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Kachingle fires a blog salvo at NYTimes.com’s metered paywall

Steve Outing — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 21:45:58 +0000

This is an interesting case of what I guess would be termed “guerrilla marketing.” Kachingle, an online user-donation network that aims to financially support many websites and blogs, has begun a campaign to “STOP THE PAYWALL” at NYTimes.com.

First, some quick background:

NYTimes.com has announced that it will put up a “metered paywall” on the site in early 2011. That means that site visitors after viewing an as yet unspecified number of stories in a month will be asked to pay to subscribe to the site or otherwise pay to access more Times content. It is likely that web users referred via links on Google, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. will not be counted against the monthly free allotment. (In other words, it’s a porous paywall, unlike the “hard” paywall that’s on Rupert Murdoch The Times (UK) website; that paywall allows no free content, and only paying customers can see beyond the headlines.)

Kachingle’s founders don’t believe in paywalls for general news websites, and they think that they have a better idea: Get readers of news across many sites and blogs to band together, pay $5 a month to Kachingle, then have Kachingle distribute that money based on individual users’ tracked visits to sites and blogs that they like (and that display Kachingle “medallions”).

The Kachingle guerrilla marketing campaign has specifically targeted the 50-plus blogs published on NYTimes.com, by allowing Kachingle’s paying member (I’m one) to “Kachingle” or support any of those blogs — without NYTimes.com’s cooperation. (I regularly read some of the NYT blogs and have Kachingled the ones I like. So, when I visit those blogs from now on, some of my $5 a month will start going to NYTimes.com bloggers — that is, if they choose to sign up to collect it.)

Since the Times doesn’t appear to want to do business with Kachingle or support its donation scheme, Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos and CEO Fred Dewey had their staff create browser plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome that allow a Kachingle member to support the NYTimes.com blogs. With the plug-in installed, when you visit one of the blogs, a thin Kachingle medallion banner appears above the page, pushing down the rest of the NYTimes.com page. That’s how you can “Kachingle” a specific NYTimes.com blogger. … NYTimes.com visitors who do not install the Kachingle browser plug-in will not see the medallions.

There’s also an automatically updating “Leader Board” that shows which NYT blogs are getting the most Kachinglers (i.e., financial supporters). As I write this, Paul Krugman’s blog is leading the Bits Blog and David Pogue’s Posts blog. The numbers aren’t much, but the campaign was launched only last night, and paying Kachingle members and some journalists and bloggers were notified today.

We’ll have to wait and see what the reaction is from NYTimes.com executives. As I see it, they can ignore this innovative but perhaps annoying (to NYT) ploy by a small Internet donation start-up, and it will either catch on with web users who think it’s a good idea, or die quickly. Or the Times execs can make a stink and try to force Kachingle to halt the campaign.

My experience with big media companies is that they often can’t help themselves from the latter approach: Call in the lawyers and send out the cease-and-desist orders! That would not be wise, since it will turn Kachingle’s guerrilla marketing ploy into a David-vs.-Goliath saga that could get lots of attention in the blogosphere and on Twitter.

Hey, what better way for a small business struggling to catch on with the public than to get a boost by being threatened or sued by New York Times lawyers! And it will raise more questions about the NYTimes.com paywall strategy.

I should learn more later, so we’ll see where this goes. In any event, it looks like fun.

(Disclaimer: I have written about Kachingle in the past as a former columnist, and in this blog; I’ve also done a small amount of consulting for the company.)

3 links that explain Editor & Publisher’s demise

Steve Outing — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:57:45 +0000

(Disclaimer: I worked as a contract or freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online from 1995 till this week, covering for the site and sometimes E&P magazine the intersection of newspapers and the digital revolution. I do not have inside information about why Nielsen Co. shuttered E&P, and the words below are strictly my opinion.)

The demise of Editor & Publisher (the now-monthly magazine and companion website) can be quickly understood from the following three links:

John Temple: Rest in peace, E&P: Killed by an aggregator

“It’s easy to underestimate the power of aggregation. But the truth, in my view, is that Romenesko replaced Editor & Publisher long ago as the place where journalists turned to find out what was going on in their world. It’s not limited by one medium or industry. It’s timely. And it’s deep. The magazine couldn’t compete. And it’s not just Romenesko. There are many sites and blogs to turn to today to learn what’s going on in journalism. Which is why E&P couldn’t survive as a viable business.”

The former editor and publisher of the defunct Rocky Mountain News hits the nail on the head. E&P still operated like a traditional trade-magazine publisher, just using a different medium (the web) for daily coverage and cutting back on print (from weekly down to monthly in its later years). To this day, it was weak on user participation and aggregation from other sources, even though its traditional news coverage was strong and well respected. E&P probably should have hired Jim Romenesko years ago rather than let the Poynter Institute lure him.
Steven Berlin Johnson: “Old Growth Media and the Future of News“
This is a transcript of a speech presented in early 2009. It’s long, but it is the best description I know of about why traditional trade publishers are doomed unless they properly adapt to the new digital media environment. Johnson uses the example of the old Macintosh magazines, pre-web, and how they were marginalized by the growth of Mac insider websites, e-newsletters, and blogs over the years.

What started out in technology journalism, Johnson explains, eventually will spread to many other sectors of news. It already has in some areas such as sports and politics. For industry news, the same dynamic will strike in niche after niche. Johnson’s message also points to the importance in the business press of aggregation and curation.
A tweet by Vin Crosbie yesterday

“Root of E&P mag’s death was Steve Outing’s start of Online-News listserv in ‘93, creating ability to report industry news faster than print.”

News media consultant and now university educator Crosbie is referring to an e-mail discussion list that I started either at the end of 1993 or early in 1994. Online-News and its companion discussion list Online-Newspapers grew to be significant and lively gathering places of news professionals and innovators looking to leverage the Internet to bring news into the online age. The information shared by a large group of passionate and knowledgeable news innovators was often the kind of stuff not found in traditional media trade publications.

Crosbie is perhaps stretching things to directly link E&P’s demise in 2009 to the start of an industry listserv in 1994, but his point is valid.

User comments sway a trial’s change of venue

Steve Outing — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:30:14 +0000

A long-running soap opera legal case here in Boulder involves the Midyettes, a couple whose 10-week-old baby died. Molly Midyette is serving a jail term for not preventing the death of her son, while Alex Midyette is set to stand trial for child abuse resulting in death.

This week, Alex Midyette was granted a change of venue for his trial, due to the intense publicity surrounding the case. Just as with the fabled Jonbenet Ramsey case (Boulder’s most notorious criminal mystery), it’s just about impossible to find anyone in Boulder without knowledge of the Midyette case — and probably an opinion about Alex’s guilt, given his wife’s conviction.

Daily Camera commenters haven’t been reticent in expressing their opinions

What’s interesting about this change of venue is that the court cited Internet comments on local news websites (mostly the Boulder Daily Camera) and blogs as a primary reason for moving proceedings out of Boulder County, along with traditional media coverage. This may be the first time a court has relied so heavily on online comments to news stories in such a decision; it certainly won’t be the last.

The Camera’s Zak Brown covered the issue in this story, which includes a short quote from me.

Twittering reporters

Steve Outing — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:32:30 +0000

WCNC-TV (Charlotte, North Carolina) web gal Kayla Castille wrote in today to report on a journalistic success with using Twitter:

“I just wanted to update you on our Twitter coverage at WCNC. We did it for the primary yesterday, and it was incredibly successful. It was the 3rd most-viewed page on our site, right behind the complete election results and the top story on Obama’s win. The reporters, anchors and producers really got into it, and they were all excited when it succeeded.”

Excellent! Check it our here.

A new and improved blog

Steve Outing — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:36:38 +0000

Since I needed to move this site to a new host, I figured I may as well incorporate a new design (since I was SO sick of the old one) at the same time. I think this is an improvement. At the least, it’s something NEW!

Related to the move, I’ve also shut down GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, an advice website that I thought better of seeing through. There were quite a few posts from the couple months I experimented with that site, and they’ve now been incorporated into the content of SteveOuting.com. If you typed in a GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com URL, you ended up here (so all external links to items from that site should redirect to the proper content).

There are a few little things still to be worked out on the new blog. Please let me know if you spot any glitches. Thanks!

A nice blog-aggregation presentation

Steve Outing — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:18:31 +0000

Here’s an excellent new blog aggregator: Alltop.com. That’s the site’s main entry point, and here’s one of its aggregator sites: Journalism.Alltop.com.

The concept is a simple one that we’ve seen before, though I think this is a nicely done implementation that’s worth a look. Alltop’s sites simply list the top 5 entries of a bunch of blogs on a particular topic. Mouse over a headline to see a short excerpt. And of course click through to the original blog entry.

Where this is worth a daily tip is the recommendation for news sites to develop something similar for their markets. Imagine creating a bunch of local blog aggregators for various segments of your local market. Local sports bloggers. Blogs about local pro or college sports teams. Blogs by local moms. Blogs by local politicos. … You get the idea.

Of course, this is content that’s out of your control, so you have a couple choices. 1) Search for relevant bloggers to a niche and add their RSS feeds to the page. (That’s what Alltop has done; I was pleased to find my personal blog on the Alltop Journalism page, but they didn’t seek my permission.) 2) Have local bloggers apply to be included on the page.

A key point is that you’re in control of who’s on and off the blog aggregator. While you can’t control what these bloggers write (nor should you even wish to), you do control the on-off switch.

Also, you might exert some editorial control in how the blogs are ordered. Instead of alphabetical order, I’d suggest doing a ranking. Put the blogs you think are best up top, and the dogs at the bottom. That’s a useful editorial service for readers. Or rank them in order of traffic. Or let your uses rate them and use the results for ranking-order.

Recruit ‘citizen reporters’ or leverage who’s out there already?

Steve Outing — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:27:00 +0000

When some news people think about “citizen journalism,” the inclination is to think of encouraging (and perhaps teaching) non-journalists to act like journalists. For example, my hometown paper features something called MyTown, which announces:

“Post news, events and photos. Blog, create your own groups, set up RSS feeds, and build your own communities and web spaces. It’s up to you to provide the nitty-gritty details that make your community special. No news is too small — from Little League to college scholarships, professional accolades to pie-baking contests, volunteer opportunities to neighborhood watch programs.”

That’s fine, but I think any local news organization is going to have trouble trying to get community members to drop what they’re doing and start doing reporting on “hyperlocal” happenings (for free, of course). Some people will do it, but probably very few. Largely, such initiatives will attract those local businesses and community organizations wanting to post press releases or announcements (ZZZZZZ).

Here’s a better strategy to add to the more common one described above: Look for people within the community that are already producing hyperlocal or community-group news.

For example, most schools in your city probably get scant coverage from the local newspaper. When something significant happens, it makes headlines, but the large quantity of more mundane news goes unreported. But it’s not actually unreported. Each school has a newsletter for parents, produced by a parent volunteer, a teacher, administrative assistant, and/or principal. Ditto for many community groups.

As the recent Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests, newspapers need to evolve into local information and connection utilities. To serve that task (on top of being traditional news providers), newspapers should start dealing with stuff like news and information coming out of local schools and organizations.

Picking up this information shouldn’t be too hard. Some schools (to stick with using them as an example) will already publish RSS feeds for their newsletters; simply pick up the feed and add it to an expanded local-education section of your website. Others may need to be coaxed into sending you their weekly newsletter, which you’ll need to process and publish.

Another idea is to recruit people from each school (and community group, etc.) to take what they already do and move it up a notch by posting it to the local newspaper website. Offer an incentive: perhaps a free subscription to the print edition; a split of ad revenues generated by the school-news page; or even a small “stringer” fee. It could be as simple as letting these people assign their own Google AdSense account to their page on the newspaper site and keep the resulting ad revenue.

The idea here fits with the Newspaper Next 2 recommendations. A local newspaper needs to be the place where people first think to go to get information that’s important to them. Right now, when I want news about my daughter’s elementary school, I don’t go to the local newspaper website; I go to the school’s website.

By reaching out to providers of broader and deeper local information who are already producing it, a newspaper can move toward being more of a “utility” (that is, more of a local Google) than just a “newspaper.”

When reporters reach out with social tactics, traffic happens

Steve Outing — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:00:47 +0000

Today’s tip was spotted in a recent article by Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review, “Keeping Your Job in Journalism.” While the article is aimed at instructing journalists on how to keep their jobs in an era of downsizing and transition-of-the-business-model chaos, one recommendation helps not only the individual journalist, but his or her news company.

Niles urges reporters to promote their content to people most likely to value it. As an example, a beat reporter covering higher education might keep a mailing list of bloggers covering the topic, and e-mail them alerts about new articles he’s published.

That’s excellent advice for the individual. I’d also suggest that it’s good for the company, so much so that company leaders should require that (or at least strongly encourage it) from reporters.

In today’s media-crowded world, no newspaper or TV news show can exist as an island, hoping online users come for a visit. It’s important for journalists at mainstream news organizations to reach out in order to get picked up elsewhere online.

Niles explains:

“Most established news organizations remain clueless about how to promote their work in the social medium of the Internet. Make it your personal responsibility to do better with your work. … Build a list of readers and sources to message whenever you publish a new piece. Facebook and other social networks provide an easy way to start with this. Just create a page and invite readers and sources to become your ‘friends.’

“Give readers easy-to-use tools to forward and share your work. Link to other sources and politely invite other writers and sites that cover your beat to link to you, from time to time.

“When I worked at the Los Angeles Times, a few fellow online editors would hit Google to find discussion boards and fan sites covering people and movies the entertainment section was featuring the next day. We’d e-mail those webmasters links to our stories even before they’d hit the front page of latimes.com. And we often found that those sites sent those stories more traffic than other pages on the Times’ website did.”

Excellent advice. A social media strategy can bring in significant traffic to your website.

Assign a community blog editor (your next Herb Caen?)

Steve Outing — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Be sure to check out a Boston blog aggregator site called Universal Hub. It’s a great example of what all local news organizations should be doing (IMHO).

Universal Hub is an independent website run by Adam Gaffin, who trolls all the blogs having to do with Boston and picks out the best items each day to highlight. (Here’s a story about Gaffin and his increasingly popular site: “Master of Hub Hits.”)

The significant thing here is that Gaffin doesn’t just pull in RSS feeds of blogs; he’s using his personal judgment and considerable effort to find the most interesting stuff out there, then he writes a short item about the blog item, with a link to the original.

He also spends time searching for new sources, since new blogs show up all the time. He is, in effect, acting as a beat reporter where the beat is Boston-area bloggers.

What news publishers often do with non-affiliated local blogs is simply set up automated feeds for blogs that they think might be relevant to their audience. Some hand-pick local bloggers to be included on the news website.

I think where those models can be improved on is in bringing in a human editor to bring out the best of local blogs. Readers of a vetted summary of local blogs can be assured of reading something interesting — and saving the time of tracking local blogs themselves. It’s a great service in that it helps readers who may be interested in what Boston bloggers have to say avoid the dreck and just see the good stuff.

An interesting angle with Universal Hub is that it is open for others to post blog items, but few do (other than post comments, which many people do); the site is primarily a platform for Gaffin, who has become a local news commentator and media critic.

So here’s my tip for the day: Assign someone in your news organization to the “blogger beat.” Gaffin is an excellent role model. While it might be nice to hire someone to do this, let’s be realistic; most news companies today will want to use existing staff. Considering that the person assigned to this task will be significantly enhancing the local coverage of your news website, it shouldn’t be too hard to argue for a sole reporter to make the move.

If you remember the San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen, you may catch the similarity between this kind of job and what the “three-dot columnist” did so well for so many years. Where Caen published based on tips sent and called in by readers, Gaffin is serving a similar role on the web with blogs as the sources.

Caen was, I think it’s fair to say, the most popular thing about the San Francisco Chronicle. Perhaps a Gaffin-like blog “columnist” today might fare as well.