Columnist/twitter experiment

Persuaded Gideon to Twitter on election night – despite it all being a bit last-minute, I think it went rather well.

But then he does seem naturally adept at everything. Which is almost as annoying as discovering Bono can blog.

Is subbed copy an unaffordable luxury?

Reading Nouriel Roubini’s latest frightening missive I noticed that he doesn’t care about clean copy either.

(Yes I know this is a trivial thing to concentrate on when he’s talking about market shutdowns and saying global equities still have a further 30% to fall on fundamentals alone. But this blog is about news media).

But when actual content is so seriously devalued that advertisers will pay next to nothing to be associated with much of it, who can afford luxuries like subbing and design?

Perhaps if I was more enterprising  I’d setup some service offering rapid-fire subbing for those readers who value it enough to pay for it.

Editing is a different matter, to me at least – without editing you have no unifying concept for all the content in your newspaper/programme/blog/gutenberg-era zine. Without editing you have no product.

Note: I am not in favour of newspapers getting rid of subs (and I am particularly in awe those who can write good headlines to fit). I am not in favour of getting rid of any newspaper staff, librarians included. But it’s a cruel and low-margin world we live in.

Yahoo Buzz opens up to all comers

But is it democratic, asks Read/Write Web.

Answer: no. Well not in the sense that they are asking.

Yahoo Buzz is an interesting idea, but a boring site to actually use (for me, anyway). It’s a bit like Digg but less niche, making it a more pedestrian and mainstream news agenda. I’m clearly not in their target market. Of course it sends shedloads of traffic to those sites who manage to get items on the frontpage – particularly as it also appears on the front page of yahoo.com

As RWW suggested, the lack of transparency about how things get to the front page seems to create a lack of enthusiasm for users to actually interact with it. There is a suggestion that web marketers will be furiously trying to work out how to game the system.

I wonder how game-able it will really be, if it is truly moderated. Slashdot has only a few editors and a very sophisticated system of comment moderation, but it seems that all the story submissions are still hand-selected.

Design versus IA (information architecture): explaining it to other journalists

I’m talking solely about content-rich websites here.

Have you ever tried explaining what information architecture is? It’s hard. Not that long ago, I probably didn’t know it myself. I don’t do IA of course, but I work with them… I think working with information architects is the key to getting any reasonably sophisticated website working well.

Design is all well and good too. Making a site look pretty is important. Design can help to realise some of the underyling goals around how users actually use the site, consume the content, interact with it, and so on. But it can’t be thought of in isolation from the underlying architecture – the structure, the rules, the logic, that drive the site.

Found a couple of good descriptions of IA at something called the ‘Support group for information architecture‘. Are IA people so misunderstood they need a support group? Anyhow:

IA encompasses all the design and structure from the back-end to through the content…

This was from a woman at Microsoft. I truncated it because it got a bit vague at that point.

IA is the practice of creating plans that describe the underlying organizational structure for a system of content and interactions.

This was from a guy at Sapient.

I don’t know why I care about this as I’m not an IA. But I sympathise with people in difficult-to-describe roles. And, as a journalist/editor involved in a big website, you must get quite involved with the IA of the site if you want it to be any more than just a bunch of content slapped up on the web.

Other definitions I have found in my 47-second search around the web are too general or too jargon-heavy for an editorial audience. But as a general explanation, I liked this O’Reilly book suggestion: (paraphrased) ‘I’m the person who sorts out the information overload’. The authors also suggest describing oneself as a web librarian, but I think this is a little inaccurate.

Credit crunch: The (Alphaville) movie

I’m quite proud of this:

It took a while to make and required help from a lot of people (especially Ben, who did the animations rather fabulously and of course Paul, who agreed to script and narrate it despite being even busier than usual).

But it was fun, it was a bit of a different approach to the usual timeline, and I learnt an awful lot about Final Cut Pro. Which is such a nice piece of software that I’m even thinking of finally joining the elite and buying a Mac.

The outlook for journalists: optimism and realism

I don’t think that much of Roy Greenslade’s optimism about journalism. Yes in some ways journalism is thriving, but people worrying about who will pay for investigative journalism, and any journalism other than industry/niche interest type news, have a good point. Some of the comments on his post were very interesting though – I particularly liked this one.

In the long term I am optimistic; a new model of how to pay for words will eventually rise from the dust.

In the short term though I think the next decade or so will be bleak. There’s no sign of that new model arriving for some time to come, or anyone with any idea of how it’s going to work.

I still feel there is lots of cause for optimism for journalism, particularly on transparency (not just in the news media but generally) and ‘networked’ journalism (though I’m sceptical that this will be useful for large numbers of stories, it will potentially work in some important ones). But troubled business model is what makes my doubt remains. If no-one can be paid to find out the things that someone doesn’t want you to know, who is going to find them out? I don’t know if we can rely solely on hobbyists, enthusiasts, or those who don’t need to earn a living or have enough spare time to investigate things on their own behalf.

Facebook: the new, um, Flickr?

Last summer in London was the Summer of Crappy Weather, and also the Summer of Facebook. So inevitably this year the pub/bar/park conversations regularly dip into who’s still using Facebook and who’s not, and the usual argument about its merits ensues.

“It’s a place to put your photos” one friend said recently in Facebook’s defence. And I realised  that for my demographic at least, that’s largely it. A reasonably large core of my friends still seem to be using it regularly – but a few still haven’t signed up. And the hardcore users are very much into posting photographs, probably more than anything else. Perhaps Flickr wasn’t quite social enough for most people – it appeals more to those who are *really* into photos, but less so to those who just want to publish some happy snaps as an easy way of keeping in touch.

I maintain Facebook would’ve been great if there were far less pointless widgets. Turning it into a platform was great in theory, but all the zombies and crap just drove away people like me – who liked it as a social tool rather than a time-waster – in the end.

I have a new theme

It’s a pre-cooked one, but I switched the header for a pic I took of the Appleton rum factory outside Kingston. There were some amazing looking factories in Jamaica and I thought it (factories, not rum) was kind of appropriate to the subject matter…

Why ‘long form’ texts are still useful, despite the rise of dots and snippets

I’m not sure if Scott Karp is correct to compare AP’s attempt to stop people using more than 4 words of its copy to the Atlantic’s use of quotes from his blog without linking to his blog. I agree that both are a bit ridiculous, but AP’s move was clearly thought through, while the Atlantic’s is no doubt an oversight or shortcoming in their workflow (I very much doubt they thought ‘let’s NOT link to online sources mentioned from online versions of our stories).

Anyway his wider argument that maybe there is less need for things with a long narrative structure anymore is interesting. His argument that there is a viable alternative to narrative structure is hard to argue with; and isn’t just an internet thing anyway; but edited/curated/aggregated snippets are indeed a valuable and useful way to create new meaning and convey it. But he also argues long form information is “so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information”. Surely this is just trolling. Yes, for lots of types of information joined up dots, snippets or whatever you want to call them, are fine. I could read a whole book to find out about, for example, the origins of utilitarianism but, depending on my goal, I might only take away a few key facts and therefore might be far better off reading a few wikipedia entries.

But it’s also that there will always be complex subjects that are not only best told through a long form, narrative structure. Why? Because the world is complex. Yes, many industries and many of us involved in communication make a buck out of over-complicating things. Half the non-fiction books I read seem to be re-hashed doctorates or a very very long way of explaining one or two single ideas. But many things are more nuanced. Keeping the Atlantic in mind; James Fallows’ piece on manufacturing in China and Megan McArdles’ piece on the economics of ageing societies were two of the more interesting pieces of journalism I’ve read in the past year, and wouldn’t have worked as a bunch of joined-up little segments because it was the colour, the structure and yes, the length of each story that allowed them to convey such interesting facts, ideas and observations.

Secondly, is efficiency all we care about? For a business, an industry or an economy – yes, of course it’s vital. But that’s a very reductive approach. The world is more than just an economic output machine; we are also societies and cultures, with ideas, passions and dialogues. And texts are more than just groups of facts and ideas and connections.

News stories that don’t deliver: is it traditional journalism that’s at fault, or our expectations of it?

This NY Times story about professional blogging being (shock) hard, intense and often stressful work was predictably panned. Yes it was silly to draw conclusions from 2 sudden deaths – but the author does actually point out that it’s not epidemiologically sound. Do they have to spell it out?

I think we’d be missing out if no-one every wrote a news story, blog post, comment,  or status update  that just pondered some question with nothing but very poor circumstantial evidence.

Ok, this story does show the limitations of conventional news structure – but it also shows the knee-jerkiness of much of the blogosphere. If it had been written as a blog post, eg:

‘A few bloggers have had heart attacks recently. Is it because they/we work too hard? Why is that? How do the emerging pay-per-post/pay-per-cpm models affect that?’

..then no doubt it wouldn’t have been so criticised (the only good criticism I read was by Felix Salmon, who pointed out that although timeliness is important, breaking news by seconds doesn’t actually cut it in the blogosphere – or, perhaps, online generally).

The news story structure is kind of limiting in that it forces one to have a ‘top line’ and creates the expectation that anything said in that top line should be thoroughly backed up.

I believe the conventional news story structure is too limiting for many things that could legitimately be considered ‘news’ or information. But what role do our expectations as readers play? Can’t we countenance an MSM story that is merely ponderous and poses an inconslusive question? Ironically if it’d been written as a blog post it wouldn’t need any more evidence or weighty argument – it would just need to be worded slightly differently.

It would still have the flaws that Felix Salmon pointed out – but it wouldn’t make everyone so darn angry.