saila.com: Journalism Feed

5 steps to CBC success

How to program a national public broadcasting corporation:

Operate a respected international cable news channel.
Create an innovative, ground-breaking television program using all the techniques of social media Web sites more than five years before it becomes cliched.
Get praise for the former, and inspire a former vice-president to copy the model outright.
Stop producing content for the respected news outlet so said ex-vice-president can use the channel to host the aforementioned copy.
Wait about four years, and strike a deal to create a Canadian version of the groundbreaking news channel that resulted from those deals.

Just the facts (and more)

Embracing online can be seen as, depending on one’s viewpoint, either a desperate last gasp of a dying business model or bold and visionary move.

Both views can be applied, for example, to Microsoft’s preview of its Web-based Office Live product. Likewise, the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to abandon a printed newspaper and focus its news operations online is either too late or leading edge.

The same can be said when company get the “open source” religion.

Netscape did it when its browser was dying, and the move, literally, resulted in a phoenix rising from the flames.

Sun is doing it with Java with less dramatic effect.

After consuming so many Web 2.0 companies, the bulk of Yahoo’s interesting efforts have been to produce a public means to access many of the tools and data that makes Yahoo Yahoo.

More radical, though, are The New York Times’ efforts to free the information contained within its storied archives. Within the past two weeks, the Gray Lady has given Web access to its campaign finance information and its movie reviews. Bloggers can now associate related New York Times articles with each of their posts. Designers are invited to comment on the news by creating new visualizations from the Times’ archive.

Late last week, another leading international newspaper, The Guardian (and its sibling, The Observer), has taken the Times’ move to its logical conclusion and have made the full-text of (and the meta data about) nearly every article it publishes available through RSS.

News long ago became a commodity, and to compete, news organizations must focus on how best to present the gathered facts. This is, in essence, what differentiates my employer, msnbc.com, from nytimes.com from huffingtonpost.com from an anonymous blogger.

The last time and economic bubble burst, the Web went on to create tools, like Blogger and MovableType, enabling anyone to easily post a story online. Just under ten years later, and in the shadows of another economic collapse, the Web is developing the tools for anyone to crunch data and present their findings in visually compelling ways.

The traditional news industry barely made it through the last wave of change. This time, though, some finally seem to be learning those lessons and discovering how to make themselves an indispensable resource.

CBC: near- or farsighted?

Recently Canada’s public broadcaster urged the CRTC to “reject old assumptions about new media” and claimed that the consumption of broadcast media is not being negatively effected by the Internet.

This defies the observable evidence yet manages to be based in some careful shaped facts. For example, CBC’s paper claims that:

Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool. … These are the types of activities that are driving Canadians to spend time using the Internet. They are not activities that are substitutable with TV and radio usage: these activities are completely different than the time spent with traditional media.

Additionally, it claims one percent of Canadians watch television online. While the claims may be technically true, the arguments are on very weak ground.

True, the government’s research arm found almost everyone emails or searches for information online; but it also determined 65 percent “view news or sports” online and 28 percent listen to online radio.

In fact, in the past three years, there was a 60 percent increase in the number of people watching TV or movies online (20 percent in 2007). Seeing how people consume TV online in the U.S., I will confidently conclude there will be a similar increase in Canada after another three years.

Similar narrow-sightedness can be found in its discussion around online revenue opportunities (which is too broad for me to discuss in detail, but I will mention online ad spending continues to increase and is predicated to surpass radio advertising).

Everyone likes to shape facts to support their own perception of reality, and the CBC, like many media institutions, could be seen to be struggling to maintain its default top-down organization structure. (As evidence: people in the trenches have continually been doing some incredible things at the CBC as it relates to the online world, but the upper management seems oblivious to the realities.)

My hope is, like the Canadian newspapers before, the CBC has merely crafted a report to discourage the CRTC from regulating the Internet (or at least the Canadian media companies online) and is not merely a result of a lack of vision.

The False Idol: Technology

The journalism industry, in all its worry over its place in the digital age, seems too willing to “commit suicide out of a fear of dying” and seemingly latches onto anything it thinks might increase user engagement and/or page views.

At the recent Online News Association conference, the entire place was filled with “MSM”-types buzzing about “UGC.”

Those implementing it were eagerly doling out advice; “It’s wonderful,” they seemed to preach. “It’s revolutionary!” (Ironically, there was also a session explaining how to keep the annoying people from participating).

Job postings for Site UGC Editors abounded.

The sense was as though the industry thought it finally has this “Web” thing figured out.

But, as the IHT’s Mike Oreskes said in his keynote to the conference, journalists need to help audiences with information overload and not just become conveyor belts.

The online news industry needs to realize mainstream media has always about aggregation. The New York Times prides itself by claiming that it only publishes the “news that’s fit to print.” Online news needs to confidently embrace this role by filtering out, again as Oreskes said, the wheat from the chaff.

If a news site can present its readers, alongside the pure news, a distillation of the best of the rest of the Web by properly using the tools of the new Web surprising things could happen: news outlets might once again been viewed with the kind of authority they once had.

But first the industry needs to remember, technology won’t save the day.

During his presentation at the recent conference, Adrian Holovaty was asked repeatedly about what tools a news organization can use to collect and refine data for features like “Faces of the Fallen.” His answer?

“Hire a reporter.”

Online journalism still needs to learn

Day two of the Online News Association’s conference has had, at least for me a much more engaging set of panels and conversations, starting with Holovaty’s through to integrating interactives into the site (which featured a tremendously strong panel). The day closes with what is dubbed the “Superpanel;” after is the ONA awards.

What has become increasingly clear is that, despite the long-standing trend, some news organizations in Canada (I’m looking at you globeandmail.com), are in fact ahead of many U.S. sites. The lessons we have learned are now being discovered by many major sites, including USA Today. In fact, my general sense, is that the online news industry is ignoring the entire blog/Web 2.0 world (except to look at in fear), and, as a result, are missing a lot of the lessons and user experience conventions many Web users have learned over the past few years.

Holovaty at the ONA conference

Adrian Holovaty started the day with his session on evangelizing reporting and making data in news articles available for machine parsing (as evidenced in ChicagoCrimes.org). Although I arrived late (something about the Queen St. streetcar trying being diverged, and partly a result of a late night hunt to find a Gypsy jazz band and a Yahoo party), I’ve seen his talk on this before (and he is a good speaker), but it is heartening to see that it was incredibly well attended.

As he has readily admitted, it’s not rocket science, but it is a very original concept to the vast majority of the news industry, including those in the session. Each time he talks, and people see the results (both direct or indirect) of his work, there’s hope more news organizations will begin doing this kind of kind of interactive journalism, along with the more typical multimedia presentations.

From my experience, the two hurdles are:

finding the resources (both human and technical) to build out these applications;
and making it user-friendly for the reporters to input the data (i.e., creating a WYSIWYG interface).

The first is not insurmountable; there are a lot of talented journalist and Web developers who would be willing to do this kind of work. The second would require a more concerted project effort and training, but the results would continue to pay-off the years.

Midday at ONA, Day 1

So far, Toronto Hydro is failing me, hotel rates are too high, but I do have a recharged laptop (I still can’t believe there’s no free WiFi at an online journalism conference). Thankfully, I’ve been able to catch-up with a lot of people, some of which live in my city, or I’ve just met. And that was one of my hopes in attending this conference.

Of the two of the panels I’ve attended, the one on serious gaming was the most interesting. Essentially, the panelist just spoke about the relationship between online (educational) gaming and interactives. That simple notion sparked a lot of ideas that I was hastily jotting down in my trusty Moleksin. The second, post-lunch, was an all-star panel (Rob Curley, J.D. Lasica, Dan Gillmour, and Jay Rosen) that was interesting thanks mainly to Curley’s willingness to dive deep into how they are doing local blogging.

Many of the panels seem to be “ideas-based” and a lot of “wouldn’t it be great if…” Perhaps because I already believe what’s being preached, and have myself preached the same, that I find the tone a little too academic.

The nosepicker is that I have spoken to others here that are completely wowed by those concepts, which is good, very good, for this industry.

Two more sessions today, and I expect at least one more post.

ONA conference starts

Arriving for an early start at the Online News Association’s conference here in Toronto, and I have, so far, have run into colleagues I’ve worked with, might have worked with, and could be working with. Apparently the rare, and heavy Toronto fog has closed the airport, preventing some from arriving, but still it is quite packed.

The plan was to live blog this session, but in my rush to get a coffee, I forgot my power cord and my “typewriter” ribbon is running low. That, and I’m using Toronto Hydro’s wifi network — I did manage to connect, but its slow…

Keynote by Yahoo’s Hilary Schneider is interesting, if not quite enlightening overview of the Web 2.0 tools and how theoretically it could be applied to journalism. (Best line: “rapid failure” is good.) Elections, methinks, is going to be a big trend (the U.S. is due for one in a year, and Canada…well who knows), she just mentioned it in the keynote, and there’s a whole session on it later today.

More as deemed necessary. Technorati Profile

New York Times free again

The New York Times is dropping its online paid-subscription plan two years after launching it (and four after The Globe and Mail launched the model The Times used). The spin is the online advertising boom change the rules of the game. However, advertising revenue would be a pittance compared to the potential revenue generated through annual subscriptions.

The real reason then? Uptake was less than 300,000 subscribers on 13 million unique monthly visitors. At about two percent, the online conversion rate is better than some, but that rate will decline as subscriptions plateau while site traffic grows.

Which brings us to the Trojan Horse of this announcement: archives for the past two decades are now free as are all public domain articles from 1851 to 1922. In addition, some material between 1923 and 1986 will also be released from the paid archive.

All of a sudden there will be near-primary source articles for a lot of historical events that, until now haven’t had a public online presence. From a business perspective, the company has greatly improved its available inventory and calls its competitors: release your archive or lose traffic. (While working at The Globe and Mail, one of my disappointments was being unable to convince enough people of the importance in freeing the digital archives from only institutional settings.)

Both The Globe and the Wall Street Journal rely on subscription revenue and are sitting on large archives, and I know both were re-examining their business models. The Times’ move, however, should help weaken those previously unassailable revenue models.

Google News rewards original content

Over the North American long weekend, Google announced a deal it struck four of the top English-language newsfeeds that will see Google News hosting wire stories.

Effectively, Google has exposed the dirty laundry of many online news outlets: the bulk of the news posted on a daily basis is sourced from third-party providers. While such a practice is not new (the objective voice of modern journalism arose from the need to blend articles from a variety of sources into one cohesive package), it has been a lucrative crutch for the online industry more than a decade. Even the wire services have known this, and tried to cash-in — Reuters’ site design, with its pagination and online ads, is a prime example.

News organizations have had a love-hate relationship with Google News since it launched more than five years ago, but have recently become extremely reliant upon the traffic it brings. Although I don’t believe the deal is the beachhead to the portalization of Google, this latest move will no doubt increase publishers fear factor of the big G because, in the current market space, it will effect the revenue targets of most news sites.

Even as the online edition of newspapers are experiencing tremendous advertising growth, there continues to be a reluctance to reinvest that money into the core product. Too few outlets are hiring editorial staff; even those that are, the hires are editors, not reporters. Staff are expected to vet and/or repackage the content instead of writing new material. Although the wire feeds allow sites to publish huge amounts of news, the amount of work involved often means original (online) reporting is sacrificed no matter how simple it can be to do.

Smart publishers should realize the irony, and see Google’s move a forced weaning from the wire and begin investing in exclusive content which Google — as it has shown in every tweak its made to its search services — will reward with prominent, traffic-generating page placement.

Podcasting down, video up

One of the topics I’ve been speaking about over the past year has been online news trends, and there’s a few recent pointers from The Editors Weblog that speak a bit more in-depth about two of my themes: video and podcasting.

Podcasting has always seemed to have a limited audience:

the at work audience is often unable to listen to audio;
during the commute, podcasting competes with the radio;
few media outlets (excluding the CBC and other public broadcasters) have the resources and content to produce interesting audio offerings (see also: “Washington Post radio gets cut”);
the revenue model is, with he possible exception of Ricky Gervais, unproven.

Alex Iskold goes into more details, and looks at why podcasting has become the dedicated habit the way many pundits had expected.

Video, however, seems to have hit the sweet spot for both content and revenue.

Most news outlets had already been producing multimedia slideshows, so the visual metaphor is well established, and video content is more widely available (outside of public broadcasting, most radio content is exclusively music-based).

Television stations are now experimenting with producing online content, and, in many senses, are in the same position newspapers were online about a decade ago: playing with the potential of the medium (good thing, too, the “godfather of the net” is predicting the end of traditional TV).

But, more importantly, advertisers are eager to use video to push their message; even if it experimenting with formats other than pre- and post-roll ads.

CBC.ca’s down

Sadly, it sometimes takes an outside event to put things into perspective. So it was when I saw nothing but a server error on cbc.ca this afternoon. That error (or error message) stayed for at least a few hours, until they managed to create a simplified, yet attractive, homepage for the news.

Apparently, it’s a result of nothing more than a bad case of Murphy’s Law.

Here’s hoping they can get get the site up again soon. The site is getting back to normal a day later, but you can read an update on what actually happened to the site on the Inside the CBC blog (which incidentally, has tripled its visitors as a result of the main site going down).

The Exclusion of Garth Turner

Garth Turner and I have a history.

He was my MP for a while — I met him once during that time — and he now represents my parents’ riding. Turner was doing his mutual fund advice while I was covering the sector. And a month-and-a-half ago, at BarCampEarth, I had some heated discussion with the man helping with the Turner Report blog.

I never voted for him and find some of his personality traits a bit grating, but what I have come to respect about Garth Turner is his bold efforts at political transparency. His aforementioned blog is well-written, candid, and opinionated — everything a political blog should be, but normally isn’t. Turner’s willingness to critique the Conservative government he helped form and talk intelligently with opposition members was a refreshing change from his tight-lipped colleagues.

Given his “maverick” behaviour, his dismissal from the Conservative caucus today probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. But it was as he admits himself in the latest of his self-made MPtv videos and the aptly-titled blog post, “Holy smokes!”.

As I write this, that post has garnered 163 comments, and The Globe and Mail’s article about it has 217 comments. Most are critical of the Conservative party’s action, and many are urging him to join the Liberals. (He’ll be taking reader questions tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET on the Globe’s Web site.)

The Prime Minister may have hoped to weaken Turner with the expulsion, but the reverse may happen as a thousands of curious Canadians flock to the Turner Report and MPtv to see what all the fuss is about. What they’ll find is a whole lot of blunt commentary from a politician not afraid to speak the truth about the political system. In other words, someone completely unlike Stephen Harper.

Trouble at Toronto papers

Trouble has been brewing at Toronto Sun for a while, and was already apparent while working at Sun Media’s CANOE in the late 1990s. On the weekend, my current employer, The Globe and Mail wrote a surprisingly sympathetic piece on troubles at Toronto’s tabloid.

The Sun’s former competitor and former suitor, the Toronto Star is undergoing its own shakeup. Both its publisher (Michael Goldbloom) and editor (Giles Gherson) were “replaced” today after just two years — they had in turn replaced John Honderich who had held both positions for years.

The new editor is Fred Kuntz. The incoming publisher, Jagoda Pike, will also be president of the newly formed Star Media Group.

By the way, looking to get into online media (and not too concerned about the last couple of paragraphs)? The Star is looking for a Web producer — or drop me a line, Globe’s always looking for good people. (Apparently the Globe’s sister news site, CTV.ca is also looking for a Web producer.)

Remembering two Canadian media greats

This weekend Antonia Zebisias broke her blogging silence to remember Sid Adilman, one of Canada’s best entertainment journalists. He died this past Saturday and the paper he spent so much time at, the Toronto Star, remembers him well.

Sadly, another Canadian media legend died today: Lister Sinclair, the genius behind CBC’s Ideas program (among many others). For the next three nights, during Ideas’ time slot, the CBC will air a three-hour tribute to the broadcaster.

Before this medium consumed me, I lived for radio as exemplified by Lister Sinclair’s Ideas. The show — which to me, was him — offered more intriguing ideas and discussions than I’d encounter in school and his program continued to indulge my mind well beyond graduation. His voice, which was all I knew of him, will be missed yet fondly remembered.