Writing Hurts

This man, I mean. His argument is that newspapers still have a long way to go on the Web. I don’t think anyone in newspapers would disagree with that.

We worry about leaking our enterprise stories too early, we don’t always follow stories with consistent updates, and, let’s face it, there are a lot of newspaper sites that are hard, if not impossible to navigate.

And the points he makes are valid. Changing the link structure is a great way to make sure no one sees a story again, and making readers login is a great way to make sure no one sees a story in the first place. Online analytics have come far enough that you don’t need to have a list of registered users, you can find out how many people are actually reading and go from there.

But the best point he has is one we should have gotten a long time ago: we need to stick with what we know best. A Web site isn’t like a newspaper, and the idea of a monolithic information provider is dead. So why do so many papers keep bombarding readers with wire copy they can get elsewhere. That space could be better used to showcase more of our local expertise, and to get good stories in front of more eyes.

A couple of weeks ago, Annette Schulte posted something about a Cedar Rapids video blogger who uses his cellphone camera. The salient point was that media companies don’t need fancy equipment to get into the digital age. In fact, they don’t needs anything they don’t already have.

She’s dead on. You’ll never catch me argue for fewer toys for the newsroom, but we need to start doing the things we’d like to, however we can, and prove that it’s worthwhile before starting to throw money at it. The name of the game is audience building, and that means trying new things, particularly low-risk things, to try and capture new eyes. If it’s more successful, we can develop it.

Or maybe we don’t need to. At my last paper, we started shooting video and bought a Canon GL2 and started to shoot video. We had a nice set of wireless mics, a decent shotgun mic, a mini news-gathering setup. Very high-quality video.

No one used it unless I made them. It was too much.

Then we bought the Pure Digital Flip for $100. This little camera is stupidly simple to use. It has a big red button on the back, and that’s it. I call it reporter proof. It also produces better video and sound than a camera that cheap has a right to. Reporters loved to take it out, and our use of video went way up.

People in the media talk about “just good enough,” but it’s also really misunderstood. That doesn’t mean making crappy content. It means not getting hung up in perfecting things and actually getting content out the door. If that means a cellphone camera or the Flip Video, what’s wrong with that?

I was having a discussion the other day about how people group themselves. We were talking about a group of one. After all, how many people fall into the exact same category that you do? For example, I’m in my late 20s, a newlywed, I live in Cedar Rapids, I work in newspapers, and I have a deep and abiding love of shiny new gagdets. There are more ways I could classify myself, but those’ll work for now.

How many other people would match that description, let alone a yet more specific one? Not many, to be sure. But I don’t want to find my exact match, I want to find people who are interested in some of the same things I am. Newspapers need to find a way to offer their readers a way to connect with readers with other people with some of the same interests. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are great. They give people a way to connect.

But people are interested in news stories, too, and if a newspaper could give them a forum to read the stories they want to and then discuss them with like-minded people, they would be able to really build a community on their Web sites.

Not as in mine, although I am worn out and looking forward to vacation, but as in fatigue over the word “my.” The New York Times wrote on Sunday about how every new Web site has the word “my” in it somewhere. My Subaru, MyAOL, Mythis and Mythat. It makes me long for MySpace a little bit.

Here’s the problem as I see it. Companies are letting you store information that they’re giving you — information you could get anyway — and telling you it’s yours. No, it isn’t. It’s yours if you had a hand in creating it, or some vested stake in it, or some part in the conversation.

In some cases you do have that. MyStarbucks Idea is a place for consumers to kvetch or just make suggestions. And you can immerse yourself in a “subtly branded experience” on myCoke.

But in a lot of cases, it’s still about the company addressing you, and maybe you getting to make a comment or two. Just because you use the prefix “my” doesn’t mean you care about consumers, just like using the prefix “i” doesn’t mean you put the care into your product that Apple does.

It helps as a signifier, sure, but it also smacks of opportunism (a point noted in the NYT article). And face facts, the kids are moving away from MySpace. It’s still popular, sure, but if we’re really trying to reach the younger demographic, we need to appeal to them, not appeal to what they used to like.

Tom Altman (and others) keep saying that the ideal is to give people a place to have a conversation. Some people have coined the term “wedia” and I like that, although it’s not very euphonious. How about “our”? Our___ could have a nice ring to it.

But rather than picking out a prefix of any kind, how about actually giving users a place to have a conversation, to contribute and to get the content they want?

There was a time when portals were the next big thing. Yahoo, MSN, all the big Web companies wanted you to set them as your homepage and use them to navigate. They’d offer you sports scores, headlines, TV listings, whatever you wanted to see.

You don’t hear much about it, but leave it to Google to re-invent the idea. For more than a year, the homepage on every computer I use is my iGoogle personalized homepage. I can change what I see on there pretty easily, and through the magic of AJAX, it loads and re-loads seamlessly.

A news site isn’t likely to make a similar idea work. But they can leverage what Google’s already doing. You can add RSS feeds to your homepage by hand, and a lot of times I do just that. But it wouldn’t take much work to have an online person create a “gadget” that people can search for and add to the page. It would get people who might not be comfortable using RSS looking at what’s on the site. And you could let the reader customize the stories they see, as well. We need eyes looking at our content. Who cares where they link from?

My colleague Annette Schulte has become a Twitter user. As she’s working on new ways for media companies to create content, that made me think, how can media companies use twitter, either to deliver content or get information in? Some media companies already are.

CNN has a twitter feed already, and it’s used to deliver breaking news. A pretty obvious use for it, actually. After all, if you can’t explain your story in 140 characters, then there’s something wrong. And since it’s real-time, it shows up on your phone or your screen more quickly than you might get an email. But there are other uses, too.

If you can find people who use Twitter, not only do you have a ready-made tip line, you can also make sure that you’re actually writing about the things the people in your community care about. Following people in the community makes sure that you know what they’re talking about.

One blogger, Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, had problems with his Comcast internet service. He vented his frustration on Twitter, other bloggers picked it up, and he got service restored. In his post explaining all that, he talked about Twitter as an early-warning system for companies. It can easily be an early warning system for newspapers, too.

Is there something big happening? People are talking about it, and we need to find out where. That way we can make sure their voices get included, makning sure the stories we’re righting are accurate and that they resonate with people.

But it’s also a way to start a conversation with the community. If a reporter uses it, they can let people know what they’re doing and also talk about the stories. News isn’t a one-way street anymore, and the more ways we can make readers part of the conversation, the better off we’ll be.

Finally, it’s a way for reporters and editors to keep in touch. Reporters can tweet to keep their editors (and others who follow them) up-to-date when on assignment, including when a meeting goes long, or something interesting happens that might change how the story is played. A text message might do the same thing, of course, but this has the added advantage of making our operations even more transparent, a good thing.

So do any reporters out there use Twitter in their job?

OK, I was being cranky in my last post. There are a lot of things that newspapers are doing to survive. I just worry that we haven’t absorbed the lessons of how to deal with disruptive change from other industries.

Take Polaroid and Kodak. Fifteen years ago, those were the names you thought of when you thought of photography. They both had histories of innovation and were well-positioned to corner the digital market. And Kodak did try early on, producing one of the first digital SLRs used by newspapers. But they were committed to film, and even when thinking about digital, they had a film mindset. Now they’re cutting back on film production and have a line of (mostly) excreable consumer cameras.

Polaroid thought that their photos were superior to digital ones. And they were, for a while. But sensors got better and better and cheaper and cheaper. And gradually, almost no one except artists and the elderly were using Polaroid cameras. The company didn’t plan for such a market shift. And I don’t know that anyone can.

Those kinds of changes are exactly what newspapers are facing today. And the innovation programs that are under way really are a good start. But newspaper companies need to stop thinking like newspaper companies. Easier said than done, for sure, but look where thinking the same way got Kodak and Polaroid.

I had an editor who once asked if we were going to do the same thing differently or something really different. We’ve tried doing the same thing differently. Now it’s time to try something different.

The story of Polaroid is a sad one. The once-mighty photo company recently announced that it would stop making the instant film that made it a househould name. This came after a bankruptcy and a re-invention where most things with the Polaroid brand are made by someone else. You can’t even buy an instant camera anymore.

Now Polaroid pictures weren’t the best, but a lot of people my age and older grew up with snapshots whirring from the front of a camera and slowly developing into view. When digital cameras came onto the scene, Polaroid stuck to its guns and thought the marketshare it had was permanent. It wasn’t, of course.

Sound familiar?

After some painful reorganization, it kept producing it’s standby product, but diversified, too. Layoffs kept coming, and I think you’d have a hard time finding an analyst telling you to buy Polaroid stock. The idea seemed sound. Keep producing film for artists and people who for whatever reason don’t want to use digital cameras, and branch out. But the niche Polaroid was trying to fill wasn’t profitable.

Now they’re coming up with new products, including a portable printer that connects to your cellphone’s camera and can print a 2×3 picture. Not that they asked me, but I’m not sold on the idea. It has some value as a novelty, but you can look at the picture on the screen, and most people are content doing that. But it’s a good experiment.

The analyst at the end of the NYT article has a good quote, and one that everyone involved in innovation in any business should bear in mind:

However ingenious the process, Mr. Hoffenberg of Lyra said, people might still not be tempted to convert camera clicks into prints.

“Potential markets can exist because they aren’t tapped, but also because they aren’t actually a market,” he said. “It’s not always evident up front which is the case.”

Newspapers have long acted the way Polaroid did, but are branching out. They can’t wait any longer, though. Polaroid is a good example of what could happen if they did.

More tomorrow

In the fall of 2006, I went to a conference with editors and publishers from the chain I was working at. It was a mix of a few small dailies, like the one where I was city editor and metros. We all paid close attention to a presentation about how we needed to change, restructure the newsroom, our Web sites and our print products. Then we broke up into small groups to think of projects we could do.

When it came time to announce our ideas, every group had the same theme: MySpace for ___. One group wanted to make MySpace for pets. Another wanted to make MySpace into a glossy print product featuring high school athletes. You get the idea.

When we were leaving, I asked my publisher what she thought, and she was pretty pleased with all of the ideas. Her take was that MySpace was so successful, why shouldn’t we use their idea to make money? What she missed was that MySpace (and Facebook, and Google, and Flickr and any number of other successful ideas) succeeded because it did something new and interesting. Taking an idea and barely re-working it doesn’t qualify as innovation. Especially when you miss the point entirely, like the glossy magazine people did.

As I’m writing this, I logged into MySpace for the first time in weeks. In 2006, I logged in every day. If you’d have told me then that things like Facebook and Twitter would have replaced that, I don’t know if I’d have believed you. And I’m sure the reaction at the conference would have been along the lines of “What’s Twitter?”

There are plenty of great ideas floating around out there, and people in the media have them. Instead of trying to just re-purpose things that other people have done, we need to implement those truly new and original ideas.