A couple of years ago, I was on a panel with some newspaper execs and one of them declared, rather self-importantly, “If we eliminated [journalistic touchstone X], our readers would be all over us.” What I was thinking, but didn’t say in the interest of comity, was it’s nothing compared to the reaction you’d get if you stopped running Beetle Bailey.
Newspaper readers are notoriously resistant to changes in their beloved morning ritual, and especially hate redesigns. And now, USA Today has gone and completely redone their website. They’re in for it now.
They’ve added a ton of welcome interactive features: news from other sites, comments on stories, forums, links to stories on other news sites and blogs, headline voting, user-contributed photos. But the comments on the announcement of the new design are uniformly negative. Unfortunately, there’s no archive of how the site used to look.
There are things I really like about the site. In addition to all the interactive features, which are great, they’ve avoided the classic newspaper website mistake of trying to put a link and a promo for every single site feature on the home page. They label headlines with the number of comments and recommendations. At the same time, the page seems loose and disorganized. The headlines have no summaries, white space (which I love) is arbitrarily determined by photo placement. Stories are arranged by time and not by importance, which correct for blogs and questionable for news sites. There is too much information above each headline (section, time, comments, recommendations).
So, the new USAToday is a mixed bag of great new features and a design that could use some tweaking. But, most of all, I agree with readers in comments that the publishers should be participating in the conversation and explaining the design goals and tradeoffs that went into their new look.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to appear on an hour-long discussion of the future of radio in the wake of the proposed merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio networks. We had a good, far-ranging discussion of the competitive environment for traditional radio stations. It was interesting to hear from all over the country, as KQED Forum is broadcast live over Sirius. You can still stream the discussion from KQED’s website.
Monday, I also able to participate in a discussion of the impact of the Internet on the news business, as the moderator of a remarkable panel that included the managing editor of WSJ.com, the publisher of Slate, and the supervising producer of CNN.com. It was fun to participate in a more upbeat discussion of the news business than I usually hear these days. Of course, these guys are all working on the online side of their businesses.
Bill Grueskin of WSJ.com shared an interesting anecdote about how Digg made a two-year-old column one of the most-read stories on a particular day. Interestingly, WSJ.com is getting tremendous lift from promoting their videos to bloggers. We’re all beginning see the value promoting individual stories to bloggers and aggregators, something I’ve been pushing for some time. And I’m still doing it. I’m working on a report on long-tail syndication strategies this month.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Satellite radio: a match made in heaven
The proposed merger of the Sirius and XM satellite radio businesses addresses the biggest issue we identified the last time we looked at the business: building a stable subscriber base. Of course, combining their businesses will greatly decrease their overhead and programming costs, but this merger is very much about subscribers.
Both services are trying to expand rapidly and reaching the limits of the early-adopter market. They’re moving from pre-installation in luxury auto brands to economy brands. We’ve been concerned for a while that as they expand their target market, churn could increase to a point where their subscriber buckets were leaking faster than they could fill them.
It doesn’t help that more and more cars are coming pre-installed not only with satellite radio systems, but with connectors for MP3 players. So, they’re not only competing with free radio, but with the customer’s own music collection on a device they know and love.
By combining their businesses, Sirius and XM will not only greatly improve their chances of reaching a stable and profitable subscriber bases, they decrease any consumer uncertainty over which to choose and whether either service will be around in a couple of years.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
I’ve been saying for a long time that I don’t know why more local papers don’t cover their communities the way the Wall Street Journal covers theirs. Even within the constraints of budgets and talent, most local papers are capable of providing more perspective on their communities than they do.
In a column introducing the Journal’s new look, publisher L. Gordon Crovitz reveals that the new WSJ will be more like the old WSJ than ever.
The biggest change is the one Managing Editor Paul Steiger describes: The Journal’s news department is increasing the proportion of articles that are exclusive, telling you about facts, trends, ideas and analysis you won’t see anywhere else. A little over half of the Journal in recent times has been this kind of unique coverage — more than any other newspaper, which is one reason the number of people subscribing to the Journal is up by 10% this year, when most newspapers have many fewer such subscribers.
Still, this means that almost half of our news was available to readers the previous day, often online. We now aim to make 80% of your Journal what-it-means journalism, devoting the other 20% to ensuring that you haven’t missed anything of importance from the previous day. This approach reflects our vision of a Journal you can use throughout your day, with the print Journal focused on what the news means to you and The Wall Street Journal Online focused on what’s happening right now.
Further down he quotes Journal editor Bernard Kilgore as saying in the 1940s, “It doesn’t have to have happened today to be news.”
I can’t think of a better strategy to compete with the Web’s ownership of generic news than the one Kilgore articulated sixty years ago.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
So, I finally get quoted in Romenesko, everybody’s favorite old-school journalism blog — and it’s something I’m pretty sure I didn’t say:
Newspaper pages of the future will look like web pages
Investor’s Business Daily
That’s Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr’s prediction. “What a newspaper might come to look like is a printed digest of what’s online,” he says. The American Press Institute’s Vickey Williams tells Doug Tsuruoka: “The newsrooms that are successful in the future will move faster and be more outwardly focused on news consumer preferences and less risk-adverse than they are today. The successful newsroom will anticipate rather than react to change.”
I went back and talked to the reporter, and it appears he was asking about design and I was talking about content. Of course, newspapers are going to seem less fresh to anyone who’s been on the Web in the last 24 hours. But I don’t think they’re going to take their design cues from the Web. Newspaper websites already take too many design queues from the print edition, and they need to diverge from print.
We’re in for a period of innovation as newspapers try to figure out what they should look like when all the news they print is already (or should be) online. Multiple changes in ownership, cost-cutting, declining circulation and ad pages are going to force newspaper editors and designers to rethink what a newspaper is. And they’re going to come up with more than one answer. I’m not prepared to say right now what the results will be, but I’m willing to bet it won’t look like a Web page.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
I’ve been visiting a lot of news sites and looking at video in preparation for a report on podcasting I’ve just completed and an upcoming report on best practices. It’s not surprising how rough a lot of the video is on non-TV news sites. But I was surprised how inconsistent we are about the way that we offer video to our readers.
Usually there’s a dedicated section for video on the site. Often, but not always, it’s linked to the individual story. Sometimes remarkable videos are hidden inside a special package for a particular story.
It’s often unclear whether the video linked comes from in-house, an affiliated TV station, or a wire service — until you start the video.
Sometimes we let the user choose the format (QuickTime, Windows Media, or Real) on the first click, sometimes we ask for them to choose a format after the link, and sometimes we don’t give them a choice.
Sometimes we use a screen capture to link to the video, sometimes a photo, and sometimes we just use a headline or the word “VIDEO” and sometimes an icon. Or some combination of the above.
Worst of all, your chances of getting a reasonable, permanent URL for any video clip, or even a reliable landing page, is pretty much a crapshoot. This continues to be a huge problem, and it’s especially troubling since video benefits so much from viral sharing.
The sheer variety of the way we link to video and promote it on our home pages is a good indication of how immature this technology is. We’re in a stage of experimentation, and producers feel it’s still too early to even steal good ideas. The lack of consistency keeps video adoption lower than it should be. A good resolution for 2007 would be to steal more ideas for designing online video into our sites.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
It’s hard to quantify, but we’ve all seen stories on Digg whose popularity are simply baffling.
Niall Kennedy did some good spadework on a specific story that did very well indeed on Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and del.icio.us which was clearly boosted by votes from interested parties. Digg and others are working hard to deal with this kind of abuse. But until it is eliminated, the credibility of social news sites will be in question.
Our research shows that consumers see social news sites as less trustworthy than news media or portal sites — by a fairly wide margin. Stories like this tell us it’s going to take a while for social news aggregators to win the trust they need to be more than a fringe source for most consumers.
I took a look at consumer interest in social news in reports on social news aggregators and trustworthiness, both of which were released last week.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Jeff Jarvis provides more evidence that the future of “television” is being remade on the web, mostly by amateurs, hackers, and struggling artists.
Online video in 2006 feels like the Web in 1994. It’s all pretty rough, but a lot of it is very creative. Much of the stuff that’s being created for the web by the mainstream media has a raw, experimental quality that we’re not used to from big organizations.
Jeff’s story of producing his segment for CBS versus producing a segment for Amanda Congdon’s webcast hints that the eventual impact of web video on television will be greater than the impact of the Web on print.
One of the most significant parts of all of this is that amateurs can produce higher-quality video than is possible with standard Grown-Up TV production techniques. The technology is necessary but not sufficient. Production processes have to be re-invented for the low-overhead, small-screen, short-subject, random-access, bandwidth-thrifty web. We’re still in inventing a new grammar of online video, just as Desi Arnaz (yes, Desi!) invented multi-camera production techniques late in the early days of television.
I’m finishing up a report on the market for online video in the news business. I have also begun to take a look at best practices for online video.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.