Kiesow 7.0

Help!

I am at a workshop at Poynter this week learning about change management and coaching/training techniques. Just for a plug for the sponsor – the event is called the McCormick Change Leadership Fellowship.

The group is working today and tomorrow on developing hour long teaching modules that could potentially be used in the future at Poynter or other journalism events and conferences. We will not be building a full presentation this week, merely creating an outline and tools that we will use during the session.

This is where I need help. My session is tentatively titled: “10 Things You Can do for Free Today.” The focus will be on finding, implementing and using free software and services available on the Web to provide internal and external tools and features for use at your paper and Web site.

As part of the session I would like to provide a mini case study from different newspapers using each of the free tools and Web services. We use most of the at the Telegraph – but having a broader cross-sample to talk about would be much more valuable to attendees – and keep me from just rambling on about myself for an hour.

So – the list of possible services is below. If you are using any of them and would be willing to submit to a short email or phone interview and share some best practices and results around these products – let me know in the comments and/or by email: damon(at)kiesow.net I am also looking for any suggestions on services or categories of services that I have not gotten on the list yet.

1. Disqus.com/Intense Debate (comments)
2. Coveritlive.com (live chat/blog)
3. PHPbb (open source forums)
4. WordPress (blog)
5. Mogulus/Ustream (live video)
6. Qik.com (live cell phone video)
7. OpenX (ad serving)
8. Twitter (SMS)
9. Google Analytics/GoogleMaps/Google Docs
10. EditGrid (collaborative web-based data)

I know there are hundreds/thousands of others out there – I am most familiar with those in terms of good journalism uses at newspapers.

Thanks!

Damon

I am totally willing to agree that the current online news business model (e.g. publish everything for free and try and make money from eyeballs/ad revenue) has some flaws. And, the only way to find a new model or mix of models is for different organizations to try different things. Each market is different, each organization is different. Eventually it will all work out.

But, reading Business Week today Jon Fine mentions this nugget (which has been noted before):

For Subscribers Only: Locking Up the News Sites

Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which boasts a daily circulation of around 176,000, charges a monthly fee of $4.95 for full Web access. Around 3,400 subscribers are paying for that access, which comes to just over $200,000 a year, a sum that’s two zeroes shy of being meaningful for big players.

Obviously numbers are not my strong point, but this is a big paper. Can someone explain why $200,000 is a winning business model?  More to the point – how are 3,400 online subscribers (which does not count the print subs who get online access as well) enough?

Just doing the math here with round, easy numbers: $200,000 with a $5 CPM = 40,000,000 pageviews per year. So really, assuming three ads on a page they would need 13 million pageviews a year to bring in that same revenue. Increase that CPM a bit and having a paywall looks like an anchor.

Now ArkansasOnline.com has ads on the page, and these are viewed even by non-subscribers. So, they are double dipping a bit there. But still – how many readers and page views are they giving up by being behind the paywall?

Anyone have unique visitor or page view numbers to share and compare to  other non-paywall sites of similar circulation size? I wish anyone the best who tries something new but I would like to at least be able to understand the strategy.

Update: From the Neiman Lab on 04/02/09: Paying for online news: Sorry, but the math just doesn’t work.

A bunch of new Twitter accounts popped up in our newsroom recently so I put together a quick list of resources for people just starting out.  I use all or most of these services:

Track your growth
http://twittercounter.com

Get your stats
http://tweetstats.com

Get recommendations for who you should be following
http://www.mrtweet.net

Get notified when people stop following
http://twitterless.com

Find out how influential you are
http://twitter.grader.com

Look for connections among your followers
http://www.tweetwheel.com

A live map based display of everyone
http://twittervision.com

Find more friends
http://whoshouldifollow.com

Search Twitter
http://search.twitter.com

Make shortcuts for URLS (and track the clicks)
http://bit.ly

This blog post finally irritated me enough I had to rant further on it: OJR: Papers must charge for websites to survive

I intended to comment (again) on the post itself – but it has been closed. It seems like the conversation could have/ should have continued there.

Here is my original response last month:

Not to be trite but so far today I have gotten free news and weather from my TV, free traffic reports from my radio and free movie listings from a local weekly paper. Seems like charging for information might be the exception not the rule in many cases.

To be fair Mr. Storch was considerate enough to respond to almost everyone including me:

Damon, I don’t know about you but I don’t get my TV for free. I pay $123 every month to Comcast (for cable TV and Internet access). Otherwise, I wouldn’t have TV (no rabbit ears). Similarly, isn’t conventional radio fading and being eased out by the pay satellite services?

So, lets call that a ‘non denial denial.’ And perhaps further proof that Mr. Storch is not, as he freely admits, an economist. Well, I don’t even play one on TV – but I do have a set of rabbit ears available in case I need them. And, for what it is worth I don’t subscribe to satellite radio.

But, overall his analogy does seem pretty good: Comcast has built a delivery infrastructure that takes their product into every home in town. They deliver syndicated and original content and they charge their subscribers a premium for the privilege. So, why can’t newspapers do the same?

BECAUSE COMCAST IS ALREADY DOING IT! And Verizon and Roadrunner and every other ISP out there.

The exact reason people are no longer dependent on once-per-day news-on-paper is that they have an always-on broadband connection drowning them in information 24-7-365. Surely we do not all need MBAs to recognize the basic supply and demand pressures at work here?

But, lets turn the argument around. What would it hurt if we did charge for online news? To start we need to ignore two basic facts:

1) Print subscriptions subsidize delivery costs. Online distribution for news is basically free – or at least infinitely scalable at a relatively low fixed cost. In both mediums advertising has always been the revenue driver.

2) Local news is an extremely valuable product. Valuable enough that if local papers are careless, free competitors will appear in your market. All it would take is one fanatical blogger who lives for school board meetings to take a good chunk out of your newspaper’s Web traffic and prestige. Multiply that by 2 or three of your local beats and let me know how that affects your revenue growth.

Sure we can start charging for the news online. We could also double our print subscription rates or triple our advertising rates. None of those things are likely because the economics just do not make sense.

No one is arguing everything online should be free. The debate is really about who – the consumer or the advertiser -  should be paying.  Just as Comcast charges you extra for movies on-demand, there is probably a market for premium content even in local communities. But, I have yet to see the news product or feature that seems to fit the bill.

David Ardia is the director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard. He spoke on a panel in Worcester last November and gave a great summation of CDA 230 and the legal protections newspapers are granted to moderate comments on their sites.

I had forgotten this session was videotaped until seeing a Tweet from Patrick Beeson: @patrickbeeson Yes, you can police comments on your news site and not get sued: http://bit.ly/Fk3u

Watching the beginning of the video – I thought it all seemed familiar. Then I realized I was on the panel and (off screen) was sitting two seats to the right of Ardia. There must be some term for that – maybe deja view.  That would be a case of deja vu caused by viewing a video of an event that you forgot you had witnessed live.

The video was recorded and posted by Josh Benton at the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard.

David Ardia, on legal liability for comments online from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

So, it is going to be a spectacle, especially during a slow news week, when one media company sues another for hyperlinking:
Gatehouse sues NYT Co. over local Websites (Boston.com)
Gatehouse Media sues New York Times Co. over copyright issues (WickedLocal.com)
(For ongoing analysis Dan Kennedy at Northeastern University is tracking the case at Media Nation – he has posted the complaint here)

They say all politics are local, and even on the Web, most business is as well. So in this case there may be a disconnect between the open ideals of the Internet and the cold reality of Website publishers trying to compete with giants such as Boston.com. To put it another way – it is easy to be high minded about such things until it is your ox being gored.

The ‘what are they thinking’ perspective is ably represented by Jeff Jarvis and Mark Potts:
When did Gatehouse become clueless
Gatehousegate

The other side of the story (What they ARE thinking) is so far represented only by the GateHouse complaint.

As someone who competes for online readers in the broader Boston market I can understand GateHouse’s concern. But – I think/hope this might be a technological and design problem, not a legal one in the end.

After all, Boston.com is basically doing what most Websites do – they are aggregating content and linking to original sources. So, it is hard to imagine GateHouse winning outright with this complaint. And, if they did it is hard to imagine the case law thus created would be 100% beneficial to anyone. Let’s all hope they get some mediation and a settlement.

As to the merits, on a first read the trademark dilution complaint appears most on target (to a non-lawyer anyway.) The design of the Boston.com Newton page seems to imply that WickedLocal.com – mixed in with Globe stories and blogs – is just another NYT property. A quick fix there might be to simply separate Globe and ‘other’ content into different news lists with different headers. Just make it clear what Boston.com owns and what they don’t. That is the design solution.

A larger problem (at least for a smaller media property competing in the Boston market) is Google juice. This is where we need a tech solution.

Many small papers have an ongoing complaint that any Web-first breaking news they publish shows up quickly on larger regional Web sites via sharing with AP. The issue is not that AP picks up Web stories, nor that Boston.com (among others) feeds them to their site. The problem is that Google gives big Web sites preference in their search rankings, regardless of whether or not they are the original source for the content.

This happens on a weekly basis when a murder or natural disaster story hits our Web site.  If we publish at 9:00 a.m. it gets to AP by 9:30 a.m. and before 10:00 a.m. Google News has Boston.com, WCAX.com, BostonHerald.com and etc at the top of the search results – while our original and ongoing reporting is in the middle or bottom of the page.

Imagine this same scenario for WickedLocal. If “Your Town” eventually expands to 125 communities who is going to get the search traffic for Newton TAB stories? One would assume Boston.com will get a high rank – and a potentially lopsided share of those first clicks. To be fair I don’t see a strong indication of this effect yet but check out this search result and you can see the beginning of it. So, if 100 readers click to Boston.com and 30 click through to the WickedLocal story is that good? And, is that a gain of 30 for GateHouse or a loss of 70?

So – the ‘simple’ tech solution: Newspaper.coms, the Associated Press and Google need to get together and agree on some ground rules. Newspapers would add metadata to links and external feeds indicating a URL for the original source material. AP would transmit this info with their wire stories and Google would respect that metadata when crunching their Google News algorithms. This would allow everyone to link and excerpt to their heart’s content – but it would NOT reward aggregators with improved search engine rankings built on top of someone else’s content. It would basically be a sort of reverse ‘nofollow’ tag for news stories – that gives credit where due.

AP already has a partnership with Google that is aimed at reducing duplicate wire stories in the index – would it really be too difficult to make this same concept serve individual newspapers? Technologically probably not, politically who knows?

UPDATE: Some more commentary from the blogosphere:
GateHouse Lawsuit vs. New York Times Co. has Dire Implications
A Danger to Journalism
GateHouse: O hai, internetz — we r fail
Gatehouse sues NYTCo over aggregation: But do they have a point?
Globe vs. Gatehouse Part I
Peeking inside Pandora’s Box
GateHouse v NY Times Co.: Not So Simple After All

Sure disasters make for good copy and they are a chance for a newspaper to really serve the community — assuming you can print the newspaper and the staff has power at home and can leave their driveways.

Oh – but it does still make good photos as evidenced by my front yard around noon today:

(submitted from the Radisson – with hot water, warm beds and wifi – more pix at Flickr)

I spent the morning at a workshop in Worcester, MA focused on reader comments and the law – and for some reason started thinking about ice cream on the way home.

The session was organized by an informal group of New England media lawyers (shout out to Rob Bertsche and Rick Gagliuso) and the lunch keynote was delivered by Josh Benton of the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. I joined three other journalists on the morning panel: Jim Bodor of the Telegram & Gazette, Jessica Kosowski of the Sun-Chronicle and David Olson of the Salem News.

We had a great crowd and conversation, none of which had to do with dessert. On the ride back I started wondering if any of us were doing enough online (reader comments aside) to make digital news really different than print.

So try this analogy on for size: For 200 years we have been selling basically the same product – call it vanilla news ice cream. Maybe some papers have been selling vanilla bean or French vanilla. It is still vanilla – albeit fresh and tasty and delivered right to your doorstep every morning.

When newspapers went online we started by offering the only flavor we knew how to make – vanilla. Vanilla online is basically as good as vanilla in print – assuming you really like vanilla. And we bet the farm on people really liking it. Sure, one click away were 10,000 other store fronts selling Youtube and Flickr and Face… I mean chocolate and butter pecan and rocky road. But we were sticking with our sure thing.

The question becomes – vanilla is great but what it only 20% of people want to buy it on a regular basis? What if adding multimedia and comments and text alerts is great but is really just hot fudge on top of the vanilla? Yummy, but still intrinsically the same as the print product.

So, what exactly do newspaper.coms need to do to learn how to make pistachio? And butter pecan swirl. And maybe mint chocolate chip. Is the answer mass customization, user generated content, local business recommendations and reviews, free classifieds, hyper-local databases, cell phone video or social networks? Or are all of those things really just news with sprinkles on top?

Is someone out there already building the next great ‘news’ thing and if so, any chance they are building it for a journalism company?

If you know please leave a message – I will be at Baskin-Robbins.

Technically, no one has quit the AP yet. Their current contract contains a two-year notice period. But, a number of papers have given their notice (7% this year vs 4% last year according to AP) and last month the Spokesman-Review indicated they plan to try and break the two-year clause.

And then late this week AP announced it was cutting rates an additional $9 million in ’09 and eliminating the new two-tiered service structure in favor of giving members access to every text story the wire service produces. They also announced an intent to pursue what may be a complete restructuring of their menu of services and fee schedule.

So – maybe that is good news. In the meantime I have been curious as to how many papers have given their notice. Seven percent would be somewhere around 100 – but below is the best I can figure that have announced publicly. If I am missing any you know of – please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.

Papers that have given AP their 2-year notice:

1. Minneapolis Star Tribune
2. Spokesman-Review
3. The Columbus Dispatch
4. LA Times
5. Chicago Tribune
6. Baltimore Sun
7. Sun Sentinel
8. Orlando Sentinel
9. Hartford Courant
10. The Morning Call
11. Daily Press (Hampton Roads, VA)
12. The Telegraph (Nashua, NH)
13. The Bakersfield Californian
14. The Post Register (Idaho Falls ID)
15. Yakima Herald-Republic
16. Wenatchee World (WA)
17. The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)
18. New York Daily News
19. Lewiston Sun Journal (Lewiston, ME)

A list of articles and posts referencing the above cancellations:

• Preparing for a Post-AP Era
• The New AP
• What Would Happen if Newspapers Divorce AP
• Tom Brettingen, Chief Revenue Officer, AP: ‘Returning $20 Million To The Industry’
• Steve Buttry’s letter to AP
• Strib tells AP: we’re canceling
• Dispatch gives notice of cancellation to AP
• Some Papers in Financial Trouble Are Leaving the A.P. to Cut Costs
• US regionals turn away from AP to focus on local reporting
• Newspaper Chain Refuses to Renew AP Contract
• Shocker: Tribune Co. Gives Notice To Drop AP

Ok – so hooking an external microphone up to the Nokia N95 is not an original idea – but most of the solutions we found on the web involved some pretty delicate cable connections and adapters:

External Microphone for The N95: The Final Word (we hope) & video tutorial
Steve Garfield – video

I blogged about our solution a few months back – and then lost that post in a blog crash. Don Himsel has also covered our set-up on Newsvideographer.com.

We have received a few emails about it in the past few weeks – so here it is again:

The bracket is the Nokia DT-22 which works just fine. We are using a Senheiser shotgun mic in this particular set, but obviously it works with anything that has a stereo mini-plug. It is particularly fun using a wireless mic with the N95.

So – the key here is the custom mic cable we soldered together for the purpose. The N95 has a standard AV 4-conductor 3.5mm jack in the bottom. And despite the inclusion of a proprietary cable with the camera, any cable will work. Nokia has changed the ‘colors’ on the cable – yellow is NOT the video signal – so just keep that in mind.

The cable we built is painfully simple. We took a standard AV cable (4 conductor plug on one end – 3 RCA plugs at the other end.)

After figuring out which of the 3 RCA cables were carrying which signal – we cut off the RCA plugs, trimmed the cable down the the desired length and soldered the audio left and right cables onto a standard (3 conductor) stereo modular jack. The ‘extra’ cable is simply left inside the plug housing – it is not connected to anything. (And FYI – links are for illustrative purposes – we bought our parts at the local Radio Shack.)

I can not remember which cables were left/right audio – but there are only three to choose from so it was not tough to figure out. When using the cable – plug the mic in first – then plug the cable into the Nokia. When prompted, select ‘headset’ as the accessory to be used.

Good luck.