Below the Fold

Revisiting the Ghosts of Auroras Past

“If we don’t meet again, your final assignment from me is perhaps the most important lesson you will learn in life. Go to your mother, father, brother and sisters, and tell them with all your heart how much you love them. And tell them you know how much they love you too. Go out of your way to make good memories…at some point these memories may be all you have left. May God bless you all, Bryan.”

Professor Bryan Cloyd’s e-mail to his students. Cloyd’s daughter, Austin, died in the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shootings.

Virginia Tech, Columbine, Aurora. There are so many more, of course, so many we can't remember despite each time promising ourselves we will never forget.

There will be a time to talk about news and social media again. There will be time to reflect on key moments, such as when a selfless teen turned Reddit into the world's most important news channel during the first hours of the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting that left 12 people dead and many more injured, some permanently.

For now, we just need to listen. We always have and never really do, but I hope against hope that this time it will stick.

I will say this about the suspected killer: As many of you know I have some experience talking to capital murderers, and the question I'm asked the most is what makes them into these monsters. Are they all poor, are they mentally ill, are they all on drugs?

The answer is yes, and no, and everything else. The common thread, if there is one, is that they are far more like us than not. They are friends, neighbors, family. They are a poor mentally ill kid from Kansas City, Mo., and they are an upper-middle class neuroscience student from San Diego, Calif., who bought a movie ticket and brought hell to a Colorado town.

Everything else I want to say I've already said in the below post from just after the Virginia Tech shootings. I'm reposting here in its entirety because I don't want to forget, and neither should any of us.

Now, Hear This (published April 19, 2007)

An elementary school student walked into his classroom, sat at his desk, pulled a loaded gun from his backpack – and blew his own face off.

This was almost 20 years ago in Jefferson City, Missouri. It was my first story on my first day as a reporter for United Press International. I still remember calling in the copy from a nearby pay phone, the crime scene and the students. I remember thinking how could this happen, why did it happen, and would it happen again.

Twenty years later, all that’s changed is the technology. News moves faster, guns shoot better. But tragedy is timeless.

You don’t need me to go on about the Hokie Horror that devastated Virginia Tech and froze the country in disbelief; we have Anderson Cooper for that.

I’ll just say this: It took five syllables and about a week for Don Imus to lose his talk radio job. Cho Seung-Hui gives us more than two years of warnings via teachers and students, spends time in a mental facility where he’s deemed a menace to society, and we don’t hear a damn thing.

Listen now.

Why Most Brands Will Suck at Storytelling

"STORY" IS THE NEW "CONTENT."

As buzzwords go, story isn’t entirely bad -- for years I’ve pushed clients to be storytellers. I’ve berated the descent of story into a furtive sea of “content,” stripping all emotion from human pursuits.

So I’m good with story. But let’s be honest, success lies not in the idea but in the execution. And the truth is most brands will suck at storytelling.

Why? Because most brands won't do what good storytelling requires.

Stories – real, honest, emotional, transformative and inspirational stories – have conflict. They have villains. They have winners and losers. They have personality and flaws, great highs and severe lows.

In other words, stories have many of the things that brands don’t want anyone to know about. So the content – err, sorry, the “stories” they create – get sanitized. Every story ends with “and they lived happily ever after.” That’s great for fairytales but not for real life.

The non-fiction story about a company is inherently more interesting than any fiction created for the purpose of earning friends, followers and customers. It’s what has always worked for marketers and still does:

• Tell a great story
• Create emotional impact
• Embrace your friends and respect your enemies
• Acknowledge mistakes, then fix them
• Don’t ask for trust or loyalty, earn it

Notice I didn’t use the word “strategy.” That’s essential, of course, but too often companies create a strategy first, and then the story. A better approach is first to have a story – not a mission statement or a press release, but a real story. The strategy is the easy part.

Brands aren’t buildings and companies are not logos. There are human beings behind them all, not a great and powerful Oz.

Just tell us a good story, we'll listen. And if you still just want to produce “content” that's fine, as long as you keep calling it “content.” Leave story alone.

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.

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.

 

Newspapers: Making the Case for Free

(Originally posted at www.edelmandigital.com)

The future of newspapers may well be in Colorado, once home to the late “gonzo journalism” provocateur Hunter S. Thomson and today home to no less that 12 free dailies. All of these papers are very local, and perhaps more importantly, successful. This trend is even more interesting in light of tough times at the “real” state papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post.

This isn’t a Colorado-only phenomenon. Palo Alto, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley and arguably Ground Zero in the “print is dead” movement, has two free daily newspapers. A free paper in Santa Monica, Calif., may soon expand.

Online advertising, pay walls, premium subscriptions – newspapers are trying anything to find new business models. But the future of print’s survival may be in Free.

Yes, free. No subscription, purely ad-driven free newspapers; hyper-targeted to neighborhoods and towns, not cities or regions. And rather than published in the morning when the news is at its most stale and competes for attention with people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, these papers can come out in the late afternoon (for you old-timers, afternoon papers used to be commonplace in the United States.) A free, local, afternoon paper gives you analysis, context and hometown perspective to the news of the day.

“Most revenue for newspapers comes from advertising sales that subsidize the per-paper cost,” Curtis Robinson, editor of the free Portland (Maine) Daily Sun, says on the paper’s web site. “We just work on the model — like broadcast TV and nearly all Internet sites — that people want free news and that advertisers want to reach that readership. Media gurus sometimes assert that free dailies are the “transition” from traditional print media to online-only news — which sounds okay, except that free dailies did well before the Internet.”

The Case for Free (and Local)

It’s a popular conceit that people ever paid for content via their newspaper subscriptions. What they actually paid for was the means of distribution — paper, ink, presses, gasoline, tires and so on.

Advertisers were brought along for the ride – the more subscriptions a paper had the more ads that could be sold, which meant more pages and then, you guessed it, higher distribution costs.

This worked fine until the Internet Age. Newspapers made the mistake of looking at the Internet as simply another means of distribution, figuring that people would come to their web sites and read the news, and more importantly read the ads that helped pay for the web servers.

But search trumped any vision of people reading the news only at a newspaper’s web site. Now they could read the news on Google, Yahoo!, MSN or via RSS and Twitter feeds directly on their computer desktops or mobile devices. New media companies like Google saw value in the content, not the distribution, and traditional newspapers have been trying to catch up ever since.

Free may be the answer. And by staying hyper local – or a “micro daily” as Robinson says – the old distribution costs are greatly reduced. The paper is now attractive to readers and to advertisers, who see greater value in ads targeted to their most likely customers.

The editors of the free Palo Alto Daily Post put it more bluntly on their web site (where you won’t find any news):

“Giving away news online is a dumb way to do business. News is valuable. We put our news in print. The news creates demand for our paper, and increased readership makes our ads more effective than advertising in any other medium.”

Still Much Work to Do

The latest “State of the News Media” report from the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism offers few surprises: Big-city papers continue to have the worst of it. But small dailies and community weeklies are generally doing better. “The latter come closer to the late-20th century position of newspapers as the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertise,” the report said.

The New York Times launched regional supplements to its San Francisco and Chicago editions, and even ESPN got into the act, starting regional sites in Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles, challenging papers there for the hearts and minds of local sports fans. Yet these new products still don’t give locals what they really want – high school sports coverage, City Hall and Neighborhood Association news, or why that helicopter was circling overhead last night.

All of this news can and should be delivered online and via mobile devices, especially when it comes to time-sensitive information or live events. And location-tagging services like Foursquare and Gowalla will make the news event more local, and therefore more relevant.

The future of newspapers is still comprised more of bits than atoms; this transition can’t be stopped, nor should it be. But local print dailies have a place and a purpose. They appeal to young and old and everyone in between.

In a world drowning in fragments of fleeting “content,” print is the king of context and narrative. And free is the way forward for print to remain relevant – and survive.

The Real Story behind "The Last Newspaper"

 You don’t get to age 43 without experiencing some loss, usually the loss of hair and the ability to maintain that body you once knew in high school. It’s a familiar theme, even necessary. Hell, without loss there would never have been a Disney animated film.

A few days ago, someone asked what my new book, The Last Newspaper, was about. I started into my usual spiel about media transformation, journalism trends and all that, when it became clear.

This book is about loss – the loss of a predictable past; of comfort; of story and of an industry. And as a former newspaper journalist who had planned to change the world, it’s also about losing yet another part of me.

I didn’t realize it until recently, but loss has been my life’s defining thematic. I lost my father at age 8; the chance at a “normal” childhood soon followed, as I also lost any memory of him or anything that happened prior to his death. It was as if I didn’t begin until he was gone.

In 1993, I lost all hearing in my right ear, the result of a tumor that was removed but still leaves its mark in the form of balance problems and the occasional seizure. The next year, my first book was published – a non-fiction novel about the death penalty. Again, loss reared its familiar head.

I thought The Last Newspaper would be prescient social commentary, a must-read for journalists as well as marketers. And, on the surface at least, that’s exactly what it is.

But it’s also a long goodbye. It’s an acceptance of what has happened, mixed with not just a little bit of defiance. And, I hope, it’s a warning. I’ve seen enough futures to know that not all of them are better than what came before.

True, it’s easier to feel helpless than hopeful. It’s easier to make excuses than to make a difference. It’s easier to think about the things we’ve lost than the things we’ve gained.

I work every day to avoid these traps, these psychological comforts. I still have hope for real journalism; and I don’t accept excuses from anyone, including myself, no matter how murderous my headaches or how tired I may get.

Loss defines me, but it won’t defeat me.  Hairline excluded, of course.