Archive for May, 2010

Civility (and lack thereof) on many news websites, the topic of my previous blog post, is clearly worth more discussion. A bit of brow-beating of me by Josh Young, social news editor for HuffingtonPost.com, today on Twitter gives me the opportunity to continue the conversation … and fight back:

@jny2 Seriously, @steveouting, what do you know about news sites handling tens of thousands of comments a day?

@jny2 I led huffpo’s comments operations for a year, till recently, and I can say that Steve’s piece is thin and unoriginal.

@jny2: @umairh what did you like so much about this unoriginal and, frankly, tepid “fix” for commenting at news sites?

Josh, I’ve been operating and reporting on online communities since 1994. Much has changed over the years, obviously. When I started my first forum (an e-mail discussion list for online-news professionals), we didn’t even have spam to deal with for a couple years. Some of our members preferred to remain anonymous; they let their words and their intellect speak for themselves. I don’t see that as much anymore, and on a professional forum someone not using his/her real name is less likely now to be taken seriously.

True, I have not run a site that handles tens of thousands of user comments a day.

HuffPost does better than most news sites at handling comments, which is hardly surprising. Unlike legacy news brands, HuffPost is an online pure-play where user participation is understood to be critical, and the site utilizes many features to make the comment experience better: Commenters can have “fans”; commenters can get “badges” to gain social status; community moderators watch over things; users can click “flag as abusive”; viewers of comments can select to read all comments, HuffPost editor picks comments, comments from the user’s social stream, etc. But the site still has trolls, and it’s far from perfect.

My suggestion was aimed at the news websites that don’t have the resources (or cultural imperative) to do a good job with controlling user comments, and where trolls run wild and the level of discussion is, for the most part, lame. That would describe many newspaper websites. They have a problem in need of solutions.

What might solve their problems would not be appropriate for other types of websites. Niche and professional sites, in general, have less of a problem with abusive commenters and trolls; there’s more agreement among the user base, whether it be rock climbers or elementary-school teachers. Even HuffPost has more homogeneity (left-leaning audience) than your average newspaper, which draws people across the spectrum of controversial topics who can get heated up quickly.

So, Josh, while you may find my suggestion “tepid,” it may be for you and HuffPost, but not for news sites that serve the broad political spectrum and lack the resources (or knowledge of solutions) that you do to devote to commenting.

I will admit to being idealistic when it comes to online community and discussion. You’ll find evidence of that in an old blog post of mine: “Ender’s Game and the intelligent ‘nets’.” Perhaps, in time, discussion forums will become what Orson Scott Card envisioned: valuable to society.

You could argue that some of the more prominent news brands have created user commenting that is of high quality and value: The Economist, NYTimes.com, etc. For most news sites, and certainly the dominant one in my town, no way; the troll population and the lack of civility keeps out many of those who have something of value to contribute.

Josh: With your experience at HuffPost, what would you suggest as solutions for the type of news sites that I’m talking about?

Have you been watching the Honolulu Civil Beat news experiment? That’s the Hawaii news website edited by John Temple (former editor of the defunct Rocky Mountain News) and financed by Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay).

While I have doubts that its business model (asking $19.99 a month for full access to the news site’s content and discussions) will work, I do think that it’s heading in the right direction with its user commenting policies:

• Commenters must be paying subscribers; free visitors to the site can’t leave comments on articles or join discussions. (A cheaper option is to pay 99 cents a month for a “Discussion Membership.”)
• Commenters and discussion participants use their real names; anonymous comments are not allowed.
• Civil Beat reporters serve as hosts for discussions and regularly interact; they don’t sit on the sidelines but rather mix it up with readers, and keep things “civil.”

As the site’s name implies, the goal is to create valuable, intelligent, civil online discussions on local and state issues where there are divergent views. While the paid-subscription model limits the size of its audience for full content and for participating in discussions (anyone can still read discussions for free), the tenor of the public conversation on the site is far better than the typical local news website where user comments are a free-for-all.

An unusual option: Honolulu Civil Beat’s “Discussion Membership” for 99 cents per month

Here in Boulder, we have the opposite of civil with the user comments on DailyCamera.com, website of the dominant daily newspaper. A recent major story demonstrates the problem with the Daily Camera allowing commenters to hide their identity.

A few weeks ago, an employee of a stove and floor store killed the couple who owned the business, then killed himself. The married couple left behind a young teen daughter and were beloved by many people. The employee-shooter was a 50-year-old ex-computer programmer described as socially awkward, oddly compulsive, never married and no children, who lived alone with his cat, and apparently was disgruntled about a change to his commission structure.

The best media outlet to follow the tragedy has been the Daily Camera and its website, which examined the lives of those involved and (controversially) covered the store owners’ emotional funeral. But what was awful about the Camera’s online coverage was the user comments that piled up under any article published about this sensational tragedy.

DailyCamera.com uses IntenseDebate for its web comment hosting, and while to comment on a story you do need to register, there’s no requirement to publicly identify yourself. You can use a nickname (like “SwitzTrail,” a frequent commenter) and hide in anonymity. IntenseDebate hosts an archive of SwitzTrail’s comments posted on DailyCamera.com and other ID-using sites where he/she has posted, but there’s no profile information on that person. You don’t have to identify yourself publicly if you don’t wish to in order to post a comment.

This stove store shooting story confirms my strengthening opposition to commenter anonymity when it comes to local general-news sites. Many of the user comments I read online during the height of the coverage were truly abhorrent, with wild speculation that maybe the business owners were too greedy and that’s why this happened, and suggestions that current government policies may result in more stressed-out people going whack-o. (I could point you to many other recent examples of Boulder stories with comment threads filled with anonymous, abusive, and downright stupid posts. It’s the same at too many news websites.)

This is the stuff that sane people would not publish if their real names were attached. I hope the orphaned daughter was not exposed to this anonymous drivel.

DailyCamera.com’s editors removed some of the worst comments. To get an idea of what got nixed, and some of what remained online, here’s one of the more rational commenters:

“It’s sickening the way some of you are rationalizing the murderer’s actions. Who cares whether or not the compensation package was fair or not, he could have quit at any time. This guy was a murderer and a psychopath, and I hope he is rotting in hell! Scary to see how many people sympathize with this guy!”

I’m not trying to be anti-free speech, and I believe that anonymity can have its place. But here’s what I’d suggest for DailyCamera.com and other news sites where divergent views are the norm:

1. Require registration for anyone who wishes to comment, including entering their real name.
2. Use real names as user IDs — no self-chosen nicknames allowed — so that real people are standing behind their words; that will cut out most of the abusive and garbage comments. (Yes, of course, some people will easily get around that with a fake “real name.” But if the majority comply, you’ll have less incivility entering the comment stream, and people who don’t comment now because of the ugly tone of the discussion threads may return.)
3. Allow a registered user to create a comment that is listed as “anonymous,” but such comments must go through a moderator for approval; no instant posts.

Additionally, a local news site like DailyCamera.com could institute a “Discussion Membership” fee, a la Honolulu Civil Beat. That might cut user participation so much that it’s not a wise move; then again, it might be successful enough to add a needed extra revenue stream while also moving the needle on user comments from Dumb and Dumber to Quasi-Intelligent and above.

So the solution is quite simple for those news sites needing to improve their public online discourse. Just say no to anonymity, except in exceptional circumstances.

* at least on the smartphone platform

ConsumerReports.org is the classic example of a once-primarily print publisher having content valuable and unique enough that it can charge for it online. The site for years has had a subscription model, with a monthly or annual fee to access its product reviews.

I subscribed for a while, but I rarely needed to look for product reviews; I got tired of paying for a service that went unused most months and canceled. (The rate has changed since then: It’s now $26 a year, or $5.95 a month, auto-renewing.)

I’ve long been annoyed by ConsumerReports.org because it only offered subscriptions — no day passes or even a pass for a single month’s access without automatically dinging your credit card every month.

While CR’s regular website is still crippled in that way, the company’s new mobile website for smartphones finally offers a day pass for 99 cents, or a non-renewing month pass for $4.99. Hurray!

Hurray! CR finally offers better payment options

You have to wonder what took CR so long. Having CR reviews in your hand while out shopping for a new dryer is a handy thing, and I’d gladly pay for a daily or month pass during periods when I’m shopping for a major purchase.

So, CR, how about doing the same with your non-mobile website now? You can start getting customers like me — who refused to pay for a long-terms subscription — back. (Many years ago, I even subscribed to the print magazine.)

From a business perspective, I can understand why the one-off pricing for reviews or the day pass might seem to be an option to be avoided. Get enough people hooked into having their credit card charged automatically each month and that’s a sweet business model.

But the days when that was possible are gone, in my view. Too many websites and online services want to charge a monthly fee. Sorry, CR, but there are only so many monthly online fees I’m willing to pay.

I’ll use CR’s mobile website with the day pass option when I’m in a position to need the product reviews. I’ll avoid the regular website until it dumps the subscription-only silliness.

Credit cards suck for many reasons. (One that annoys me the most is the absurdly high late charges I’ve personally experienced for being a day or two late getting my bill in on time.) But in the physical world, and in certain situations in the online world (e.g., Amazon.com, which can store my account information), they are awfully convenient.

But for paying for low-priced digital content, credit cards largely suck because the fees are too high for online publishers to use them on small amounts without some sort of aggregation system to bill multiple small purchases together, as Apple does with its iTunes accounts when you buy 99-cent songs (and there’s no need for entering a card number more than once).

So it’s a pet peeve for me when I see some media website selling content or subscriptions, and the only payment option is using your credit card, and typing in all your information for the transaction to go through. My peeve is less about the cut that the credit card companies take form the site owner (though it is outrageously high, typically!), than about how much time and bother it takes the buyer to make a small purchase when the required payment method is a credit card.

Online users do not have a lot of patience, and usability experts who’ve studied this will tell you that to get lots of online users to do something (like pay a bit of money for some premium content, or make a donation, etc.), the process must be quick and simple. Typing in card number, expiration date, name on card, security code, e-mail address, postal code, and phone number is not something that you want to ask online users to do very often.

This little rant comes courtesy of me spotting this donation pitch (at right) from the Bay Citizen, the new non-profit online news enterprise covering the San Francisco Bay Area and financed by Warren Hellman, which launches on May 26 under the editorial leadership of Jonathan Weber (ex-NewWest.net and the Industry Standard). Pre-launch, Bay Citizen is looking for “founders” to commit either one-time or repeating donations, and it has this lengthy form for you to fill out.

The sole payment option: your credit card!

Especially for non-profits, those donation forms should be effective at collecting money. A long form like the Bay Citizen’s just gives an excuse for a potential donor to click away rather than spend several minutes filling out a form. But the same goes for for-profit media sites.

How about doing the obvious, web publishers: Offer some choices! Let your contributors or purchasers have multiple options: Paypal, Google Checkout, and more media-centric payment systems such as Zuora and others.

While I can buy a burrito at Chipotle and the counter person swipes my card and hands me a receipt (not even a signature required any more), too many media websites force me to spend precious time filling out long forms like the one on this page (click to enlarge it).

It’s got to be made simpler and faster in the online marketplace!

The other day I received two envelopes of coupons in my (snail-)mail box.

The first included the same kind of untargeted assortment of color-printed discount coupons from local businesses that I’ve received for decades. OK, not entirely untargeted; after all, they were for businesses in my area. But the sender knew nothing about me other than where I live, apparently, so flipping through the 1/4-inch-thick stack of coupons, all but one went immediately to the recycling basket.

The other, smaller package of (single-color) coupons was from one of the grocery stores I shop at: King Soopers. Because the King Soopers chain offers member discount cards, the company’s databases have lots of data on what I’ve bought from its stores; you pretty much have to use the cards (or enter your phone number as an alternate ID at the check-out), or else you pay significantly more by missing all the in-store sale prices.

While King Soopers has been sending my household product-discount coupons (which go beyond the member-card sale prices) for many years, this latest envelope got my attention. Of the dozen coupons in my envelope, every single one was for a grocery item and brand that I routinely buy. The company at last seems to have evolved its system to the point where I could use all those coupons.

If I was of mind to get upset about digital privacy, I might have been freaked out that one of the coupons was for a free pint of Haagen-Daz ice cream. You see, one of my daughters and I are both fond of that company’s Java Chip variety, and I must confess to having purchased quite a few packages. My guess is that the system tracking my purchases noticed that I’d bought a bunch of Haagen-Daz, and rewarded me not just with a discount, but with a coupon for a free pint.

You may feel differently, but I’m not one to freak out about this on privacy grounds. I’ll trade the occasional free item and ongoing discounts for a computer tracking my grocery purchases. In fact, I thought it was pretty darn cool that King Soopers has advanced the technology it uses enough so that I can get, in effect, personalized discount coupons.

Returning to the usual topic of this blog, none of the news brands that I use regularly know me anywhere near as well. Count me as one of those news website readers commonly afflicted with banner-ad blindness. I’m looking for news, so I seldom notice the ads, unless there’s something about them that hits my interest areas.

Google, on the other hand, knows me well, because it reads all my e-mail, as a regular user of its Gmail service. On Gmail, there’s a thin strip of text ads that run on top of the list of messages and above opened e-mails. I notice those ads frequently, because they are placed contextually based on the content of the e-mails in my Gmail inbox. I don’t try to look at them; they just catch my eye when they’re relevant to me. I’m surprised at the number of those Gmail text ads that I’ve clicked on through the years.

Back to news once more, there’s a similarity between when I visit a news website and when I’m using Gmail. In both cases, I’m task oriented: reading news, and reading and responding to e-mail. Yet with Gmail I notice more of the ads because many of them end up targeting me because they’re based on the content of the e-mail I’m reading. With most news sites, the ad targeting is weaker, and the advertising thus less effective in catching my eye.

That King Soopers and Gmail know me better as an individual than do the news providers that I frequent online is a problem for the latter. Sure, some newspaper companies have used targeting technology to track what a website user is reading, and perhaps if they have the data through required online registration, their systems can match that information with my age and location to deliver personally relevant ads on their websites and/or via e-mail or other subscribed services.

But I believe news providers online need to do a much better job or personalization and targeting of advertising. Local newspapers, indeed, might want to look at the grocery industry to pick up some tips. I find it intriguing that the most effective, personalized advertising that I’ve received lately came from a grocer.

Perhaps those member cards are something that news brands should consider more seriously.

I’ve had an iPad for a couple weeks now (sharing with my wife and two daughters; it’s a popular gadget around our house). And I’m starting to notice some patterns in buying apps for the new tablet. I’d love to know if any of you share my behavior. (Comment below, please.)

1. I don’t think much before purchasing a low-priced iPad app that is “permanent.” For instance, the Weather HD app looked cool, and even with its limited functionality (compared to the free Weather Channel Max for iPad app), I enjoy the quick look at the current weather and brief forecasts for the next few days and the app’s slick animated photo graphics. 99 cents? Sure, why not.
2. Family members and I have purchased a few more expensive iPad apps: Scrabble ($9.99); Crosswords ($9.99); Pages ($9.99); Starwalk ($4.99, and highly recommended!); and some more low-priced ones: Magic Piano (99 cents); Glee ($2.99); Set ($2.99). Again, each of those apps is “permanent,” as in they will stay on the iPad until we tire of them.

Buy a digital edition of Time magazine on your iPad! … For $4.99?

I’ve also downloaded a bunch of news apps, all of them free. Frankly, the news publishers that are giving away these apps are leaving money on the table. Of the apps that I downloaded for free to my iPad, I wouldn’t have blinked at paying 99 cents or $1.99 for those from: New York Times, NPR, USA Today, BBC News. I would pay for these because they are permanent.

Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing. You can even bookmark, say, the NYTimes.com homepage and put an icon on the iPad screen permanently. The reason that someone like me would pay for an iPad news app from a specific news provider is if the experience is superior to viewing the news website on the iPad’s browser.

(At this early stage of iPad news apps, the websites as viewed on the iPad browser sometimes are as good of a or a better viewing experience than viewing the iPad app versions. NYTimes.com viewed on the iPad’s browser is quite nice, for example; in fact, it’s better than the only iPad app available from the New York Times currently, NYT Editors’ Choice.)

Within the news iPad apps I’ve used so far — and I’ll concede that it’s early, and publishers I hope will figure this out soon — the business model seems to be something that the companies will get to later. USA Today’s iPad app, for instance, has a banner ad on the homepage (Marriott Hotels at this writing), but ads don’t show up in much else. The NY Times iPhone app has ads from a single advertiser, at the bottom of the homepage (where banner blindness will make them mostly ineffective due to that positioning), and on the second screens of most news articles.

These apps are mostly “shovelware” from the news websites, and lack even web basics such as allowing user comments.

One nice ad technique used on the NY Times iPad app is an occasional “interstitial” full-page ad, which appears after you click a homepage or section-front headline and appears before you get to view your article. I don’t find this that annoying, but if I did, the Times would be smart to give me an option in the app to turn off such take-over-my-screen ads by clicking a setting and, say, paying a dollar to avoid seeing them for the next month,or maybe $5 to not see them for a year.

There are lots of ideas for “upsells” within an iPad news app to persuade (not demand!) people to pay extra beyond the initial, inexpensive download fee. Let’s say that USA Today’s iPad app had a setting where for $1 a month I could turn on a commenting feature and be allowed to leave comments on stories. This should be the topic of another blog post about how to make money from upsells in news iPad apps, so I’ll leave that for another time.

While major news brands are not taking advantage of obvious revenue opportunities with iPad apps yet, Time magazine, until this week, has been going about it wrong. Initially, an iPad user could purchase a single issue of a Time weekly edition, an enhanced digital edition of the print magazine, for $4.99 per edition. That’s compared to the street price of a printed Time magazine at $4.95.

It’s not just that the iPad single-edition price is a few cents more than the paper edition (which I think is ill-advised, considering the printing and physical distribution costs saved by Time with digital editions), but it’s also absurd that Time was selling each edition as a separate iPad app.

Getting back to my earlier comments, there’s no way that I’m going to pay for individual magazines as individual iPad apps! This approach completely misunderstands the device. First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted (since if I don’t and I continue buying iPad Time editions, my iPad screen will fill up with Time icons for various editions).

Time has now fixed this blunder and offers a Time iPad app for free. From within the app, the iPad user can purchase digital versions of the magazine for $4.99. Old issues are stored in the cloud for later reading, and there’s only one Time icon on the iPad screen. But pricing should be more realistic, I believe, and subscriptions offered. While I don’t think that this is the best iPad business model for Time, at least if its executives want to charge per digital issue, they should get a grasp on what’s likely to fly in digital-content pricing when there’s free content (like Time.com!) available on the iPad browser.

Count me as an iPad fan. I love the device, and more specifically I love the form factor of a tablet and can see it becoming an important part of my media life, taking much time away from my laptop. It does concern me that news publishers, out of the gate, appear to be missing the boat in working on an innovative business model for the tablet. Geez, I hope we’re not seeing the big news brands repeat the mistakes of their past when it came to adapting to new digital devices!