On the difference between gameplay and gamification: Josh Korr on “why gamifying the news is so challenging.”
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An alternative to Audacity: Fission
Jan 10, ’11
2:41 PM
An alternative to Audacity: Fission: New to me, a free, somewhat uncomplicated audio editor for OSX.
San Francisco
Feb 25, ’09
2:29 PM
Yesterday, news broke that Hearst will close the San Francisco Chronicle if it a) can’t dramatically reduce costs (read as: cut payroll in half) or b) find a buyer (it won’t).
Analysis:
Although it is likely that you will hear and see a copious amount of handwringing in the coming days and weeks about San Francisco being the first major American city to lose its last major metro daily newspaper, I’d calmly and politely encourage you to take a look at this in context:
- There are daily and weekly local newspapers surrounding the city of San Francisco, blanketing the Bay Area on every side of every hill. (Yes, I am fully aware of the quality and resources issues within the MediaNews empire.)
- There are weekly arts and entertainment publications in San Francisco, covering all the calendar and advertising needs of the print-consuming populace.
- There are ethnic media print publications covering many (most?) of the geographic/ethnic niches in the city of San Francisco.
- There are left-leaning national news organizations covering the sort of political issues the Chronicle did.
- There are neighborhood and niche blogs blanketing the city of San Francisco.
- There is craigslist.
Those last two items are probably the most important, long-term.
What happened in San Francisco was this: In a city of early adopters, in a region of early adopters, in a state of early adopters, potential readers and advertisers are seeing their needs met in other mediums, in narrower niches, in distributed form, and they have not been slow to change.
No surprises there.
I’ve never worked for Hearst or the Chronicle, and I know little of the internal wrangling over SFGate.com or how much of it has held back innovation over the years, but the time for the Chronicle to innovate was a *long* time ago. That boat done sailed.
The big question left for those trying to figure out what to do post-Chronicle should not be “How do we replace this newspaper?” but rather, “What in this newspaper needs replacing?”
Once that is answered, get serious about aggregation and integration. Which existing local online news sources are already filling this need? Which existing vendors/open source projects could best help tell the story of San Francisco? Which national news sources matter to San Francisco readers?
So what’s left after that? Well, a business model would be nice, but let’s come to that through the back door.
Before we try to figure out revenue, let’s look at our budget: We’ve pared the newsroom down to an extremely small team of multi-platform journalists, and we’re going to get as much content (think: breaking news photos and video from readers’ phones) as possible, so we’re not talking about gobs of photographers and reporters flowing in and out of some big downtown building.
In fact, the staff could be extremely small. I’m not talking about half its current size, I’m talking about fractions here. A news staff of 10? 20? How agile can we get? Do the math.
And then, yes, take the advertising pieces of the current organization that are working, profitable, and useful to readers in San Francisco, and revise them to run with as little overhead as possible. Reduced expenses means reduced need for revenue, and you can make do with far, far less of it.
Obvious organizations to partner with:
Want to expand upon any of these ideas or talk about your own?
Check out the wiki Alexis Madrigal has set up.
It’s all about the San Francisco Post-Chronicle.
Thanks, Howard.
Feb 22, ’09
11:15 AM
As you may or may not have heard by now, my boss at the office, Howard Owens, has moved on.
I just want to take a moment to publicly say thanks to Howard here, and more than obviously, to wish him the best in whatever endeavor other people might call his “job” next.
Personally, I happen to know that what Howard calls his “job” is more of a 24/7 thing than a 9 to 5 thing, and it has everything to do with the transition of journalistic power in small towns and neighborhoods from the press to the community, and very little to do with where his paycheck comes from, or the sign on the door.
So: Thanks, Howard. And good luck.
(Of course, I’ll continue to work with Howard on Wired Journalists and other projects across the Web. This just means I don’t have to do what he says quite as often. 
)
Comments are closed on this post.
Commenting survey results
Jan 7, ’09
5:43 PM
For a couple years now, I’ve been working with editors, reporters, and commenters on news sites taking the following hypothesis as a given:
Commenters will be the most civil in the place that is the most public.
For example, I expected commenters on news stories, where more people could see their words, to be more civil than commenters on blog posts on a news site, which theoretically have a smaller audience, and I expected the worst of the lot to show up on message boards, buried deep in the bowels of the sites that haven’t flushed them from their systems yet.
I was wrong.
A quick question or two on Twitter gave me enough anecdotal evidence to justify whipping up a quick Google form as a simple survey on commenting for news site managers.
Onward to the results, based on 49 responses as of the morning of January 7, 2009:
- 23 of you said commenters are the most civil in threads on blog posts; 7 of you said they are most civil on news stories; 3 of you said they are most civil on message boards.
The following came from a respondent who said commenters are most civil on blog posts and least civil on news stories:
“News stories tend to be about controversy or negative topics: crime, scandals, politics, social issues. These get people riled up, so the discourse is automatically polarized. The blogs are less issue-based, and more stories about life where people find more common ground and tend to relate to each other as real people, not just avatars.”
- 33 of you said commenters are the least civil in threads on news stories; 5 of you said they are the least civil on blog posts; 6 of you said they are the least civil on message boards.
For the contrary view, notes from a respondent who said commenters are most civil on news stories and least civil on blog posts:
“We moderate all news story comments and only take down blog post comments if they are offensive, spam or link to another site.”
The responses regarding anonymity were pretty mixed. I asked where readers have the most and least anonymity when leaving comments on your news sites. As expected, the answers vary, depending on your registration systems or the lack thereof.
See what I mean? Hard to pull any real clean takeaway from that, but let’s look into some other “Other” responses on these questions:
- “all comments and forums require registered usernames, but we can’t track who the actual user is”
- “n/a all comments are tied into the same registration system, so none are any more anonymous than others”
Plus a few more responses along the same lines, which is probably a good thing: If that’s a trend, maybe news sites are doing a good job of integrating news, blogs, and other spaces for reader participation, so one login works everywhere on the site. That’s no small feat.
Moving on to the goldmine of the other extra notes left by respondents:
(In the survey form, I said I would keep these responses anonymous, so I’ve edited out a couple key details. I think the responses have plenty of value without those details. You’ll see my brackets where relevant.)
On civility:
“We have nearly as many trolls or comments in general on blogs as stories. I wonder if there is a relationship between volume and civility rather than form and civility.”
“We think that readers at [major metro newspaper.com's name removed] tend to be more civil on blogs because that is a “tended” space owned and overseen by a reporter, so getting out of line there would be like yelling in someone’s house. Blog comment threads stay more civil even though its the only comment space on the site where we don’t require registration.”
On anonymity:
“Anonymity is a huge issue at our paper — many people believe it is the source of all our problems, while others believe that we need to have it or a lot of people who might provide valuable input just won’t comment at all.”
On systems:
“Traditional shovelware news articles do not ask questions, they act like they contain all available information on the subject. Most of the bile is on crime stories that can flare racial tensions, and the rest of it is typical conservative vs. liberal noise.”
On culture:
“We do little to “cultivate” our commenters and so the inmates have taken over the asylum. We use [commenting vendor's name removed] for comments and there is a way for users to flag offensive comments and if enough do the comment if removed, but this does not replace having responsible people weighing in and constructively guiding the conversations — which, by the way, is verboten. Reporters are frowned upon for commenting on stories.”
On commenters:
“Our readers are vicious idiots who try only to out-zing the person before them. There is little meaningful discourse, and all comments tend to end up blaming minorities, Bush or liberals for the problems of the world.”
“Public comment is like an open sewer. But it keeps people coming back to our site.”
Bonus links:
- A U.S. Air Force flowchart on how to respond to negative comments (probably message board posts in this case) in the wild. (via Tim Windsor)
- A 2007 New York Times style section piece on the high end of commenter culture. (via fimoculous)
Tools for News: Chris Amico’s new database of online news tools
Jan 2, ’09
2:34 PM
Behind the scenes at Wired Journalists, a few of us have been talking for some time about the need for an all-encompassing database of online tools for news, featuring tutorials, examples, ratings, and reviews.
Chris Amico has made a solid run at building out the guts of it, launching his Tools for News this week.
Looks pretty simple, but there are lots of little pivot points in the data, so you can register, leave a comment about a tool, add a link to an example of how a tool has been used before, or to a tutorial about the tool, etc… I’m hoping to see some basic rating systems added as well, and probably support for OpenID or Facebook Connect or another alternate auth system.
How about an automatically created widget for each tool with vital stats, links, and an activity feed for the page?
I’m full of requests for this thing – Chris has been awesome about fielding feedback on this project. Check out his blog post about it here.
A podcast in which I discuss the merits and limits of Ning with Pat Thornton
Jan 2, ’09
8:30 AM
I spent 20 minutes or so talking about Wired Journalists and Ning with Pat Thornton last week for a BeatBlogging.org podcast.
Here are some highlights from Pat’s list of questions:
- Would you choose Ning again if you could start over?
- How specific should a topic be for a Ning site to be specific?
- How many users are needed for a quality Ning network?
- How do you get the most out of Ning?
- What tips or tricks do you have for people interested in setting up a network?
I hope I did a relatively decent job of answering those, or at the very least, explaining the easiest way to find the answers to those questions.
You’ll hear mentions of a few Ning-powered social networks at newspapers, including Your Santa Cruz Sports and School Matters (in Knoxville, TN).
What don’t we know about news organizations using Ning? Say so in the comments at BeatBlogging.org.
A quick survey about comments on your news site
Dec 31, ’08
11:03 AM
I have a little theory.
It’s my opinion that commenters — or anyone, really — is the most civil when they’re speaking in public and everyone can see who they are.
So, I think that news site commenters/readers are most civil on news story comments, then blog posts, then message board threads. When I popped off about that on Twitter this morning, a bunch of you said “p’shaw” (to paraphrase).
So let’s gather some data, shall we?
This short survey is also posted at Wired Journalists. If you’d like to share it with your friends and colleagues without sending anyone to Wired Journalists or my blog, you can access it directly at http://tinyurl.com/civilcomments
I’ll share the results in a few days.
Thanks in advance!
Notes on getting serious about staffing for online news
Dec 1, ’08
11:37 AM
Mark Potts on what it takes to shift a news organization’s focus from print to Web:
“How many newspapers have a sizable staff responsible for managing print circulation? All of them of course. Now, how many have even one staff member responsible for managing online distribution via RSS, e-mail or Facebook? Damn few.
How many newspapers have a department devoted to fixing and painting news boxes? Just about all newspapers of any size. Now, how many have any staff devoted to thinking about how to optimize their site’s placement in Web searches? Not many.
How many newspapers have an advertising production staff that can churn out a good-looking ad for any advertiser? It’s essential, of course. Now, how many have anybody thinking about new forms of Web advertising that take advantage of tools like search, widgets, Flash, interactivity, data-mining, etc.? Very few.”
Why commenting on news sites still stinks: Further notes on the commenting survey results
The most striking conclusion I’ve come to based on the results of the commenting survey that 49 online news folks answered over the last week or two was this:
I’ve been writing about how to improve commenting on news sites for a couple years now, but all my ideas — and really, most of the systems I’m borrowing ideas from — are technological solutions.
And that’s fine, and good, and necessary, but the feeling I’m walking away from these survey results with is the feeling that no matter what technical solution a news organization implements, there are still a set of very human problems to be solved in the newsroom if you really want to raise the quality of the comment threads on your stories.
In short, you can let readers “report as offensive” and ask questions and e-mail to a friend and vote comments up and down and recommend comments all day long, but if there’s not a journalist managing the community — participating in threads, asking and answering questions, and generally continuing the conversation — your comment threads will stay a mudpit, all technology, identity, and registration aside.
So here are a few ideas. Thinking out loud here, so please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments here.
What else? Again, we’re looking to work on the human (as in, your newsroom staff) issues, not the technological ones, for the moment, at least.