Comments on: Notes on the Cleverness Economy

By: “The Cleverness Economy” and “Maxims of new media” « Makurrah's Blog

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:16:22 +0000

[...] which appeared on Ryan Sholin’s blog Invisible Inkling on January 20, 2010. Find it at http://ryansholin.com/2010/01/20/notes-on-the-cleverness-economy/ . The post begins with a brief exploration of the relationship between epigrams and tweets, with [...]

By: Building reference material into news sites : ErikGable.com

Building reference material into news sites : ErikGable.com — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:49:18 +0000

[...] Ryan Sholin writes at Invisible Inkling about how this relates to online news: “Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers. [...]

By: Recommended reading « Makurrah's Blog

Recommended reading « Makurrah's Blog — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:10:07 +0000

[...] January 31, 2010 · Leave a Comment Ryan Sholin, “Notes on the Cleverness Economy” http://ryansholin.com/2010/01/20/notes-on-the-cleverness-economy [...]

By: 7 links: Interns, paywalls, cleverness, failure, Flash, press conferences and internships | Innovation in College Media

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:51:29 +0000

[...] Notes on the Cleverness Economy – Ryan Sholin uses the humorous aspects of Twitter to make a point about the news business today. And it's a really good point: “Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers. But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. For example, I’ve gone back to this New York Times piece on the 2008 Democratic primaries more than a few times over the last year, sometimes for political reference, and sometimes just to demonstrate the sort of displays of information that interest me these days. Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours. [...]

By: Ryan Sholin

Ryan Sholin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:26:35 +0000

@Erik:

I think everything evergreen is ‘stock,’ especially databases and local information. That’s the sort of thing that has lasting value, that will show up in search engines years later, and that your audience will keep coming back to.

A process story on a zoning initiative out of a city council meeting? That’s flow.

A fun game for news orgs might be to figure out ways to generate flow with as little investment of time and resources as possible.

Things to try: Don’t write more than a few grafs on a city council meeting. Treat breaking news as a blotter item or a brief, building larger ‘stock’ stories based on context, trends, analysis of a string of ‘flow’ events.

By: Erik Gable

Erik Gable — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:58:38 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to put something down on how the “stock/flow” balance relates to journalism. I’ve been thinking about that in the back of my mind ever since you posted that link to Twitter, but hadn’t gotten to the point of putting it into words.

Do you think the basic, not-changing-very-often reference pieces like lists of elected officials’ contact info — or even essays about local history — are part of “stock” as well? I’ve been wondering about the capacity of things like this to drive traffic over the long term. If a piece of content like that on our site were to get four or five page views per day, over the course of the year, that’d just as many views as a typical story…