Same content standards, regardless of the platform

A key ideal and admission for all news organisations: all your content, everything that has your name on it should adhere to the same high standards of production and maintenance – and that includes social media.

Everything is equal across the digital landscape, nothing should be given less consideration.

Any content you publish, whether it’s re-purposing from print, or collected from digital sources, should still have a quality stamp from your organisation:

“Until now, we spoke about ElPais.com when we were referring to online content. But in this new age, we’re dropping the “.com” and the whole El Pais newsroom is working, regardless of the platform where content is published – in print, on the web, on mobile or tablets – to the same standards of quality and rigour,” declared the paper, as it unveiled the new design, “El Pais is El Pais, no matter where you read it.”

From SFN Blog – Website redesign reflects new newsroom philosophy at El Pais by Hannah Vinter

Thoughts on “The psychology of engagement” and the importance of user experience

User experience is so important to those creating content and the delivery device that surrounds it, yet so misunderstood and/or ignored, yet it is all around us.

In everything we read, every website we browse, every shop we wander round and even the mode of transport we got there in there is  an experience, whether we realised it or not, and the fact that a user noticed a journey maybe the clue to whether it’s working or needs some changes.

For news websites, it’s the journey a user takes through the site to their desired piece of content, and the importance of “removing friction from processes to get users to their end goal faster” as Martin Belam puts it, read Martin Belam’s full post: “The psychology of engagement” – Mo Syed at UX People.

What things are called, the size, shape, colour and location all have an effect on user’s interaction with a web page “as humans we make associations between different pieces of information just due to their proximity” as Martin adds. The success of a site’s user experience can be of great value in terms of reaching a site’s objective of highlight new articles or signposting revenue-related content.

Interaction is a key goal for new websites, so knowing the best way to get users to the content they want and inviting them seamlessly to interact and engage are vital. Having an understanding of why users do what they do, aka the psychology of engagement, and how to subtly guide them around a site should be a key part of any ongoing strategy, leading you in to other areas like usability studies and information architecture.

As Irene Pereyra says in her .netmagazine post ’10 steps to an engaging interactive user experience’: “1. Design for the user, really”, it’s easy to forget you’re publishing and broadcasting for the benefit of others not yourselves and your own personal enjoyment. A bit of homework on your audience and some user experience best practices in your design can make a huge difference to your traffic and level of engagement.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the subject and am by no means an expert, but here are some related articles:
The UX of Learning – alistapart.com
How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?  – Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
Business Objectives vs. User Experience – smashingmagazine.com
A Web Designers Guide to Information Architecture – inspiredm.com
What is ‘Information Architecture’? by Martin Belam at guardian.co.uk
More advanced thinking: Subliminal User Experience – 24ways.org
‘User experience design’ as defined on Wikipedia

Notes: Opening links in new windows

Thinking about news/newspaper websites and the best practice for user experience on whether to open external links in the current or a new window or tab, that is the question:

Many wise web folk suggesting opening in the same window/tab is the best practice and has been since 1999 according to Jakob Nielsen, especially with the increase in mobile usage and how those browsers handle this action.

It’s difficult area, with various schools of thought on it over the years. In principal I’d agree it’s wrong to force the user to open a new tab or window, as WebCredible and  Smashing Magazine explains:

From the usability point of view the decision to enforce opening links in new windows violates one of the fundamental principles of the user interface design: users should always be in control of the interface they are interacting with.

For example if it’s a link to more information or further content from an editorial story, e.g. a local council/police page, then it’s a logical user journey to go straight to the other site, the old maxim that if we provide good sources, they will come back to us later.

But for editorial sites I would lean towards a new window for external sites if it’s in a related but not specifically relevant commercial context, e.g an event or award sponsor.  Sven Lennartz in an article for  Smashing Magazine adds that : “It is appropriate to enforce opening links in a new window in case: the link may interrupt an ongoing process”

Discuss.

The value of an engaged news website audience

A few thoughts sparked by an article ‘Guardian part 2: What are engaged users REALLY worth?’ by the Wannabe Hacks:

Speaking from the point of view of a local daily newspaper website… All visitors have value, but they visit for different reasons. and they have become a disparate bunch, Twitter followers, Facebook likers, registered commenting site visitors etc. Different strategies are needed for each group.

Big reasons for staying/returning to the site: quality and relevance of content to visitor’s interests – as it always has been. Good quality journalism has long term value, celebrity stories have high short-term value.

Many people visit but never comment or interact on news websites, should we force these people to register? If they are a large but loyal number then I think the potential loss of audience is too great. If your publications voice is only being heard by a small minority how can consensus or influence be maintained?

Clamoring for the largest audience must be tempered with not overlooking delivering what your target audience want, be that subject or geographically based. If you’re not doing that then you’ll have little chance of moneting the audience.

The data on registered users though has huge long-term value, knowing what they look at, where they came from, their journey through your site, enables tailoring related content and commercial offers to them and justifying changes to your site structure.

There’s nothing wrong with commercial elements alongside quality content, but if it has relevance to the user, then there’s clearly more revenue potential and everybody wins!

In short, a very difficult area, a fine-line to be trodden through making enough money to pay for quality of content and product whilst keeping a strong, loyal audience and not driving them away with over-bearing commercial strategies.

In terms of skills, SEO and understanding how content works in a digital environment is vital to all editorial staff. Being able to judge how and when to add keywords and phrases into headlines/intros, compacting a story into a Tweet and other web-based copywriting and sub-editing is a hugely valuable skill-set.

Live blogging for journalists

The live blog is an opportunity to curate multimedia content and information from professional and non-professional sources ‘on the ground’, using editorial judgement in what to publish.

It’s a great collaborative tool for news organisations to cover major or breaking events, conferences or big issues using mobile tools and central monitoring to coordinate interactive content publishing, the audience then have the power to feed into the live stream and feel part of the process.

A live blogging strategy

As an example strategy, setup a CoverItLive blog and promote across all your platforms in advance where possible, setup initial questions if possible. Get all your journalist involved using Twitter, all their feeds can be added to the live blog, collectively creating the live blog stream without any other action required in its most basic form.

A manager can monitor the live blog, adding user comments and any related tweets as well as multimedia content and polls into the stream.

Specific Twitter hashtag feeds can be used if appropriate to integrate information from members of the public who may be at the scene and let the audience follow via Twitter if they prefer.

When to use a live blog

It has its place when suitable situations arise or events break as an important digital media publishing strategy that shows what can be achieved coupling journalistic skill and citizen knowledge with readily available digital publishing tools.

Editing and curating is a vital part of the operation, but this is clearly a different area of journalism from reflective, objective long-form pieces that would follow-up online and in print, but all have their value to the audience.

It’s just a new opportunity in a multimedia, multiplatform publishing world.

Further reading:

• Tips on tweeting live by Mary Hamilton – advice on choosing hashtags, sources and curation
• Twitter for journalists: beyond gathering and distributing content
• Styles of live blog: Guardian, New York Times, BBC, FT – Andy Bull, multimedia-journalism.co.uk

News business model strategies & notes on Shirky’s ‘The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics’

Clay Shirky comments on paywalls in particular News Corp’s Times paywall and disclosure of audience statistics. How do we get people to pay for news on a digital platform? It’s never going to be easy, especially being one of the first like The Times, they must be applauded at least for diving in.

But there are other models in along the lines of free, freemium, or hybrids of free and paid-for content. Though I think a ‘Great Wall’ style paywall may be a n extreme that would only work a for a few strong or highly niche/valuable brands.

Different titles with different audiences will need more experimentation before we all find our balanced strategy, playing off some level of charging for access against keeping a presence on the open web.

Quotes from the article:
Robert Andrews at PaidContent sees hope in the Times now having recurring user revenues.*
Mike Masnick at TechDirt believes those revenues are unlikely to offset new customer acquition costs and the loss of advertising.*
General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That’s the problem.
The web puts newspapers in competition with radio and TV stations, magazines, and new entrants, both professional and amateur. It is the war of each against all.
The advantage of paywalls is that they raise revenue from users. The disadvantages are that they reduce readership, increase customer acquistion and retention costs, and eliminate ad revenue from user-forwarded content. In most cases, the disadvantages have outweighed the advantages.
anyone advising newspapers will at some point say “All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!”
This advice is well-meaning. It’s just not much help.
merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.
Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity. This is, invariably, most of them.
One way to think of this transition is that online, the Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day
Instead, it is becoming a newsletter
the paywall creates newsletter economics.
If you are going to produce news that can’t be shared outside a particular community, you will want to recruit and retain a community that doesn’t care whether any given piece of news spreads, which means tightly interconnected readerships become the ideal ones. However, tight interconnectedness correlates inversely with audience size, making for a stark choice, rather than offering a way of preserving the status quo.
This re-engineering suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms.

Shirky also adds comments:
“I agree with you that the Times is an unusual case in many ways, not least because it is embedded in a much larger and more diverse media empire. See, on this subject, Seamus McCauley’s terrific piece on the use of the Times as part of a larger “confusopoly” media war: “News Corp’s Paywall Is About News Corp, Not The Times” http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2010/11/news-corps-paywall-is-about-news-corp-not-the-times.html

I disagree that this makes the lessons of the Times paywall less relevant; in fact, the Times has two unusual cushions–a publisher who is willing to forgo some revenues in order to have influence, and a larger media empire for whom having the papers collect CC numbers may make it an atttractive source of up-selling and cross-selling. Papers that don’t have those cushions are likely to suffer more from a switch to paywalls.”

Quotes:

The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics « Clay Shirky

• Robert Andrews at PaidContent sees hope in the Times now having recurring user revenues.*
• Mike Masnick at TechDirt believes those revenues are unlikely to offset new customer acquition costs and the loss of advertising.*
• General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That’s the problem.
• The web puts newspapers in competition with radio and TV stations, magazines, and new entrants, both professional and amateur. It is the war of each against all.
• The advantage of paywalls is that they raise revenue from users. The disadvantages are that they reduce readership, increase customer acquistion and retention costs, and eliminate ad revenue from user-forwarded content. In most cases, the disadvantages have outweighed the advantages.
• anyone advising newspapers will at some point say “All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!”
• This advice is well-meaning. It’s just not much help.
• merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.
• Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity. This is, invariably, most of them.
• One way to think of this transition is that online, the Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day
• Instead, it is becoming a newsletter
• the paywall creates newsletter economics.
• If you are going to produce news that can’t be shared outside a particular community, you will want to recruit and retain a community that doesn’t care whether any given piece of news spreads, which means tightly interconnected readerships become the ideal ones. However, tight interconnectedness correlates inversely with audience size, making for a stark choice, rather than offering a way of preserving the status quo.
• This re-engineering suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms.

Auto-push content to Twitter & Facebook

Sign up to: http://twitterfeed.com/ it’s quick and easy.

Create a new feed and add an RSS feed and then tell it when and where to push articles.

When creating a feed, click ‘Advanced settings’ where you can tell it:

• how often to update,
• whether to take headline and/or first paragraph,
• add an optional keyword/#hashtag before or at the end, e.g. your town name,
• shorten the article link using bit.ly or other service (you’ll need an account, but that’s easy to set up)

On Shirky and Brock on paywalls

The inital Times paywall figures are an early indication of a difficult future for general news publishers in the next phase of the digital media landscape.

As Clay Shirky puts it: “General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That’s the problem.” And it’s simple to say, just create unique, highly valuable content, but there is only so much potential in this, and the time, resource and technology required to get new ideas and new ways of publishing off the ground are beyond the realities for many current legacy news publishers, national and regional.

The actual subscriber figures for the Times’ digital offering behind a ‘Great Wall’ style paywall, once you equate the variety of platforms and payment plans, as Shirky ponders “monthly web subscribers could be under 10,000″ can be taken in different ways, again Shirky offers:

As with every aspect of The Times’ paywall, interpretation of these numbers varies widely. There are people arguing that these numbers are good news; Robert Andrews at PaidContent sees hope in the Times now having recurring user revenues.* There are people arguing that they are bad news; Mike Masnick at TechDirt believes those revenues are unlikely to offset new customer acquition costs and the loss of advertising.*

Now the commodification of news is becoming a stark reality, Shirky:

The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can’t charge such rates.

Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.

An all encompassing paywall, seems an extreme measure, as you attempt to charge for your digital product in the same was as you charged for the print version – you pay one fee for the whole package even though you probably only consume a few specific pieces of content and services:  “The advantage of paywalls is that they raise revenue from users. The disadvantages are that they reduce readership”.

More sophistication is needed both in the creation of digital content, the reworking of print content for digital platforms and most definitely in pricing structures and the where and how we pay. George Brock comments on Shirky’s piece, adding: I “hope that someone invents something more technically sophisticated which allows charging to be combined with better ways to seduce the reader into consuming the journalism. (Next experiment in that line: the New York Times).”

On newspaper website structure

Interested in how The Boston Globe separates http://www.boston.com/ from the newspaper portal http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/.

Is it just unnecessary excess or is their some merit while the print audience is still sizable enough?

Slideshow: Future Ideas For Journalism And News

Inspired by the news:rewired conference, 14 January 2010