Kiesow 7.0

Arguing Apple vs Android and apps vs web is fun, but so 2011. So, thinking about 2012, a handful of mobile trends are worth tracking:

1. Transactions/Authentication (NFC , Square etc.)
2. External sensors and connected devices (Bluetooth 4.0/Internet of Things)
3. Voice (Siri vs Google)
4. Presence (Moving beyond check-ins)
5. Home Hub (Airplay, HDMI outputs, home controls)
6. Connected cars (3G-enabled, streaming Internet replacing AM/FM etc.)
7. 4G (Speed changes behavior)

I am collecting links on these and other mobile topics on Delicious.

In December I will be leading a Poynter News University webinar titled “Track Your Traffic: Web Metrics for Journalists.” The name sort of aligns itself with the theory that journalists and math don’t mix well which is unfair but still often true. So while basic Web metrics are not calculus if you don’t work with them every day then jargon like UV, PV, Avg Time Spent, Search Refers, and Bounce Rate can still be a challenge.

The session will review the basic terms and methodology of Web analytics but will also let people put their own Web reports into some context. To help with that we want to gather (anonymously) examples of a few key metrics from your web site. We don’t want names or any other identifying information and the only descriptions that will be used in the training will be generic such as “A 30,000 circ daily in the Northeast.”

If you complete the survey and provide your e-mail address, we’ll send you a promo code worth $10 off the Webinar. The code will be sent one month before the Webinar, so make sure you fill out the survey before then.

Thanks for the help and please leave a comment below if you have any questions or have additional data to share that might be useful in the training.

If you like New England and you like digital media you have come to the right place. The Telegraph is hiring a Managing Editor / Online upon my departure on August 4. I will let the job posting below generally speak for itself but I have been here for 5 years and have loved every day of it.

The Telegraph has been named one of the best papers in New England for at least the past 5 or 6 years and we have done some great work in reader engagement, multimedia, enterprise reporting and community development during that time.

The staff and management of the paper buys into a Web-first approach and they are looking for a Managing Editor who is a good journalist and a digital innovator to take them to the next level.

Contact info is at the bottom of the listing but feel free to email me directly if you have questions about the position.

Job Posting
Managing Editor Online

Telegraph Publishing Company and its affiliate, the Cabinet Press, seek an online editor with a strong background in journalism, a thorough understanding of Internet technology, and proven leadership ability to help continue the transformation of our news organization in the digital age.

In addition to The Telegraph, of Nashua, N.H., (circ. 25,000, daily), the company also produces four weekly newspapers along with multiple niche publications and Web sites. The online editor is responsible for editorial content and presentation of NashuaTelegraph.com, Cabinet,com, and the company’s niche Web sites such as FeastNH.com, EncoreBuzz.com and TelegraphNeighbors.com.

The successful candidate will have at least five years of newsroom experience as a reporter or editor, and must be familiar and comfortable with the conventions of community journalism and the operation of a small daily newspaper. The online editor coordinates content, projects and communication between newsroom and digital media teams.

He/she must also:

• Understand online content, revenue models and strategies; lead our community and audience development efforts and play a lead role in the implementation of our social media strategies.
• Be familiar with all facets of publishing process from story pitch to publication in multiple media on multiple platforms including print, web and mobile.
• Develop work flows and training plans to facilitate publication of news, videos and photos to multiple digital platforms.
• Be immersed in the trends inside and outside the news industry that impact digital publication and audience development.
• Be comfortable working with print and digital vendors, including writing product specifications, project management and contract review and negotiations.
• Assist in building a newsroom technology strategy that supports mobile journalism capabilities for reporting and photo staffers.
• Be familiar with the technology of digital publishing including Web servers, HTML, CSS and Javascript.
• Assist in daily news coverage discussions and decisions and make independent judgments that serve both print and online coverage needs.
• Monitor metrics for all Telegraph sites and develop relevant business and content reports and strategies.
• Serve as a member of the Telegraph Editorial Board and contribute one editorial per month.

This is a salaried, management position; compensation commensurate with experience.

Interested applicants should apply via email to Executive Editor Dave Solomon, dsolomon@nashuatelegraph.com, with “online editor” in the subject line.

No phone calls please.

As a journalist, what are your favorite mobile tools?

Not just services like Qik or Twitter, or devices like the iPhone, but anything (I mean anything) you use for researching, reporting, publishing or interacting with the community when you are on-the-go.

Think of anything from power converters to WiFi locator maps. Everything from the MiFi to the EyeFi. What is in your camera bag or backpack or car trunk (or on your phone or laptop) that helps you do your job?

I am building a June webinar for Poynter’s News University (name and date TBD) and am looking for some great examples of people doing cool things with mobile tools. You can see an list of collected links for the project at delicious.com/dkiesow/newsu.

If you know what an OWLE is or have filed a 10 inch story from your Blackberry please let me know. I hope to use a selection of real-world examples for the webinar as well as expand on a few for the Mobile Media blog.

Please leave a comment below, email damon(at)kiesow.net, or ping me @dkiesow. Thanks!

In general I have given up arguing free v.s. paid content strategies. The terminology being used: ‘free’ v.s. ‘paid’ is in itself some assurance that in a recession many publishers are going to start charging for their online editions. Never mind that the debate is really ad supported v.s. subscription supported v.s. a hybrid of the two. And, never mind that if you sketch out a ‘paid’ strategy thinking ‘free’ is the other alternative you are probably going to get it wrong.

So in the short term some will get it wrong, possibly horribly wrong. But those paying attention to the fact that digital has changed our culture will hopefully get it right. And ‘right’ can include some level of subscription fees, the question being what cost, what content and what platforms.

But, the number one way to get it wrong is to believe that because content is expensive to produce, readers must and will subsidize its creation through subscription fees. Assuming you are entitled to be paid for something is not really a sound economic argument, especially in the face of an unlimited supply of information driving down the perceived value of your content.

I have not seen anyone map this on a simple supply/demand curve:

Disclaimer: the chart is for entertainment purposes. I am not an economist, not even on TV and the curves here are purely diagrammatic. If this was showing a real information demand curve the ‘supply’ line would be so far to the right as to be off the page bringing the quantity (Q1) with it and dropping the price equilibrium (P1) to zero.

Economics 101 is when supply increases prices decrease. In this case we could argue demand has also increased but not enough to match a limitless supply of information.

So what we have is an oversupply of information. Not news, not journalism necessarily, but information. And guess what, consumers are exhibiting a behavior that indicates 5.5 hours per day of ‘information’ on Facebook is at least a minimally acceptable substitute for paying for a daily newspaper or watching the evening news. If the news is important it will find them. Assuming there are any newspapers left to cover it.

I received no less than four competing direct mail offers for newspaper subscriptions this week. Oddly enough, only one of the papers actually publishes in New Hampshire – and it was not mine. (Yes, I do already have a subscription to my own paper.)

I found the coincidence of timing, and the various pricing strategies interesting. Each paper structured their offers differently, but basically:

7-day subscription (5 for WSJ)
Union Leader – $2.25 /week
Boston Globe – $7.75 /week (12 week special)
New York Times – $7.40 /week
Wall Street Journal – $2.30 /week

Weekender
Union Leader – $2.00 /week (Thu-Sun)
New York Times  - $5.20 /week (Fri-Sun)

Sunday Only
Union Leader – $1.00 /week
Boston Globe – $2.50 /week (for $3.24 includes Globe Reader)

An interesting quote from Jonathan Miller (once-upon-a-time my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss at AOL) talking about Kindle, the WSJ.com and the distribution problem in digital media:

I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon (for WSJ.com on the Kindle). Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That’s part one. Part two is they don’t know I exist. I went from being someone who’s their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they’ve lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion’s share of the economics.

So newspapers are mad at Google for creating an efficient distribution system that drives traffic back to them, but the same publishers are rushing to Amazon to give them 70% of the subscription revenue to get onto Kindle?

I went looking for he phone number for our local bike shop this morning. I know where the shop is but never can find the number when I need to call. (BTW – what’s a phone ‘book’?)

Google search = Merrimack bicycle shop Luckily for the owner that generic search is also the exact name of his store. Great SEO for someone who has been in business for 20 years.

First result = Google Maps Fair enough – I did search in Google. But, I wonder why we do not hear more concern about that? Local directories can be a significant source of newspaper.com revenue and here Google has gone and given itself the market. Business-wise that worries me more then them linking to us in Google News. Where is the moral outrage people?! WIN for Google.

Second and third results = Waymarking.com which appears to be a cycling enthusiasts site with reader contributed reviews. Interesting – unfortunately the location and photo in the listing is two locations ago. (The owner has moved several times in the past few years.) FAIL.

Fourth result = AOL.com The shop I was looking for was 9th on a list of apparently sponsored and featured links. At least it was listed – but unfortunately the location is a year out of date. FAIL.

Fifth result = Directory.NH.com (disclaimer: we own nh.com) This is the first genuinely ‘local’ result on the page. The Telegraph has actual real live people who maintain the site, update phone numbers and addresses, sell enhanced listings and so on. And of course the info is accurate in this case! WIN for NH.com

Results six though 100 (no I did not look at every one) seem to be the usual mix of empty SEO-grabbing directories with a few reader contributed sites in the mix. Almost none of them had the correct address (416 DW Highway) and none I saw had anything approximating business hours. Overall Web FAIL.

So, I guess the question is really about Google. How useful are it’s vaunted algorithms when dealing at the local level? Yes, Google itself got the listing correct – and that should be a concern. But, 99% of the rest of the results were garbage and there was really no way to judge right from wrong, good from bad.

PageRank works wonders on non-geographic-relevant content. When I want to know the name of the character actor in the episode of STNG that is on right now (Ray Wise) I really do want to see the result that the greatest number of people found relevant.

But, when I am searching for the address of a local business I want to see the result that has the most authority. In this case accuracy is not a popularity contest.

This would seem to be a kink in the armor and we see the same problem in Google News. Large media sites get a high ranking for nothing more than reprinting an AP pick-up of a ‘local’ story. Meanwhile the source newspaper that is providing updates, context, documents and maybe multimedia is stuck lower in the results.

If newspaper executives want to make a career out of bashing Google for having a popular product – they should at least frame the argument in reality. The problem is not that Google indexes our stories and content – it is that really they don’t do such a great job in providing ‘credit’ to the local sources that are likely to also be the most authoritative.

Google News itself is an attempt to remedy this problem. By segmenting and indexing media outlets the results can be assumed to be more recent and more relevant then a random search of the entire Web. But, as with directory listings the system still breaks down at the hyper-local level.

Newspapers should be going after Google to make their searches (for news and business directories especially) more geo-friendly. Just add source location as a factor in the PageRank calculation and see if we can not start driving traffic to the sources that are actually paying to create the content in the first place.

If you are an online-type-person working at a newspaper.com have I got an offer for you.

I am working on a small research project that hopefully will turn into a case study and presentation at Poynter later this summer. The working title is: ’10 Things You Can do for Free Today.’

The project involves identifying 15 – 20 of the top ‘free’ tools being used on newspaper Web sites and then building short case study for each focused on ease of installation, use, successes and best practices. The tools most commonly mentioned so far range from Coveritlive to Qik.

If you are interested in helping out just answer a few quick questions here: Web Tools Survey

Thanks!

Reading Steve Buttry’s latest blog post this morning  Clinging to the past won’t save newspapers he summed up (with credit to Chuck Peters) the exact philosophy we have been thinking about at the Telegraph recently: Success = Attention x Trust x Convenience.

Great quote and great presentation from Chuck: