Newspapers are still steam powered

Yesterday, the BBC podcast “50 Things That Made The Modern Economy” covered the invention of the electric dynamo. The episode was partly based on a 1990 academic paper by economist Paul A. David who studies “scientific progress and technical change.”

His thesis is that the initial lack of productivity gains related to the introduction of the electricity in factories was the common practice of simply replacing the one centralized steam engine with an electric motor. That approach maintained the disadvantages of steam while bringing none of the value of electricity.

The paper is here but read the excerpt below and mentally find and replace steam/electric with print/digital.

The proximate source of delay in the exploitation of the productivity improvement potential incipient in the dynamo revolution was, in large part, the slow pace of factory electrification.

The latter, in turn, was attributable to the unprofitability of replacing still serviceable manufacturing plants embodying production technologies adapted to the old regime of mechanical power derived from water and steam.

Thus it was the American industries that were enjoying the most rapid expansion in the early twentieth century (tobacco, fabricated metals, transportation equipment and electrical machinery itself) that afforded greatest immediate scope for the construction of new, electrified plants…

 

 

Shining a light in Plato’s Product Office

One of my favorite things about ONA is the session pitch. It is a great chance to wonder, “do I actually have anything to say?” but more importantly “what do I want to learn more about?”

The suggestion box opened recently and I am still thinking about this post from October on the challenges of building great products at legacy news organizations.

Here’s the pitch:

Shining a light in Plato’s Product Office

We can all agree – creating great products requires an understanding of and empathy for our users. That is a core tenet of Design Thinking and all Human Centered Design approaches to product development.

But empathy for users (readers, viewers, customers?) is not enough. The products we develop are an emergent property of the people, processes and cultures of our teams. And creating great products in any organization, especially one with a hundred-plus years of history, requires understanding ourselves as much as it does users.

We will talk about Plato’s Cave, empathy, fundamental attribution error, and the unique challenges of shepherding ideas through the complex web of intra-organizational boundaries, stakeholders, silos and workflows that are typical in modern media companies.

The Product Solution Stack Test

(tldr; A product strategy is only as strong as its weakest link.)

The Twitter dust-up this week ostensibly about digital having been a mistake for newspapers felt a bit like Groundhog Day (the movie.) New day, same argument, same result.

Steve Buttry and Mathew Ingram both posted eloquent rebuttals:

Buttry:  The newspaper industry’s colossal mistake was a defensive digital strategy

The colossal mistake that the newspaper industry made was responding to digital challenges and opportunities with defensive measures intended to protect newspapers, and timid experiments with posting print-first content online, rather than truly exploring and pursuing digital possibilities.

Ingram: Sticking With Print Would Not Have Helped Newspapers Avoid Death

Shafer’s piece assumes there was some magical Eden in which newspapers were unassailable, and that it would have been possible to remain there if not for the sin of pushing too hard into digital. But that simply isn’t the case.

Newspapers were never likely to dominate digital in the way they had print. Many of the causes are secular – the Internet is a supremely disruptive force that inherently flattens structures, eliminates middlemen and creates value at scale.

Newspapers on the other hand were middlemen built to extract local value from news and advertising. The worth of local journalism aside, the future of the print delivery business was always going to be problematic.

But blaming our travails entirely on those outside forces risks ignoring the mistakes we do own. And at the product and development level, we failed at some basic digital blocking and tackling. Those failures can be attributed to a lack of systems thinking in our strategies, and a lack of respect for just how difficult the ‘system’ of a legacy media company can be to navigate.

Developers have a concept of the ‘tech stack’ to describe the collection of software and subsystems required for a project. A typical example is ‘LAMP’ representing Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP in a common combination of operating system, web server, database and application/template software for a web site. Each component is dependent on the other and works together as a single system.

In product development, we also attempt to design coherent systems. But unlike a standard software stack, product solutions are emergent properties that reflect the desires, needs and constraints of a wide range of constituencies including humans, machines, cost and time.

  1. Reader Need (desirability)
  2. Business Need (viability)
  3. Visual Design (on brand and articulate)
  4. User Experience (function, usability)
  5. Development Effort (feasibility)
  6. Systems Integration (between disparate services and tools)
  7. Workflow (process for creating & publishing)
  8. Culture (shared assumptions that govern behavior)

Note that some of those layers (desirability, feasibility and viability) are typical human-centered design concepts. The others represent the people and processes necessary to actually bring a product to life including designers, developers and journalists.  To succeed, any product must ‘pass the test’ of at least minimally satisfying the requirements for each of the eight layers in that stack. And, because the stack crosses multiple organizational boundaries, creative and strategic conflicts will typically abound.

And more to the point, each layer in the stack is entirely capable of vetoing a product decision considered ‘solved’ in any or all of the layers above it. So, solving for seven is still a failing grade.

For instance, readers would undoubtedly prefer (level 1. Reader Need/desirability) a news site with no ads. But that would violate the need for revenues (level 2. Business Need/viability.)

And the further apart the levels the more complex the negotiations and solution will be.

Imagine a preferred design that dictated the use of triangular photos on the homepage. We could undoubtedly build the template and create a script to automatically crop images and avoid manual effort. But triangular photos are such a radical departure from accepted journalism norms the newsroom would likely reject the idea. (Possibly rightfully so.) So, all of the work to develop a product solution that worked from levels 3 to 7 would have been wasted, because we failed to solve for culture (level 8.)

So why have newspapers struggled with digital?

  1. Our guide star is often an internal business need, not an external customer need.
  2. We have failed to modernize many of our backend systems (starting with the CMS) causing many product strategies to fail at that level.
  3. In the name of expedience we launch features and products that do not meet the minimum requirements of all eight levels of the product stack.
  4. Our organizations are often siloed in a way that can return ‘false positives’ in the product stack test due to the inaccessibility of data.
  5. We have not explicitly enough discussed the complexity of the full product solution stack, so we have under-estimated the difficulty involved.
  6. We have failed to invest in the product and development resources that could help identify and resolve these issues.

When we solve those issues and are building products that ‘pass the test’ then we can go back to arguing about the ‘original sin‘ of digital journalism. Until then, we are still learning how to do digital media and are not ready to write the post mortem. Time is short, but the solutions are at hand if we take advantage.

 

Swipe overload

Anyone else feeling like iOS has reached ‘peak gesture?’ The force touch and all of the overlapping possibilities of the right/left swipe are seriously degrading the ease-of-use of the device, not to mention discoverability of the overall interface. One example – the new control center:

Timing is everything

As the old joke goes, you have three options for any project: “Quick, Cheap or Good. Pick two.”

For better or worse, at least those are affirmative choices – assuming you make them well enough in advance of the deadline. But wait till you have a month or a week left and the equation changes. Now you can only pick one. And “Cheap or Good” have already left the building.