pharmacist.

The latest Dish, a sad tale indeed

February 5, 2015 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Almost exactly two years ago, Andrew Sullivan broke off from the Daily Beast and announced he would transition his extremely popular and much-read blog, the Dish, into its own site—one not owned by a media corporation or supported by advertising.

Said he at the time:

We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality. We want to create a place where readers — and readers alone — sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way…. Hence the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews.

How’s that going for him? Not so great. Last week he announced his retirement from blogging; this week the Dish announced it was shutting down.

We…have come to the conclusion that the practical, financial and editorial challenges of continuing on are simply too great for us to bear as we are, let alone without me.

He cited his health as the biggest factor.

We’re all only human. At some point, the marathon has to end.

Are there any conclusions to be drawn? Perhaps that it’s a ton of work to churn out fresh content, whether you’re owned by a corporation or not. Perhaps when there are “no advertising demands,” you have to generate other kinds of revenue to stay afloat (beyond your savings account), and perhaps that’s a lot of work. Perhaps even if you grind away at it but still can’t find such an alternate revenue source, you have to do all the work yourself. Perhaps this is time-consuming and stressful.

This just in: Running a user-supported content site is time-consuming and stressful. It is a ton of work. You do have to do it all. And you will burn out.

It’s sad, for sure, to see a fallen comrade. Sullivan tried a new way of doing things, and that’s admirable. If there’s a lesson for the media at large from this affair, it’s that we have to keep trying new things. We must tackle new challenges, especially the hard ones (like how to run a site without corporate oversight and ads, for example), and we must keep going, keep reinventing, keep trying.

Not to be too dramatic, but to quote Samuel Beckett from The Unnamable, “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Content management systems: Why we can’t have nice things?

June 20, 2014 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

In a rare but welcome turn of events, this week I read three thoughtful deep dives about content management systems.

1

I found myself nodding a lot at this Mediashift piece that discussed how magazines can better use analytics to determine their digital focus. Some highlights:

“We watch numbers on each of these platforms and determine what platforms can have a rich workflow and rich experience, and where we want to enhance the content with video. We also have replica editions where people are happy with just a flipbook. We make decisions on a per-platform basis [by considering] the return on investment of any of these.” —Kerrie Keegan, Reader’s Digest

“All of the different platforms — not even just production platforms like Mag+, Zinio, Adobe DPS, but also Apple versus Google versus Amazon versus Next Issue — all of those have a different set of analytics and metrics that can be obtained. Those really differ widely. It’s one of the core challenges for anybody trying to publish in this space and across those markets…. The challenges aren’t really technical at this point. The challenges are what I call infrastructure. In print, we all know what rate base is, what CPMs are going to be, what metrics we pay attention to. We don’t have the same infrastructure for monetizing digital. From an advertising point of view, does rate base matter, or is it interaction, engagement, time in app?” —Mike Haney, Mag+

2

This excellent piece from Neiman Lab gets into the inner workings of Scoop, the New York Times‘s CMS, with Luke Vnenchak. The parts I found most interesting had to do with something I always advocate: better integration of basic editorial functions, such as, oh, I don’t know, editing words, into CMSes.

Scoop incorporates a number of real-time editing options that might look familiar to Google Docs users. Different team members can work on different parts of a story at the same time: “For example, a reporter can work on the article while an editor is writing the headline and summary and a producer is adding multimedia. But one editor can’t work on the headline while another works on the summary.”

Isn’t it amazing that this very basic functionality is so hard to come by in most off-the-shelf CMSes? Additionally, for being content management systems, most CMSes are abysmal at actually managing content in the editorial sense:

One thing that is always handy in newsrooms is a system for tracking the status of stories as they move from assigning and writing to editing. Beyond knowing the status of an article, Vnenchak said they want the system to track when stories run online and in print, and how a story is performing once it’s published.

Our asks as editors are quite standard, if not primitive, from a content-making standpoint. Something as essential as status tracking being incorporated into a CMS should be common, not rare.

3

Finally, an intriguing post that could indicate the end of cobbled together, homegrown editorial CMSes. Much can be said about Google, but even its detractors have to admit that when the company puts its mind to doing something, it gets done. That something might soon be a CMS “that would unify editorial, advertising and perhaps commerce activities for media companies.”

The so-far-untapped opportunity that Google is chasing — articulated with greater frequency this year in ad tech circles — is to take a holistic approach to managing yield that spans multiple publisher revenue sources and screen form factors.

The idea that a editorial-based, unifying CMS hasn’t yet been developed is rather shocking in itself. But the arguments the article makes against Google developing such a product are the pinnacle of self-reproach and shame. It’s almost as though all of online publishing has been told by its shrieking mother, “This is why we can’t have nice things!” and internalized the message:

A CMS could be a tough sell for Google, especially as a number of publishers have lately staked their future on the strength of a proprietary CMS. Three prominent examples are Vox Media, whose vaunted Chorus CMS is considered its secret sauce, BuzzFeed, which has baked native advertising into its content platform, and The New York Times, where technology-powered storytelling is seen as core to its editorial and advertising mission. For such publishers, adopting a CMS from a large platform player like Google would be tantamount to outsourcing the very notion of innovation.

Additionally many established publishers have customized their content tools to integrate with legacy publishing systems. Many publishers use multiple CMSs, for instance a custom platform powered by Drupal alongside WordPress for blogging. So there’s a big technical hurdle to adopting any off-the-shelf solution Google has on offer. That’s setting aside the technical and human resources barriers required to migrate away from “good enough” content systems.

This last part reminds me of the great Aimee Mann song “Momentum”: “But I can’t confront the doubts I have/I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad/And so, for the sake of momentum/I’m condemning the future to death/So it can match the past.”

It seems obvious that we should embrace enhancements to CMSes for editorial, be they analytics, metrics, platforms, workflows, or appropriate ad-edit collaboration.

A place for magazines

January 9, 2014 Anna Wahrman 1 Comment

There is a reason that phones, tablets, minis, laptops and desktop computers all exist. Each does a different thing. Sometimes only a slightly different thing, but a different thing nonetheless. And with a few exceptions, we use different products and brands as we perform different tasks on these different devices, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re checking your Facebook feed, the difference between doing so on your iPhone, your iPad and your iPad mini isn’t apparent. But if you’re writing a message to a long-lost friend on Facebook, ideally you want to do so via your laptop or desktop, using a tactile keyboard, on the web. (And maybe you even want to write it first using a word-processing application.) If you’re trying to research Twitter trends or simultaneously monitor thousands of tweets, the Twitter mobile app just won’t cut it (not even Twitter’s website will cut it sometimes—just ask Tweetdeck). If you’re gaming, Candy Crush is fine on a phone, but if you want to play a graphics-intensive game, you’d be advised to do so using a heavy-duty desktop machine or a gaming console. Blog posts are easily tweaked on WordPress’s app, but I wouldn’t want to compose several thousand words by plunking them out on a virtual keyboard. I’d never want to watch Gravity on my phone.

On and on—you get the point. Or, rather, I will get to the point. Magazines are ideally meant to be enjoyed on paper at leisure. The long articles, the beautiful photos, the envy-inducing ads, the feel of the pages in the hand, the tearing out of things to remember. With the exception of some news journalism, very few brands work on absolutely all devices. The New York Times and Buzzfeed, to name two, do an exceptional job cross-platform. But even then, those in-depth, well-reported 10,000-word profiles that the Times does so well? I can’t sit still long enough to read them on the web, let alone while squinting and scrolling on a phone. Buzzfeed’s GIF-sticles? Good luck getting them to load and animate as quickly as you want them to on a tablet.

I’ve written before about how dismally magazine apps perform and tried to propose theories as to why that might be. But maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe it’s not more visibility in the app store or better PR or more intrusive update alerts or a consistent user experience. Maybe it’s as simple as: Each task we perform in our lives has an appropriate medium.

Last month, while lamenting the lack of innovation surrounding magazine apps, I wrote:

Jon Lund reported in October that “there’s not much room for magazine apps” on people’s phones and tablets, considering that the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone but opens only eight of them daily.

But maybe users stick to those eight apps simply because those are the eight that work best on their phones. Maybe they don’t bother with magazine apps not because magazine apps suck, but because they don’t use their phones to read magazines.

Maybe it’s simply that magazines aren’t truly viable in any meaningful way except for in the form they’ve taken for hundreds of years. (“Meaningful” in a literary sense, but also in the sense of those often-mentioned new revenue models we’re all still waiting to see take shape.)

Of course, some journalism works just great across devices. Quick text-based blog posts, 500-word essays, two-sentence breaking-news alerts—all are welcome, whether I’m on the couch with my tablet, on the move with my phone or at my desk with my laptop.

But in the vast majority of cases, every medium has its best form of distribution—magazines, yes, but also television, movies, books, etc. A place for everything, and everything in its place. So why is the media industry trying to make itself viable across all platforms? Pick a thing, realize its potential, realize its limitations, and do it well.

I previously said that “unlike many apps, the media’s brand relevance and reputation absolutely hinges on an amazing user experience across devices at all times. In short, it has to be perfect.” I stand by that. But if it can’t be perfect—and we’re realizing that it cannot—I don’t think the next best answer is to half-ass a magazine app, a website and the magazine itself. I think if there is any progress to be made, it will be by using technology to focus on task- and purpose-based distribution instead of trying to be all things to all people (and devices).

The costs of being a freelance journalist

July 3, 2013 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

The Awl published a Noah Davis piece that last week in which the writer uses actual numbers, down to the dollar and number of invoices, to account for how much money he’s been able to make as a freelance journalist. It begins as less a takedown of how hard it is to survive in the new gig economy than a freelance economics lesson, or maybe a complex math equation.

Freelancing for websites is nearly unsustainable, especially in the one-off pitch, write and edit sense. But here’s the thing: It rarely makes financial sense for the website, either…. Revenue streams on the Internet are too nascent and too in-flux to provide anything concrete. A growing number of publications are able to pay something, which is an improvement, but the value of the written word cratered simply because most of the Internet’s publications, unlike their printed forebears, has no subscriber base.

Davis acknowledges that though he is doing OK for now, he doesn’t know how, or even whether, journalism will survive long-term. But at least he doesn’t claim that he has the answers, unlike so many other so-called new-media experts. He doesn’t recommend “monetizing” better or going “platform native” or making more engaging ads (as though that were even possible). He just lays out the real costs of making words, saying, “There’s a vital distinction to be made between artistic value and monetary value.”

Saying that “print isn’t the rule; it’s the exception,” he quotes the great Ann Friedman, the writer, editor and GIF enthusiast who used to work at Good: “My plan that I’m going to supplement my weekly web income with a few big print stories might not be feasible even two years down the road. I’m aware of that. But for me, it’s a race against time. How can I build a personal brand as a journalist, not to Andrew Sullivan levels or anything, but the recognition that I have job security before the parachute of print assignments goes away? That’s how I see my personal calculus.”

A race against time. The parachute of print assignments that will go away. Personal brand as a journalist. Bracing stuff. (The woman is known for her #realtalk, after all.)

Stating the obvious, namely that “the Internet democratized writing,” Davis cites some troubling numbers:

The number of “writers” exploded, even while one estimate for the number of official jobs for full-time journalists decreased from 61,000 in 1997 to 45,500 in 2012.

He goes into a bit of a tangent about how the real problem might be that up-and-comers don’t have mentors now, and that’s definitely true, especially because journalism, more than most careers, is an almost entirely on-the-job learning experience. But if you asked a clerk, mail carrier or stock broker, I’m certain they’d make the same claim — without calling their jobs a (cue eye roll) craft. Without getting too deeply into the mire, I can state unequivocally that I learned everything I know about making words and making them better through my various jobs and the people who were kind enough to teach me.

But back to Davis, who concludes that he likes life as a freelance writer for the most part:

The lack of long-term stability can be troubling, especially on those frustrating days when editors aren’t returning my emails, but that’s a conscious trade-off I made for being able to go running in the middle of the day…. In a world that’s less about traditional, one-company one-job careers and more about bouncing around and trying to find a way, it works for now.

How long “for now” lasts is a bigger problem as we kick the can down the Future of Journalism road. Still, the post is an enlightening take on the real world of freelancing, good and bad, and worth a read in full.

New Year’s media quote roundup

January 7, 2013 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

vs.

The Mayans were wrong, the holiday season has ended, New Year’s has come and gone, and we’re all settling in to 2013. It may be a new year, but it’s the same old problems for the future of journalism…or is it? Below, five of the most interesting nuggets I read this week about the state of print media, advertising and marketing.

1.

Andrew Sullivan, late of the Daily Beast, announced in a post called “New Year, New Dish, New Media” that he’s taking his site to the people. He’s leaving the advertiser-based media world entirely, as well as the venture-backed one:

We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality.

We want to create a place where readers — and readers alone — sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way…. Hence the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews.

2.

From an essay in yesterday’s NYT magazine called “Can Social Media Sell Soap?” by Stephen Baker on the value, or perceived value, of data- and social media-based marketing and advertising on social media today compared to the so-called heyday of advertising that’s depicted on Mad Men.

In the “Mad Men” depiction of an advertising firm in the ’60s, the big stars don’t sweat the numbers. They’re gut followers. Don Draper pours himself a finger or two of rye and flops on a couch in his corner office. He thinks…. Fellow humanists dominate Don Draper’s rarefied world, while the numbers people, two or three of them crammed into dingier offices, pore over Nielsen reports and audience profiles.

In the last decade however, those numbers people have rocketed to the top. They build and operate the search engines. They’re flexing their quantitative muscles at agencies and starting new ones. And the rise of social networks, which stream a global gabfest into their servers, catapults these quants ever higher. Their most powerful pitches aren’t ideas but rather algorithms. This sends many of today’s Don Drapers into early retirement.

While the rise of search battered the humanists, it also laid a trap that the quants are falling into now. It led to the belief that with enough data, all of advertising could turn into quantifiable science. This came with a punishing downside. It banished faith from the advertising equation. For generations, Mad Men had thrived on widespread trust that their jingles and slogans altered consumers’ behavior. Thankfully for them, there was little data to prove them wrong. But in an industry run remorselessly by numbers, the expectations have flipped. Advertising companies now face pressure to deliver statistical evidence of their success. When they come up short, offering anecdotes in place of numbers, the markets punish them. Faith has given way to doubt.

This leads to exasperation, because in a server farm packed with social data, it’s hard to know what to count. What’s the value of a Facebook “like” or a Twitter follower? What do you measure to find out?

3.

From a news item today titled “Two Custom-Publishing Powerhouses Join Forces,” by Stuart Elliott:

“We see a real shift going on from traditional advertising to a content-driven strategy,” Dan Kortick, managing partner at Wicks, said in a phone interview on Friday. “It’s more about engagement than exposure,” Mr. Kortick said, as content marketing offers “real engagement with your customer base.”

4.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic weighs in on why web advertising sucks and which of the models described in the quotes above will work going forward (spoiler alert: it’s probably a combination of both, depending on the scale and the goal).

It’s commonly understood that Web advertising stinks, quarantined as it is in miserable banners and squares around article pages. BuzzFeed’s approach is different: It designs ads for companies that aim to be as funny and sharable as their other stories. Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, told the Guardian’s Heidi Moore that he attributed nearly all the company’s revenues to this sort of “social” advertising. “We work with brands to help them speak the language of the web,” Peretti said. “I think there’s an opportunity to create a golden age of advertising, like another Mad Men age of advertising, where people are really creative and take it seriously.”

The online reaction to the Dish [striking out on its own, without advertising] and BuzzFeed [getting $20 million in funding] seems to be that what Andrew’s doing is sort of quaint and old-fashioned and what BuzzFeed is doing is weird and revolutionary. The opposite is true. Funding a journalistic enterprise without advertising is weird and revolutionary and experimenting with ads that are suitable to their medium is a clear echo of history. Just as the first radio ads were essentially newspaper ads read aloud, and the first television ads were little more than radio spots over static images, many on the Web are fighting the last war rather than building ads that work for the Internet, journalism history professor Michael Schudson explained to me.

Banners and pop-up ads are so awful they practically sulk in their acknowledged awfulness, fully aware that they are interruptions rather than attempts to compete with editorial content for the readers’ attention. BuzzFeed (and other companies experimenting with designing advertising for their advertisers) gets that and tries to fix it. Just as TV ads are successful precisely because they try to be as evocative, funny, arresting, and memorable as actual TV, there’s no reason why advertising content shouldn’t aim to be as informative or delightful as an original online piece.

Even as Sullivan’s Dish is pushing the boundaries of subscriptions, testing how much a dedicated audience is willing to pay for online journalism that is supposedly free, BuzzFeed is pushing the boundaries of advertorial — advertising content like looks like editorial content — testing how far each side of their two-sided market (readers and companies) is willing to go. The future of paid journalism — if we can even try to guess at it — will probably be a blend of the two strategies celebrated this week: Ads that are less useless and ignorable, and readers who are asked to show a little more love than they’re used to.

5.

Finally, let’s wrap up with yet another pollyanna-ish piece from David Carr, titled “Old Media’s Stalwarts Persevered in 2012.” He has postulated that “old media,” by which he means broadcast networks, are “raining green” because they’ve learned from happened to music and print.

The worries about insurgent threats [to broadcasters] from tech-oriented players like Netflix, Amazon and Apple turned out to be overstated. Those digital enterprises were supposed to be trouncing media companies; not only is that not happening, but they are writing checks to buy content…. “As it turns out, the traditional television business is far stickier than people thought, and audience behavior is not changing as rapidly as people thought it might,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research.

Perhaps the numbers support this for now — this quarter, this year — but I think that’s a temporary glitch of the awful economy, not a harbinger of the future. As Carr reports, these giant corporations, instead of spending money, paid out dividends and financed stock buybacks. So sure, the numbers are up…but stuffing your savings under the mattress is not a long-term strategy. And its certainly not one that will not work for all “old media,” which Carr eventually acknowledges:

Another thing about those dinosaurs is that they aren’t really old media in the sense of, um, newspapers. When their content is digitized, it is generally monetized, not aggregated.

I’ll ignore the irony of having aggregated the thoughts above. And I won’t even comment on five white guys having written them in the first place, and the stories themselves being about other white guys, and what these facts say about the future (or is it past?) of media and advertising. Happy 2013.

“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.