Below the Fold

Journalists to Brands: Don’t Give Us “Content,” Tell Us Stories

ALTHOUGH I CAN'T TRACE THE ORIGIN with any certainty, I’m nevertheless pretty sure that the word “content” was first used by a marketer, not a by a journalist.

Journalists are in the business of stories. Always have been – and despite the 24/7 streams of info-snacks and feeds forced through ever-congested virtual pipes, they always will be.

So it should come as no surprise that a recent global study of journalists found that journalists don’t want “pre-packaged” news such as press releases, and instead are “looking for variety in the kinds of stories brands talk about and the way they are told. And they expect brands to be properly engaged with the relevant social networks – not a box-ticking exercise driven by the PR department, but a genuine engagement at all levels of the business.”

In other words, stop with the “content.” Even the word “content” is cold, distant. Content is artificial intelligence. Content fills the feed but leaves you hungry.

Stories, however, are emotional. Stories are history personified. Technology may be the heart of social media, the muscle that keeps it moving, but stories are its soul.

Journalists tell stories and want to be told stories. According to the study, they also want brands to “deploy a full range of storytelling assets – brand stories must be supported by videos, images, infographics.”

It’s also critical that the story be told consistently across platforms and social channels – media fragmentation demands clear narrative so the story doesn’t get lost or misinterpreted like a bad game of “telephone.” These narratives can and should vary based on the channels and makeup of the audience, but ultimately they need to be connected to a larger central theme.

With so much noise disguised as news, journalists want to hear from trusted sources and be engaged in real dialogue with real people. Social media gives brands a perfect opportunity to earn that trust – and if brands are ready, journalists are listening.

The Day the Scoop Died

LONG, LONG TIME AGO, I can still remember how the L.A. Times used to make me cry.

Hardly a week would go by it seemed without them scooping me on some local story. I scooped them once in a while, too, but our battles were more like the Celtics and Lakers in the ‘60s and ‘70s – always in the finals, but like those Laker teams, I rarely finished on top.

We lived by the scoop but for all the wrong reasons. It was about ego, not desire to inform a wanting public. These were the pre-Internet days after all, when a 24-hour news cycle still existed. If you missed a story you missed it by a day, not by a few minutes.

Back then news organizations got “credit” and kudos for being first, and if an error occurred along the way, it would be corrected the next day on the bottom of page 6 in 8-point type, next to the shampoo ad.

Technology has changed this, of course. We now live a world where the ability to be first, even if by mere minutes or seconds, is valued more by the media that being right.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of the media clinging to the past. Today’s technology demands that we be right, because if you’re not, the damage is not buried in a correction a day or two later, but amplified in a public firestorm of embarrassment that can undo a career in the time it takes to send a tweet. Accuracy is more valuable than urgency.

The latest example, of course, is Fox News and CNN’s rush to judgment of the Supreme Court’s ruling on healthcare. Both organizations reacted to the initial Court statement by saying the law was struck down, when in fact the core provisions had been upheld. CNN corrected the error (as did Fox), but not before a screen shot of the erroneous report spread throughout the social Web.

An NBC PR person wasted no time rubbing it in, saying via Twitter: “Important to underscore something I said at @NBCNews social media workshop last week: We'd rather be right than first."

Rem Rieder, an editor with the American Journalism Review, gave a less snarky but no less accurate assessment:

“Now there's no doubt the scoop is a time-honored tradition in journalism. Breaking a big story is a big deal. And that competition to unearth powerful and important stories can be a very positive force. “But worrying about being first on reporting something that is handed to you and everyone else? By 24 seconds? I think I speak for everyone when I say, it's really not important.”

Reider is right – it’s not important. The truth is that years from now, the public won’t remember or care who was first, but they will never forget who was wrong.

Reacting is not reporting, and unfortunately there are too many “reactors” today and not enough reporters. It’s time to go back to reporting the news – the scoop is dead, let it stay that way.

From Interest to Identity: Social Media and Local Journalism Will Lead Us Back

Pinterest is the latest but not the first.

For that title you need to go back to Compuserve and AOL 1.0, back even to the Usenet and BBS systems. You need to add blogs and communities like iVillage to the list, and countless groups, services and platforms dedicated to one thing: Creating Communities of Interest.

They are everywhere now, in places like Facebook and Google Plus, and more recently in Pinterest, which uses visual storytelling to connect people by interest and passion. People are more comfortable in their similarities than in their differences, making Communities of Interest like Pinterest the natural order of things rather than another social media trend.

But while Communities of Interest are like us, they are not “Us.” They are places but not Our Places. They are what we do, what we love – but they are not who we are.

They are not Identity.

This, too, is changing. Communities of Identity are coming. These are the permanent, personal connections – and for many, they are the way back from social media overload, from Communities of Interest that create more distance even as they pull more people together.

Newspapers: The First Communities of Identity

Communities of Identity are already here – in fact they were here long before the electronic media age. We called them local newspapers.

There was a time when all newspapers were local, when “the paper” was both progenitor and steward of a community’s identity. If you wanted to know what a town was like, what made that geography different or special from others, you didn’t need to look any further than the newspaper.

As mass media proliferated, however, newspapers moved away from connecting to their communities by geographic, ethnic or historical roots. Suburban flight, competition and technology forced a homogenization of the news. Papers had to look regionally and nationally, and in doing so they got away from identity and rallied around interest, focusing on broader connections and looser ties.

News became sensationalized. Talking (or yelling) at the audience became more commonplace than listening to people or representing them. Value was placed on sharing common interests, the more “common” the better.

In this environment, news in one paper became indistinguishable from news in another paper thousands of miles away. Identity was gone, replaced by the more treasured metric of “impressions” and “views.”

Journalism Leads the Way Back

This worked for a while – in fact it still works for most, with the emphasis now on aggregating and curating news for Communities of Interest. But the future of news will come more from its past than its present.

News, especially in today’s highly social environments, thrives best when it’s small. Personal connections are emotional, and I’d argue that emotions run deeper when connected to a hometown vs. a hobby.

As the world gets bigger we look for ways to make it smaller and feel a connection to the places and people that define us. “Content” can’t do this but “stories” can. Journalism can lead the way forward by focusing inward.

Community newspapers are not in retreat but rather experiencing a sort of renaissance. According the to the National Newspaper Association, 86 million Americans read community newspapers (papers with 15,000 circulation or less – in other words, 80 percent of all U.S. papers.) The paper is the primary source of news for small communities, 10 times higher than the Internet. And advertising revenues are increasing.

The same can be seen online – digital-only operations such as the Texas Tribune and the St. Louis Beacon are breaking headlines and making money. And beyond news we are seeing growth in Communities of Identity like Ancestry.com, which allow people to connect pan-geographically as well as by common heritage.

Communities of Interest aren’t going anywhere, either – you don’t need to look any further than Pinterest to see that. But even those communities will ebb back toward identity, for the true power of social media is not in how we see others, but in how we see ourselves.

Digital is a Platform

Digital is not a “publication.” Digital is a “platform.”

Publications are static, one-way, monotone. They live in comfort. Publishing is an act of control, and in that sense, it is little more than anachronism.

You can publish via digital, but digital is not a publication.

Digital is a platform.

Digital is a relationship reset, an invitation for community involvement. It is a place, an environment, a vessel for people to share knowledge and perspective. Digital is a process, and in that sense, it forces brands, journalists and others to add value rather than merely “create content.”

Publications don’t need journalists, don’t need artists, they don’t need anyone except autonomic content creators. Platforms, however, can’t exist without people to both contribute and curate, to share data and analyze data, to educate and be educated. Digital needs storytellers.

With digital, the platform comes first, not the publication.

In Search of the “News Particle”

Scientists this month said they are a step closer to finding the Higgs boson, commonly referred to as the “God Particle,” which is widely believed to be the key building block of, well, the entire universe. The God Particle is what allows matter to have mass – in other words, what allows matter (and us) to exist at all.

Confirmation won’t come until 2012. In the meantime there is another search underway, certainly not as grand as the key to matter itself yet perhaps just as important to our existence.

It's the search not for matter, but information that matters. It’s the search for relevance and originality, for order in a flood of chaos.

I call it the “News Particle.” It’s comprised of curiosity, direct questions and cogent thinking. And while it’s not completely disappeared it’s nevertheless endangered.

Before news can be curated, aggregated, fed or tweeted, it must be reported. Truly reported, not regurgitated from a press release. You have to talk to people and find the News Particle that separates a real story from just another pebble in the stream.

This is not about “old” media vs. “new” media, or a plea for more idle times. In fact there has never been a better moment for news or the news business (I’m in the minority here, but history will bear this out.)

Moreover, community participation in the news gathering process is critical and welcome. We need citizen journalists as well as “journalist citizens” who speak for and are involved in their communities. Journalism, at least the best of it, has always been social.

But being able to shoot mobile video and use a social network doesn’t make someone a reporter any more than giving the police information about a crime makes someone a cop. Reporting and police work require something more, not the least of which is patience.

The more we move away from paying journalists to do their jobs, the more we stop bloggers from getting at the truth and exercising their First Amendment rights, the more we tip the balance away from true hunters of news to and toward simple gatherers of information. The News Particle ceases to exist.

An old Society of Professional Journalists ad campaign once asked, “If we don’t tell you, who will?”

We are now finding out. And the answer is not good, for any of us.

Introducing “PEARL” – A Tool for Determining What People Will Pay for Online News

The easy answer to how much consumers will pay for online news – if there is such a thing as an easy answer – is “they’ll pay what it’s worth.” Of course that’s’ the problem: In a world where free access to news is a presumed birthright and stories have been reduced to commoditized pieces of “content,” getting people to understand the value of news is an unenviable if virtually impossible task.

That’s okay – innovation doesn’t happen in boardrooms or by crunching financials. The only way to score is to take a shot.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to have some way to evaluate the key drivers for news in a digital world -- the elements that, when applied just right, will convince people that the news is worth paying for.

Introducing “PEARL”
I’m developing a process to help determine digital news value. I call it “PEARL” – an acronym that stands for the following:

P = Personal. The news has some personal meaning, e.g., tailored to individual preferences and behaviors (technographics.) This also includes relevance, both in terms of time and place as well as geo-location (mobile.)

E = Experiential. The “packaging” of the news allows for trans-media exploration, a multi-level experience or deeper engagement with the stories.

A = Actionable. Consumers can share stories, take an immediate action (submit a poll or sign a petition), comment or contribute.

R = Remarkable. The news is unique or otherwise special, meaning you couldn’t get the same story told the same way anywhere else.

L = Local. The news has community focus or “hyper-local” coverage of neighborhood events.

I’ve also added an “S” as “extra credit” – this is for “simple,” or in other words, when the news is easy to access and experience without needing a computer science degree.

How PEARL Works
Each letter of PEARL (and S) has a numeric value between 0 and 4:

0 = Non-existent
1 = Nice try, but no
2 = Pretty good
3 = Very good
4 = Outstanding

After giving each letter a numerical value, simply do the math to get your PEARL(s) Score:

0-5: No Value (I’ll stick with Google and Yahoo!)
6-10: Some Value (but keep your money in your e-wallet)
11-15: Good/Very Good Value (okay, how much?)
16-20: Outstanding Value (sign me up – and get me some company stock)

The highest score possible is 20, assuming you awarded a 4 to all six letters (PEARL plus S.) As an example, I used PEARL(s) to evaluate The Daily, an iPad only publication that currently charges 99 cents per week:

Example: The Daily
• P = 1
• E = 3
• A = 2
• R = 2
• L = 1
• (S) = 2
PEARL Score: 11

Most news organizations should aim for scores well above 10; anything below should be cause to reassess your model. At least that’s what I’m going with for now – this is very much a work in progress, and as I do more PEARL(s) scores for other media properties, I anticipate some patterns and insights will emerge.

No system is perfect – and the question of how much people are willing to pay for online news ultimately will be determined by the market, shifts in the advertising industry, media consolidation and countless other factors both known and as yet to be realized.

Let me know what you think, either about the PEARL system in particular or the value of online news in general. And I’ll be sure to report back on how the system is evolving and provide some deeper analysis.

Murdoch, The Daily, and Journalism as Art

“I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees. Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great." -- Rupert Murdoch, Sept. 14, 2009

“Thanks for the trial subscription, but so far, it is selling itself.” -- commenter on The Daily’s first edition

It was no gimmick that Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily was launched at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. After all, The Daily, a subscription-based iPad only “newspaper,” is less a marriage of technology and news than it is a work of news-as-art powered by technology.

Journalism has always been more of a subjective art form than a craft or trade -- yet historically, the presentation of news has had all the beauty of a macaroni sculpture and functional efficacy of a rotary telephone.

That was fine when there were fewer ways for media companies to distribute the news and for the public to consume it. But in a world of endless choices, the medium matters more than ever. User experience becomes part of the story. Information becomes art.

And because art matters, the very rationale for a publication like The Daily to exist becomes even more subjective. Is it a newspaper or a new kind of “real time” magazine? Do stories with better visuals and interactive features have priority over stories with greater news value but fewer bells and whistles? Is the “art” of good writing less valuable to modern audiences than the “art” of video clips and 360-degree images?

My hope is that this convergence doesn’t become mere art for art’s sake. I hope that it will compel journalists to look at the news in different ways. I hope it lifts their art and drives them toward better journalism -- for all the technology in the world is no substitute for a good story.

The WikiLeaks Saga: Transparency without Judgment is Gossip, not Journalism

Everyone is talking about the WikiLeaks disclosure of confidential diplomatic cables revealing the oft prickly relationship nations have with each other. That this comes as a shock is almost as shocking as the messages themselves, which, stripped of the Bond/Bourne intrigue and hurt pride, amount to little more than high school gossip and in-fighting among popular cliques.

The fact that these cables exist and reveal, if not confirm, the ugliness of diplomacy, makes them news. What few have mentioned, however, is what the leaked documents are not:

They are not reporting

They are not journalism

They are not investigative

They are not analytical

They are not, by themselves, important

According to WikiLeaks, “publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people.” Um, yes, but not always. Transparency also requires judgment and analysis. Transparency unchecked will get people killed.

WikiLeaks’ site goes on to say that “better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies in all society's institutions, including government, corporations and other organisations. A healthy, vibrant and inquisitive journalistic media plays a vital role in achieving these goals. We are part of that media.”

Fine, I agree. But from where I’m sitting, WikiLeaks and those who support its brand of “journalism” are neither inquisitive nor vital to global discourse. WikiLeaks is not part of "that media" -- it is part of a rogue, opportunistic and reckless media that has little understanding of journalistic principles nor concern for the fallout created by its selfish actions.

You want to be “part of that media?” Great, then grow up and act responsibly. Find the story and tell it with context and conscience. Don’t just put stuff out there and rely on the New York Times to clean up your mess (and thank God they are trying.)

As I’ve said before, I don’t care that newspapers are dying, I care that real journalism is dying with them. WikiLeaks just fired another shot into an open wound.

Two out of Three is Best for Online Journalism

You all know the rule. No, not the Golden Rule, which of course is never speak to John Hamm unless Hamm speaks to you first, no matter how handsome and inviting he looks. Seriously, Hamm is like Bieber for MILFs.

I mean the "Pick Two" rule -- cheap, fast, or good. Most people when hiring someone for a project want all three, but as many a project manager knows, that's next to impossible. Cheap and fast? Probably won't be good. Fast and good? Ain't likely gonna be cheap. You get the idea.

The problem with online news operations like Demand Media and Yahoo's new "Contributor Network" (its "Rebranding" of Associated Content) is they are trying to accomplish all three. They want to pay pittance freelance fees for real-time reporting and have those stories be good enough to stand as quality news and commentary.

I'm not saying it won't work, I'm merely saying it shouldn't. If you can get good journalism fast and pay only a couple bucks per story -- more if your SEO jitsu is good enough to drive page views -- then that just encourages further commoditization and pushes writers to favor quantity over quality. At some point the "cheap" will kill the "good," or good journalism (and journalists) will demand better pay.

Quality shouldn't get brushed aside for speed or cost. The more that companies treat news as just another category of "content," the more it's the public that will suffer the consequences.

Ten Steps for Moving Journalism Forward

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has a problem -- it's still a "society" (the oldest of its kind), but the terms "professional" and "journalist" are not what they used to be. Digital media and bottom-up news models have forced SPJ to re-evaluate its role and how it best can help today's journalists survive and thrive in the digital age.

Full disclosure: I was president of the Univerity of Missouri SPJ Chapter when I was in school, however back then we focused less on the profession and more on who was going to bring the alcohol to the next convention. But I digress.

According to a post from the Nieman Journalism Lab, SPJ tasked its Digital Media Committee to ask "what SPJ should look like in the contemporary context." The result was a report encompassing thoughts from a number of people  — Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Howard Owens, Alan Mutter, Rick Edmonds, Ken Doctor and others.

Following are ten ideas from the report to improve and move journalism forward. My favorite: "proper information-gathering and storytelling techniques are more important than ever in the digital age." As I often say, storytelling and people come first, technology comes second -- it doesn't matter whether you know how to use a FlipCam if you don't know how to ask the right questions.

The entire report is well worth a read, both for its candor as well as SPJ's commitment to being a leader for the "professional" and "citizen" journalist alike. Let's just hope the report turns into action.

1. Bridge the divide between new and old media by aggregating and spotlighting high-quality journalism and facilitating communications among online start-ups and legacy media.

2. Create a vibrant network for new media start-ups to share ideas online and in person.

3. Take stands on hot-button digital media issues affecting the future of information sharing. Become an advocate for expanding access to the Internet, news and information.

4. Teach reporters to use powerful emerging technologies, from software to websites and gadgets capable of providing greater depth to stories and increasing public participation.

5. Educate members and citizens in the basics of journalism because proper information-gathering and storytelling techniques are more important than ever in the digital age.

6. Engage journalists and the public in a robust dialogue about the purpose, value and standards of journalism. Build public understanding of and trust in journalism, and educate citizens so they can practice journalism ethically.

7. Train media start-ups in entrepreneurial journalism by hosting seminars, producing regular magazine articles, creating convention programs and providing training opportunities on everything from sales to web development.

8. Teach journalists and their managers the theories behind why they should use new media technologies and examples of best practices, rather than just providing lessons about how to use equipment.

9. Ensure staff and leaders are hyper-literate in digital journalism trends and new media theories so they can anticipate what members will need to know.

10. Poll membership to determine and address journalists’ needs, and track and respond to the journalism industry’s direction.