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August 23 2012
Daily Must Reads, August 23, 2012
The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung
1. Forbes names the most powerful women in media, including 15 from the tech sector (AdWeek)
2. Conventions in Tampa and Charlotte welcome an unwieldy guest: Twitter (USA Today)
3. Tumblr to have Twitter friend-finding privileges revoked (The Next Web)
4. How we can improve entrepreneurial journalism courses (SeanBlanda.com)
5. Facebook tests changes to make its messages look more like email (AllFacebook)
6. Are more readers bypassing news homepages? (Nieman Lab)
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August 20 2012
Stanford tool unlocks patterns in email dumps
Thanks to a chance encounter, the researcher behind an email archive analysis tool developed at Stanford's computer science department is finding ways to help investigative journalists dive into massive public record dumps. Read More »
January 11 2012
Bring back the busy signal
Email and communication are badly broken and the solution isn’t so much new technology as new norms. We need to redefine “rude.”
The problem is clear: If you’re like me, you get so much email that you can’t possibly answer it promptly if it all, and messages that do matter get lost under mountains of rubbish. Under old norms — from the era of letters and phone calls and knocks on doors — ignoring a message would be considered rude.
Perhaps what should be considered rude today is expecting you to immediately answer a message you didn’t ask for. And shouldn’t it be presumptuous for people to say they want “only 20 minutes” of your time, with no knowledge of how busy you are and how those many 20 minutes add up? Don’t we need new signals to let people know that we won’t answer every message, that some just aren’t important enough? Shouldn’t the person asking for our attention feel obliged to explain how the contact is relevant to our needs and desires? And shouldn’t we have a right to tell people that we can’t or don’t want to talk right now? Bring back the busy signal!
We are in a process of negotiating new norms for new circumstances. That is what we are also doing in the realm of privacy as we parry for a consensus about what’s OK to share with and about friends and what’s OK for a company to know about us. In public, we’re trying to settle on proper behaviors relating to talking on a mobile phone on the street or a train. Many of us are testing the line of old rudeness when we pull out a smart phone to read it when in the company of another person (e.g., if the other person answers a phone call, it’s fair game for me to check my email, right?) or when someone in person interrupts the conversation we’re having on our smartphone. And most of us wish for norms that would manage the problem of trolls and assholes and their bad behavior online.
Norms. Technology is causing change and our behaviors lag that until we settle on new norms. We start by trying to enforce old rules until we figure out that they are irrelevant. Then we operate without rules.
Then we lie. In the early digital days, when we missed an email, we’d say, “My email must be broken.” We’d throw AOL under the bus. But then Outlook and Google came along and email got better. So next came, “You must have been caught in my spam filter.” Then spam filters got better. Now, we can shrug and say, “Oh, sorry, Gmail must not have thought you were a priority.” VC Fred Wilson told his readers that if Gmail sends a missive to his “everything else” list then “I most likely won’t see it.” Same for me. We’re just blaming technology and technology can improve, robbing us of excuses.
danah boyd takes the occasional email sabbatical, letting would-be correspondents know that she simply will not see, open, or respond to any email sent between two dates and challenging them to find her if really necessary. I needed to reach her recently and succeeded (but I’ll do her the favor of keeping my path secret). Though danah’s method is tempting, it’s no solution, for we would miss communication we do, in fact, need.
The real problem is that we don’t have control. Bob Wyman, a brilliant technologist at Google (founder of PubSub and other startups), sat me down recently and explained the original sin of email: that the sender controls when the recipient should. It took me a while to understand that. Sender-control opens the door for people you know to make demands on you without you wanting them to. It opens the door for people you don’t know to bother you. And, of course, it opens the door to spam.
Google+, on the other hand, gives the recipient control: I decide whom to circle or follow and whom I wish to read. Soon after it started, Google+ had a spam problem: anyone could send you notifications. So G+ gave you control over that, limiting notifications to people you follow. Sadly, that cuts off the serendipitous ability of anyone out there to reach you. But it was a necessary change, else G+ would have become spammed to death. The other area that can be spammed is comments and G+ is having to add more and more controls. Bottom line: Recipient must control. Bob’s right.
None of that solves the social problem, though. We still need to be able to tell some people that we are too busy for them, that they don’t matter to us, that we don’t want to do what they are asking us to do, that we are not interested in what they have to say, that they are bothering us, that we aren’t friends, that we aren’t going to read what they send us, unbidden … without being considered rude. One way or another, we need to make such unpleasant communication part of our new norm. We need to learn how to say “no.”
We see the beginnings of that negotiation in Twitter: Anyone can follow me (unless I block them) but no one can send me a direct message until I follow them. So people ask: If you follow me I can send you a message. Is it rude not to? We’re figuring that out. If I do follow this person and he abuses the privilege, spamming my feed or sending me too many DMs, then I’ll unfollow him. Is that rude?
I needed to reach Fred Wilson, whom I know, not long ago. I know Fred is a very busy man with no end of people begging for attention (and money). So I don’t bug him unless I need to. But when I needed to, he didn’t answer me and I figured my message was likely being relegated to “everything else” by Gmail because I’m not a regular correspondent with Fred. I pinged Fred on Twitter; he responded immediately. Bugs in the system.
Leo Laporte has confessed that for some communication, he waits until the person sending a message sends it a few times. If it’s that important, goes the thinking, then they’ll try again and that will make it bubble up. I’ll confess to having done that, too. Rude? Perhaps. But it’s one way to get others to prioritize your mail.
Leave it to Europeans to try to regulate email behavior: VW is deactivating mobile messages to employees in off hours. But that’s not very satisfying: What if there is an emergency? What if you want to meet a colleague for a drink on a trip? What defines regular off hours in an international corporation?
We keep looking for solutions for recipients, coping with the increasing tide of irrelevance overtaking us. But that only makes it worse for legitimate senders and increases the risk that someone you want to get through can’t. What if you need to reach someone you don’t know? There needs to be an airlock someone can enter and knock, asking you to open the door and telling you why it would be worth your while. LinkedIn is rather like that, trying to use social connections to reach others through degrees of separation. Problem is: it creates one more way to send beseeching requests to people along the way: “Will you introduce me to so-and-so? Will you use your social capital with her on my behalf?” What if I don’t want to? Is that rude?
I face this problem with students in schools other than my own who come asking for interviews. I feel awful saying no — especially because I work at a journalism school that sends students out to interview others. But I get so many of these requests — “I just need 20 minutes” — that if I tried to be a nice guy and responded to them all, I’d have no time for my own students and my own work. The rare student who asks a cogent, well-thought-out, well-researched, and brief question will get a response so long as I have time. Too many of these requests are wildly broad: “What is the future of journalism?” Honest to God, I get that one often. I don’t bother; they seem to be thoughtless shotgun queries. If the student asks a question I’ve written about and I have time, I’ll send instructions about how to use Google’s “site:” search and find it on my blog. But most times, I have to say no and I feel like a shmuck being put in the position where I feel guilty doing so. I don’t like circumstances to make me feel rude.
I have no solutions. The technology will improve. Maybe Google+ and Facebook with their recipient controls become primary means of communication with people we know and email becomes an everybody-else channel with smarter and smarter Gmail filters to bubble up the ever-rarer relevant message. But that won’t solve the social problem. We need to settle on new norms that redefine what’s polite and appropriate and what’s not: what’s rude.
December 19 2011
Magazine editing: managing information overload
In the second of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about dealing with the large amount of information that magazine editors receive.
Managing information overload
A magazine editor now has little problem finding information on a range of topics. It is likely that you will have subscribed to email newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook groups and pages, YouTube channels and various other sources of news and information both in your field and on journalistic or management topics.
There tend to be two fears driving journalists’ information consumption: the fear that you will miss out on something because you’re not following the right sources; and the fear that you’ll miss out on something because you’re following too many sources. This leads to two broad approaches: people who follow everything of any interest (‘follow, then filter’); and people who are very strict about the number of sources of information they follow (‘filter, then follow’).
A good analogy to use here is of streams versus ponds. A pond is manageable, but predictable. A stream is different every time you step in it, but you can miss things.
As an editor you are in the business of variety: you need to be exposed to a range of different pieces of information, and cannot afford to be caught out. A good strategy for managing your information feeds then, is to follow a wide variety of sources, but to add filters to ensure you don’t miss all the best stuff.
If you are using an RSS reader one way to do this is to have specific folders for your ‘must-read’ feeds. Andrew Dubber, a music industries academic and author of the New Music Strategies blog, recommends choosing 10 subjects in your area, and choosing five ‘must-read’ feeds for each, for example.
For email newsletters and other email updates you can adopt a similar strategy: must-reads go into your Inbox; others are filtered into subfolders to be read if you have time.
To create a folder in Google Reader, add a new feed (or select an existing one) and under the heading click on Feed Settings… – then scroll to the bottom and click on New Folder… – this will also add the feed to that folder.
If you are following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, use Twitter lists to split them into manageable channels: ‘People I know’; ‘journalism’; ‘industry’; and so on. To add someone to a list on Twitter, visit their profile page and click on the list button, which will be around the same area as the ‘Follow’ button.
You can also use websites such as Paper.li to send you a daily email ‘newspaper’ of the most popular links shared by a particular list of friends every day, so you don’t miss out on the most interesting stories.
Social bookmarking: creating an archive and publishing at the same time
Social bookmarking tools like Delicious, Digg and Diigo can also be useful in managing web-based resources that you don’t have time to read or think might come in useful later. Bookmarking them essentially ‘files’ each webpage so you can access them quickly when you need them (you do this by giving each page a series of relevant tags, e.g. ‘dieting’, ‘research’, ‘UK’, ‘Jane Jones’).
They also include a raft of other useful features, such as RSS feeds (allowing you to automatically publish selected items to a website, blog, or Twitter or Facebook account), and the ability to see who else has bookmarked the same pages (and what else they have bookmarked, which is likely to be relevant to your interests).
Check the site’s Help or FAQ pages to find out how to use them effectively. Typically this will involve adding a button to your browser’s Links bar (under the web address box) by dragging a link (called ‘Bookmark on Delicious’ or similar) from the relevant page of the site (look for ‘bookmarklets’).
Then, whenever you come across a page you want to bookmark, click on that button. A new window will appear with the name and address of the webpage, and space for you to add comments (a typical tactic is to paste a key quote from the page here), and tags.
Useful things to add as tags include anything that will help you find this later, such as any organisations, locations or people that are mentioned, the author or publisher, and what sort of information is included, such as ‘report’, ‘statistics’, ‘research’, ‘casestudy’ and so on.
If installing a button on your browser is too complicated or impractical many of these services also allow you to bookmark a page by sending the URL to a specific email address. Alternatively, you can just copy the URL and log on to the bookmarking site to bookmark it.
Some bookmarking services double up as blogging sites: Tumblr and Stumbleupon are just two. The process is the same as described above, but these services are more intuitively connected with other services such as Twitter and Facebook, so that bookmarked pages are also automatically published on those services too. With one click your research not only forms a useful archive but also becomes an act of publishing and distribution.
Every so often you might want to have a clear out: try diverting mailings and feeds to a folder for a week without looking at them. After seven days, ask which ones, if any, you have missed. You might benefit from unsubscribing and cutting down some information clutter. In general, it may be useful to have background information, but it all occupies your time. Treat such things as you would anything sent to you on paper. If you need it, and it is likely to be difficult to find again, file it or bookmark it. If not, bin it. After a while, you’ll find it gets easier.
Do you have any other techniques for dealing with information overload?
December 08 2011
September 18 2011
Email viewing habits: where do you read your email? - Mobile cuts webmail
Read Write Enterprise :: Litmus, a company that tracks and tests email campaigns has taken a close look at where people are viewing their email. According to Litmus, the stats provide some interesting insights into email habits. Outlook is still king, Webmail is in sharp decline, and Google Chrome is gaining share very rapidly. The comparison is from July 2010 to July 2011. Use of mobile devices to read email is cutting into Webmail severely. Opens in mobile devices have jumped from 7% to 15% in one year. Desktop opens dropped from 55% to 53%, and Webmail dropped from 38% to 32%.
Continue to read Joe Brockmeier, www.readwriteweb.com
April 01 2011
The Charlie Sheen Twitter intern hoax – how it could be avoided
image from JonnyCampbell
Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification.
Where did the journalist go wrong? They asked for the emails confirming the internship, but accepted a screengrab. This turned out to be photoshopped.
They then asked for further emails from earlier in the process, and he sent those (which were genuine) on.
They should have asked the source to forward the original email.
Of course, he could have faked that pretty easily as well (I’m not going to say how here), so you would need to check the IP address of the email against that of the company it was supposed to be from.
An IP address is basically the location of a computer (server). This may be owned by the ISP you are using, or the company which employs you and provides your computer and internet access.
This post explains how to find IP addresses in an email using email clients including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook – and then how to track the IP address to a particular location.
This website will find out the IP address for a particular website – the IP address for Internships.com is 204.74.99.100, for example. So you’re looking for a match (assuming the same server is used for mail). You could also check other emails from that company to other people, or ideally to yourself (Watch out for fake websites as well, of course).
And of course, finally, it’s always worth looking at the content the hoaxer has provided and clues that they may have left in it – as Jonny did (see image, left).
For more on verifying online information see Content, context and code: verifying information online, which I’ll continue to update with examples.
The Charlie Sheen Twitter intern hoax – how it could be avoided
image from JonnyCampbell
Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification.
Where did the journalist go wrong? They asked for the emails confirming the internship, but accepted a screengrab. This turned out to be photoshopped.
They then asked for further emails from earlier in the process, and he sent those (which were genuine) on.
They should have asked the source to forward the original email.
Of course, he could have faked that pretty easily as well (I’m not going to say how here), so you would need to check the IP address of the email against that of the company it was supposed to be from.
An IP address is basically the location of a computer (server). This may be owned by the ISP you are using, or the company which employs you and provides your computer and internet access.
This post explains how to find IP addresses in an email using email clients including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook – and then how to track the IP address to a particular location.
This website will find out the IP address for a particular website – the IP address for Internships.com is 204.74.99.100, for example. So you’re looking for a match (assuming the same server is used for mail). You could also check other emails from that company to other people, or ideally to yourself (Watch out for fake websites as well, of course).
And of course, finally, it’s always worth looking at the content the hoaxer has provided and clues that they may have left in it – as Jonny did (see image, left).
For more on verifying online information see Content, context and code: verifying information online, which I’ll continue to update with examples.
The Charlie Sheen Twitter intern hoax – how it could be avoided
Image from jonnycampbell.com
Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification.
Where did the journalist go wrong? They asked for the emails confirming the internship, but accepted a screengrab. This turned out to be photoshopped.
They then asked for further emails from earlier in the process, and he sent those (which were genuine) on.
They should have asked the source to forward the original email.
Of course, he could have faked that pretty easily as well (I’m not going to say how here), so you would need to check the IP address of the email against that of the company it was supposed to be from.
An IP address is basically the location of a computer (server). This may be owned by the ISP you are using, or the company which employs you and provides your computer and internet access.
This post explains how to find IP addresses in an email using email clients including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook – and then how to track the IP address to a particular location.
This website will find out the IP address for a particular website – the IP address for Internships.com is 204.74.99.100, for example. So you’re looking for a match (assuming the same server is used for mail). You could also check other emails from that company to other people, or ideally to yourself (Watch out for fake websites as well, of course).
And of course, finally, it’s always worth looking at the content the hoaxer has provided and clues that they may have left in it – as Jonny did (see image, left).
For more on verifying online information see Content, context and code: verifying information online, which I’ll continue to update with examples.
March 04 2011
Posted email addresses for NYT Mag reporters: A flashback to 1995
The new regime has taken over at The New York Times Magazine, and among the visible changes online is the addition, at the bottom of stories, of an editor’s credit and the email address of the writer. Jack Shafer’s written about the editor’s credit, but I’m more interested in the email addresses, which (correct me if I’m wrong) I believe is the first time the Times has ever attached reporter email addresses to stories in any sort of consistent way. (Times writers have their own author pages, but the “Send an E-Mail to Frank Bruni” link hides the email address via Javascript.)
My interest is mainly in the opportunity to repost one of my favorite all-time Lab documents, which Zach Seward wrote about two years ago. It’s a transcript from a conference we held here at the Nieman Foundation back in 1995. The conference was entitled “Public Interest Journalism: Winner of Loser in the On-Line Era” (we dug hyphens back then), and one of the sessions featured Esther Dyson interviewing the then-relatively-new publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger. It’s the oldest documentation I’m aware of the Times’ perspective on its journalists getting feedback from readers. Here’s the relevant excerpt of the transcript, after Sulzberger tells Dyson that they’ve always gotten feedback from readers, even pre-Internet:
MS. DYSON: Yes, and you get that feedback when you go to cocktail parties at Michael’s, and people come up to you who are your elite readers. But now, you’ve got some guy who can’t really spell, who wants to waste your reporter’s time sending him Email.
MR. SULZBERGER: …I don’t think that’s going to happen. And maybe I’m fooling myself, but I really don’t think that an individual reader directly to reporter, that that’s going to be a major factor in how this is going to design itself.
MS. DYSON: But it’s going to be a major factor in how they have their time wasted, or how they have their time enriched.
MR. SULZBERGER: Are you making the assumption that we’re going to put all of our reporters online? Is that the assumption built into the question, that every day, all of our reporters will have hundreds and hundreds of Email’s that they’ve got to respond to?
You can pick up a pen today and misspell a letter any one of our editors, reporters, business folks. Most — I will speak, I think, candidly for the newsroom — most of those letters go unanswered. It drives me nuts, but it’s true.
Anyway, go read the whole thing and have your own journalism version of I Love the ’90s.
December 18 2010
Asking for help~~ please~~~~~ about email hack
I want to know the password of an email~ it is @126.com , but I cannot find anyone around who can help me , and those things download from the internet are all useless, so I am here , hoping if anyone can give me a little help, I will be really grateful, just spend a little time ,please~ thanks a lot, truethfully.
November 19 2010
This Week in Review: The future of NewsBeast, Facebook Messages, and Yahoo doubles down on content
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
An unpopular marriage: As I briefly noted in last week’s review, the big story this week was, not surprisingly, Newsweek’s merger with Tina Brown and Barry Diller’s website The Daily Beast. The New York Observer, which broke the story, had most of the newsy details — merged websites under The Daily Beast, unspecified layoffs to come, etc. — as well as the story of how the deal went down.
The Daily Beast’s own Howard Kurtz had some notes on what the new organization would look like, led by Brown’s assertion that whatever the new Newsweek will be, it won’t be the newsmagazine format. As The New York Times’ Evelyn Rusli observed, the key asset in this deal may not be either property but instead Brown, one of the U.S.’ most prominent magazine editors. The Wall Street Journal had more notes on Brown, and Slate’s Jack Shafer dished out some advice for her.
Just about the only media figure who voiced any sort of excitement about the deal was Arianna Huffington; most other responses ranged from indifference to revulsion. The New York Times’ David Carr laid his derision on thick, saying the deal “marries two properties that have almost nothing in common other than the fact that they both lose lots of money.” NYU professor Clay Shirky called it a farcical reprise of the AOL-Time Warner bomb. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld warned the two companies not to combine their brands (and it appears they won’t, except online).
The Wall Street Journal summed up the doubters’ concerns well with a list of four reasons for concern: Joint ventures are tough, media joint ventures are tougher, it’s headed by strong-willed personalities, and it’s a merger of two companies that are losing money. The last point gained the most traction, building on media reports (which Scott Rosenberg questioned) that have Newsweek on pace to lose $20 million this year and The Daily Beast on track to lose $10 million (though it was supposedly expected to turn a profit within two years). Business Insider’s Henry Blodget joined the Journal in wondering how they’d make money together, and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici asked a good question: If your media venture is on track to profitability, why would you want to tie yourself to a business that’s gone nowhere but down?
There were a couple of possible answers: First, as The New York Times reported, the Beast’s Diller has developed a sudden affinity for print publications. Also, Mediaite’s Colby Hall noted that with as much content as the Beast produces, Newsweek’s costs could drop pretty quickly, and Advertising Age said advertisers could be attracted by simple novelty of the new organization.
The other big piece of the deal is the fact that it will likely mean the death of Newsweek.com, despite the fact that has a far larger audience than The Daily Beast. The website’s staff members are nervously awaiting their fate, but in the meantime took to Tumblr to mount a defense of Newsweek.com, praising its work while saying it has “always remained an ugly stepchild to its print grandparents, who were too busy burning money to notice.” Former Newsweek.com staffer Mark Coatney chimed in, wondering what would happen to Newsweek’s SEO and content deals without its own site. Reuters’ Felix Salmon also agreed, saying the shutdown only makes sense as a power grab by Brown. But Advertising Age and GigaOM defended the move, saying the Beast’s traffic is more valuable than Newsweek’s.
Don’t call it an email killer: Facebook made a big announcement this week, unveiling its new quasi-email, quasi-chat message system, Facebook Messages. (Want to know what it looks like? Search Engine Land has you covered.) The message we heard repeatedly from Facebook was that Messages is not a rival to email services like Google’s Gmail. And why was that? Well, because it spent most of the weekend being hyped as a “Gmail killer.” And the reason it’s such a threat to email, said Charlene Li and ReadWriteWeb, is precisely because it’s a lot more than email: It’s the convergence of chat, email and text messaging; archived communications by friend; and a “social inbox.” The gadget blog Gizmodo said we’ll be giving up traditional email for it because we’re all already using Facebook’s interface and because it should be able to sort what’s important from what’s not.
But another Gawker blog, Lifehacker, said we shouldn’t give up email for Facebook Messages, because it’s meant to work with email, not like email. In addition, anything you say there can’t be moved elsewhere. Others were also skeptical, for a variety of reasons: Silicon Alley Insider’s Matt Rosoff and the Houston Chronicle Dwight Silverman said this isn’t unified communications, but just another way to get hardcore users to spend more time on Facebook. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram argued that many people won’t use it as an email supplement if it doesn’t connect to their existing email accounts. The Guardian talked to an analyst who said Facebook can’t handle the task of using all of its data to optimize social messaging. Then there’s the privacy issue: Salon’s Dan Gillmor said we should be uncomfortable about putting all of our communications into the hands of a single company, especially Facebook.
There were three other thoughtful perspectives on what Facebook Messages means that stood out: Om Malik of GigaOM saw Messages as a critical step for Facebook in helping us stay in touch with our most intimate friends, as opposed to the more distant “second-order” friends it’s been specializing in. And though he was off about the shape Messages would take, Nick O’Neill of All Facebook aptly placed Messages within a long-running battle between Facebook and Google for online authority.
Finally, in a post at the Lab, Ken Doctor called for news organizations to embrace the philosophy behind Facebook Messages: “It’s about simplification, about interconnection, about consolidation.” Meanwhile, in other much-less-covered email-related news: AOL announced it’s relaunching its own email service, a story TechCrunch rather comically broke last Friday.
Yahoo goes deeper into original content: Yahoo dived deeper into the original-content pool this week with two moves: First, it added three new blogs to its seven-month-old The Upshot, building a network of originally reported news blogs. The new sites will focus on politics, national news, and media. CNN noted that the new group is being headed by a veteran of Talking Points Memo and quoted Yahoo News head Mark Walker as describing it as Yahoo’s biggest original-content push yet: “Pure aggregation will only get you so far, even if you’re really good at it.”
Yahoo also completed its integration of Associated Content, the content farm it bought in May, by relaunching it as the Yahoo Contributor Network. Through the network, Yahoo plans to post at least 2,000 articles of search engine-friendly content a day, paying its 400,000 contributors a small fee upfront, followed by bonused based on pageviews. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital was skeptical of the plan.
Some eye-opening iPad stats: We got a few more pieces of data on iPad use in the past week, including some quick, interesting stats from The Wall Street Journal showing that iPad use jumps in the evening, while computer use drops. (Smartphone is relatively steady throughout the day.) This seems to correlate with what many have suspected about the iPad — that it’s being used as more of a leisure device than phones or computers.
Business Insider had quite a few more fascinating stats from its survey of iPad owners, finding, among other things, that most iPad owners are using their iPads more than when they first got the device, 30% are using it as their primary computer, they’re spending as much time with it as they are their laptops, and about equal numbers of people use the browser and apps to read news. Poynter’s Damon Kiesow isn’t reading much into the data, but he did find it surprising that about a third are reading news primarily on apps, considering how few news orgs have them out right now. That’s good news for major media outlets, he said, though it doesn’t mean much for the little guys.
Meanwhile, News Corp.’s James Murdoch said he thinks news apps for mobile devices like the iPad cannibalize newspaper sales, something Reuters’ Felix Salmon wasn’t sure about, and Poynter’s Kiesow wasn’t buying without seeing some data. News Corp., by the way, is reported to be close to launching its much-talked-about tablet news publication, and The Economist dropped its own iPad app this week.
Google News’ crediting experiment: One cool little story worth highlighting: Google News announced it’s introducing two tags for articles that will help indicate which articles were the first to report a story and which articles are essentially the same story on different sites. It’s an experiment, as the Lab’s Megan Garber noted, in finding out how willing news organizations are to give online credit where credit is due. As Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee pointed out, they’re based on the honor system, so there’s nothing to stop spammers (or legit news organizations) from misusing the tags. CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson wondered if the tags might provide some new research opportunities for scholars.
Reading roundup: Here’s everything else worth taking a look at before you hit the weekend:
— Over at the National Sports Journalism Center, Jason Fry has written a wonderful column on the importance of the link to sports journalism, and it goes for all journalism as well. Elsewhere, Terry Heaton wrote about the value of the link in online advertising, a notion The Batavian’s Howard Owens took issue with.
— A few paid-content tidbits: Connecticut’s Valley Independent Sentinel is the latest local newspaper to make use of Journalism Online’s Press+ paid-content system, The Times of London is partnering with a mobile broadband provider for a free-access offer at its website, and two new-media companies are working on an online news “EZ Pass.”
— A couple pieces from last week I missed: Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik and Eastern Illinois j-prof Bryan Murley both urged j-schools to push some more boundaries in their teaching of news and technology.
— Weekly fuel for the pessimists among us: Poynter’s Rick Edmonds on the signs that newspapers are still failing financially, and the nonprofit news site The Washington Independent announced it’s closing up shop.
— And in the food-for-thought category: Jonathan Stray on the real value of social news, and CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson at the Lab on journalism and online community. “We can’t will authentic community into being. It sort of sneaks up on us. And just as quickly — as soon as we turn our heads — it’s gone.”
October 18 2010
Launch! Five lessons from the first months of running a news startup
Six exhilarating, nerve-scraping months ago, I left my daily newspaper job to put my livelihood where my mouth is: to build a topical local news service serving riders of public transit in Portland, Oregon.
In print, Portland Afoot is an image-rich four-page monthly newsmagazine about “low-car life,” distributed by mail to homes and, starting in the next month or two, to workplaces. Online, it’s a heavily reported wiki, with evergreen pages on every bus route, bike law, and commute subsidy in town, among many other things.
Crazy? Obviously. But four months after launch, I’ll tell you this: I’ve never been learning more or learning faster. Now that I’ve become one of the entrepreneurs I’ve covered here at the Lab, Josh has generously invited me to spin out a few of the practical lessons I’ve been spooling up. Let’s start at the beginning.
Start scheduling meetings immediately, at least one each week, and do not stop.
You know how one hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours after midnight? One coffee date before your launch is worth two coffee dates after your launch.
Maybe it’s because people like to be in the know. Maybe it’s because they’re proud to see their advice shaping your product. Maybe it’s because they have a reflex to root for risk-takers. I don’t know.
Whatever the reason, the earlier people hear about your plan, the more they’ll want to help you. And “people who want to help you” happen to be the things you’re about to need more than anything else in the world.
Loop in local institutions that share your interests.
I thought I was picking a topical niche for the sake of our audience (harried readers without time for irrelevant news) and our sponsors (retailers wanting to target green consumers at the neighborhood level). What I didn’t realize was that I was also opening my arms to a whole universe of private local organizations predisposed to help me succeed.
Portland Afoot needed early subscribers and legitimacy; celebrated local-news blog BikePortland.org ran a positive preview. We’re planning a neighborhood-specific product; the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition, a regional advocacy group, helped me brainstorm the contents. We needed a pilot location for my workplace-distribution scheme; the Swan Island Transportation Management Association, a federally funded traffic-reduction nonprofit, agreed to host it in the industrial area they oversee.
Spare me the warnings about lost independence. Yep, that’s a major risk, and I’m doing my best to deal with it through full disclosure. But it’s a jungle out there and you’re not going to survive without friends. In our case, the whole revenue model depends on print distribution partnerships; entanglements are a fact of life. If your news startup is ever going to get important enough to make enemies, it’ll need to make a few friends first.
If you’re going to sell ads, sell two cheap ones before you launch.
My gut says Justin Timberlake is right: a website with ads is like a great party that has to be over at 11. I’m sure Portland Afoot would have a few more print subscribers, a bit more web traffic, and most importantly a few more superfans if it had launched with zero ads.
But this nonprofit business, unlike Facebook, is not headed for an IPO. It’s got about a year to succeed or fail to pay my rent. And though I haven’t yet started selling ads in earnest, I’ve done enough to guarantee that you second ad is easier than your first, and your third ad is easier than your second. Prove to advertisers that your audience has worth by getting some ads on the page.
You are not too cool for e-mail.
I hate spam. I hate it so much that when we launched, I promised to ping our mailing list no more than once every three months. It’s a promise I’ve kept — and it was a big mistake.
For people who care about you, regular emails aren’t spam. They are reminders that you exist and are doing wonderful things of which they approve. How do I know? Because nothing — not direct mail, not inbound links, not tables at neighborhood events — drives traffic or action like a mass email to people who’ve opted to receive it. One of my lucky breaks before we launched was that I popped a single box on the site to start building a list of the emails of early visitors. Here’s the PHP script. Steal it.
The weirder your product is — and ours, a heavily reported wiki and four-page monthly magazine, is almost as weird as they come — the more important email, with its universal familiarity, becomes. Email is the U2 of Internet communication — all these years later, it’s the one thing we all still share. Embrace it.
Launch as close as possible to the summer solstice.
Trust me — you’re going to need the energy.
September 11 2010
Vancouver Net Tuesday September 2010: Email isn't dead yet!
TOPIC: Email communications – still alive and kicking
It’s easy to get distracted by that new-fangled social media stuff (so shiny!), but the folks on the ground in non-profits know that the real action’s in email. That’s where you raise the funds to advance your mission. That’s how you get people to show up to events. That’s how you get petitions signed.
There’s plenty of life left in email communications, and learning how to test, optimize, and integrate email campaigns is (I reckon) the best investment you can make in the online space.
May 28 2010
Senior-Friendly Tools to get Grandma Wired
Over the years my family and I have worked together to help my Grandmother get wired. She now uses Google Search, reads her news online, sends and receives email, and even uses Facebook to check-in with family and friends. Using the internet isn't a new concept to my Grandmother, though it's not really something she finds very intuitive either. That said, she understands the power of these tools, and relishes the opportunity to learn more.
My Grandmother also has a whole network of friends who are at various stages of computer use/online adoption. Recently, she asked me if I could share any resources for her and her friends to be able to network, learn and socialize on the internet.
January 05 2010
SteveOuting: Hey, news sites: Think like retailers!
Steve Outing is right: news sites have a lot to learn about email marketing from retailers...
December 17 2009
Marketing Week: FT.com adds premium subscription service
"The FT Newsmine is a weekly email service distributed on Fridays that extracts hidden nuggets from FT articles and provides a snapshot of global market-related data, trends and observations that may have been missed during the week."
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