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PersonalizationSep 29, 2008 in News, Personalization, Social media | comments(2)
My latest column is up over at Editor & Publisher Online: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.”
I’m very curious to see the reaction to this one, as I think I’m hitting some significant new ground. And if anyone can point me to examples of the global-to-micro-personal news service that I’m imagining, please do.
Jul 2, 2008 in Citizen media, Personalization | comments(14)
My recent Editor & Publisher Online column about hyper-local news websites contained a call for a new model, one that relies on professional journalists working closer with “citizen” (non-journalist) experts more so than being just open to submissions from non-paid community members (aka, “citizen journalists”). I followed that up with a blog item here suggesting that to succeed, a hyper-local strategy needs to have a way to target specialized news and information to people who care about it (since it’s “boring” to everyone else) and good personalization technology.
Mark Potts, one of the founders of Backfence.com, a defunct network of citizen-journalism websites, objected to my reasoning, and suggested that the quality of content on Backfence sites had nothing to do with the company’s demise. You can read his response in a guest column on E&P Online.
Here’s my response to Potts. I’ll start with a few excerpts from his critique of my column:
“On a hyperlocal site, the end result may be something that really can’t be defined as ‘journalism,’ but that is intensely interesting and important to the people who visit and contribute to the site.” …
“It’s also unfair to suggest that hyperlocal content is ‘of low quality and boring,’ as Steve does in his column. Low quality? To a professional editor, maybe, but the fact is that most participants in user-generated sites can communicate very well. It may not be ‘journalism,’ but it’s still quite readable and interesting.”
“And ‘boring’ is in the eye of the beholder. To an outsider, any hyperlocal information is probably boring. It may be to a transient resident, too. But to someone with a stake in the community, kids in the schools, paying taxes, dealing with community services, patronizing local merchants, etc., those arcane town council meetings, zoning disputes, tips on finding good pizza and kids’ sports scores are incredibly important — more so than just about anything a lot of us think of as journalism.”
“Let’s not go making flat statements about what doesn’t work, or what’s ‘boring’ about hyperlocal sites. It’s way too early in the game to even begin to know what the successful formula will be. Let’s celebrate those of us who are working hard, inside and outside newspapers, to crack the code.”
Let’s address the “boring” issue. What I wrote and believe is that hyper-local content, most often written by community members, is often “boring” to people who don’t care about the topic. BUT, when targeted to the right person (and this is where personalization technology comes in), it’s incredibly powerful and important. Ergo, sites that present a citizen-powered collection of news items (which inevitably include lots of press releases from community groups and others) need an overhaul.
For example, here’s a list of the “Featured” stories on July 2, 2008, from the Boulder, Colorado, section of Yourhub.com, a citizen journalism site operated by E.W. Scripps and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. (Boulder is where I live, and I do care about local news and information. I’ve lived in Boulder for about 13 years, and I lived here once before in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ergo, I’m pretty well rooted in this community.) Presumably, since these are included in the Featured block on the home page, these are the best submitted stories covering Boulder. By Potts’ reasoning, I should be interested in these stories.
So those are the Featured stories for Boulder on Yourhub.com on July 2, the day I’m writing this. I also clicked on the list of all stories submitted to Yourhub under the Boulder category. For July 2, there are 7 stories in the list:
OK, I dare anyone to convince me that that collection of content is “interesting.” I’m a devoted, long-time Boulderite, and the only thing I found remotely of interest is the Yourhub staff compilation of high school graduates; I can look to see if any of my friends’ kids graduated. I sure have no desire to come back to check out the Boulder stuff on Yourhub after this exercise.
I chose to examine Yourhub Boulder, of course, to see if Potts is right that if you’re committed to a community, you do care about the kind of stuff that goes on sites like Yourhub, and that was carried by Backfence.com sites when they were still running. I can’t begin to describe how dull this collection of content is to me.
Now, I again will emphasize that I am not a critic of the concept of “citizen journalism.” To the contrary, I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet.
Here’s what I’d suggest for a remodel of Yourhub, and what I think (in hindsight) that Backfence should have done. The user interface would look like this:
A user should be able to select from a list of topics, interests, organizations, etc. that he is interested in. This would generate a local-focused content stream of stuff over time that matches his interests. For example, I might select as my interests: mountain biking; cycling; running; “green”/environmental news; Boulder Open Space Department; trails news; Summit Middle School; University of Colorado School of Journalism; mosquito control; dogs; traffic delays/road construction; the Internet scene; venture capital community/investors; Boulder media; and news about my small neighborhood.
How would a hyper-local site serve up all that stuff? It would comb through various sources of news, events, and information that match those choices: newspaper staff; citizen contributors; local blogs (mostly external, but perhaps newspaper bloggers, too); websites and newsletters of community groups, schools, and government agencies; discussion lists (aka, listservs) and forums devoted to various topics (e.g., local mountain biking group) and run by various local organizations; local databases (police department, health department, Realtors’ groups). It would intelligently parse through a growing list of news, data, and information sources and deliver to me what I care most about. The hyper-local site ideally would become the place I look first for what I care about or need to know locally; Google serves that purpose now.
This gets close to what the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests: the newspaper as “local information and connection utility.”
I’m standing by my criticism of much (NOT ALL!) hyper-local content as “boring.” I’ll stop saying that Yourhub Boulder’s content is boring when it starts including content from the school my daughter goes to, and when it also brings me news about my nearby neighbors, and so on.
What about other local news? Am I suggesting that I don’t care about that? Not at all. That’s what my traditional local newspaper website is for. Here in Boulder we have lots of fascinating stuff going on, from adverse possession controversies to naked bicyclists getting a pass while a naked jogging priest gets arrested. The newspaper site is great for that, and I’m devoted to reading it day-in and day-out. It’s the hyper-local sites covering Boulder with their dull content about minor local events and happenings that don’t interest me that I can live without (please).
Just give me the good hyper-local stuff! Then I’ll be happy, and the hyper-local publishers (be they newspapers or independents) will have a business.
This is a complex subject, and I’m glossing over some other possible solutions. For example, I think that having a strong and attractive personality at the center of a hyper-local website can be tremendously effective in gaining an audience and creating a strong community of users. And I think that some of the weaknesses of non-professional content can be dealt with by some professional editorial oversight or help (a pro-am approach). I also think it makes sense for newspapers playing in the hyper-local space to integrate that into the main news website, instead of putting it “over there” in a silo for the “non-professional” stuff. But this has gone on too long already, so I’ll leave those discussions for other days.
I write this with all due respect for my friend Mark Potts, who I’ve known for many years. I’m having a hard time remembering when we last disagreed on an issue. But we’ll have to disagree on this one.
I want to see hyper-local succeed. Who knows if I’m right in my thinking on this; we’ll see as hyper-local plays out. Lots of people are trying to make it work and “crack the code.” What I presented in my E&P column and in my earlier blog item is my attempt at that, and nothing more.
Jul 1, 2008 in Citizen media, Personalization | comments(9)
OK, I think I get it now. I feel like I understand what newspapers need to do. I wrote up some of this in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, but subsequent to that I also ran across a significant blog entry from Dudernet: “Newspapers and why I’ve tired of reading (most of) them.” That blog is by “tball”; I have no idea who that is, but he/she works at a Tribune Co. newspaper and appears to blog anonymously.
The blog item discusses something that’s been bugging me for a while. Most newspapers are focusing on local news, since national and international coverage is a commodity online and they need to focus on what they can do best, and that’s local coverage. But the trouble is, for many people, local news is boring and not relevant to them. And hyper-local (aka, local-local) is even more so.
This is especially so for people who don’t have strong ties to the community in which they live. The U.S., especially, is a transitory society; people move around a lot for jobs, school, and other reasons, and they don’t always feel strongly attached to where they live. Lots of folks are more interested in niche topics and national events than local politics and local news headlines, or they want local news from where they’re from originally. These people are especially unimpressed by coverage of city council meetings and other mundane local happenings in the town or city where they live. It’s the people who don’t move around — who still live in the town where they grew up — that are appreciative of good local coverage.
Here’s a great excerpt from someone (”mccxxiii”) who commented on tball’s post. (This is good stuff.)
“I am fairly young, single, no kids, and no extended family in the large city where I live. I rent because I could never afford to buy here, and I’ll leave in the next couple of years because of it.
“I am concerned with exactly two items of ‘local news’ … when is the dog park in my neighborhood opening, and are there any train delays this morning. I get both of those things more quickly and efficiently from a source other than my local paper. (Dog park project listserv and text message alerts from the train people.)
“It pains me to say that, because I was a newspaper reporter for nearly a decade, and I like nothing more than to settle in for a good read with a bagel and juice in the morning. But pages upon pages of city council minutiae and youth baseball coverage say nothing to me except goodbye. Everything I read about ‘how to save newspapers’ includes the idea of hyper-local, but I can’t think of a better way to turn me OFF.”
Brilliant! This person is pointing you to the way to make hyper-local relevant.
If it’s not obvious to you, the local newspaper serving this individual should be the one serving up the information from the dog park listserv. And the train delays. That it’s not doing that, and is leaving it to others, is major oversight.
To see what newspapers must do to do hyper-local right, look to Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock.com, which digs out and filters real estate listings, crime, government data, news articles, blog entries, and a bunch of other stuff down to the city-block level. That’s stuff that reaches people at a personal level: the crime that happened 2 blocks from my house; the house that sold down the street, and for how much; the bus route change that affects the bus stop I use; etc.
Local newspapers need to figure out how to find the data and information like train delays and dog-park news, then deliver it to the people who care about it. That is the “hyper-local news” that will allow newspapers to renew themselves as important in people’s lives. Right now if you want to find out about train delays, you probably go directly to the train operator’s website; if you don’t know about that site, you go to Google and Google points you to the train schedule page. Local newspapers need to become known as the place to go for the hyper-local information and news that YOU want.
I think this will require several components to pull off:
None of this is meant to suggest that local news isn’t important. It is, and people really do care about significant news that happens in their communities. But when it comes to stuff that’s deeper into the community and of interest only to a small segment, there is a danger with hyper-local of boring your audience. Location, location, location is the Realtor’s mantra; I’m thinking that personalization, personalization, personalization should be local newspaper website editors’ mantra now.
I hope no one reads into this that I am not a believer in hyper-local. To the contrary, I’m a big fan, but I think that for it to gain an appreciative audience — and for it to turn into a business — we need to add the elements that I describe above.
Jun 27, 2008 in Personalization | comments(0)
Jay Small, a new-media and newspaper veteran for whom I have great respect, has responded to my recent blog post about individuated news: “Individuate Me!.” In it, he challenges the wisdom of making personalized news a priority. Here’s my response:
First, Jay noted that “the conference title muddles the theme: personal news. (Really, isn’t ‘Global Individuated’ somewhat like ‘Jumbo Shrimp’?)” That’s my fault, actually; I mangled the conference name in my original blog post (since corrected). The actual name is “Global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper.” Sorry about that!
Here’s Small’s view:
“I have consistently held an alternative view about investing to personalize news on the level of an individual news site. Unless you’re CNN, it isn’t worth it. Every shred of user research I have conducted, observed or studied tells me consumers do want a personal Web experience — but not just for news, not just for one news Web site at a time, and not always based on the same selection criteria.”
Actually, a few minutes ago I fired off my June Editor & Publisher Online column to my editors; it will probably be published either later today or Monday. That piece will go far in explaining why I think personalized news is important (though the column isn’t on personalized news, per se).
The short version is that I believe newspapers need to go well outside their staffs and become much better at pulling in new content and new people from the community. Add that to the traditional news reporting, and follow a strategy of using professional journalists to filter and enhance content from those exterior sources, and you end up with a big mass of content that begs to be delivered on a personalized basis; in fact, there’s no other way to do it.
If we expand our notion of the local news report to include not just newspaper reporters’ output, but also a wide mix of content from all segments of the community — and add data as news, a la Everyblock.com — then consumption requires good personal filtering services.
The other thing that sways me — and this point was made in one of the presentations at the conference yesterday — is the behavior of young people. I see this in my own household. I’d say 90% of my daughters’ media consumption is “individuated.” That is, they watch TV shows on their schedule via TiVo; music is via iPod/iTunes/LimeWire, with only occasional FM radio in the car (with incessant channel changing); movies are Netflix and Amazon Unbox, with occasional trips to a Blockbuster store; news consumption (very little) is online. For kids today, non-individuated media is outside the norm.
Ergo, I don’t believe as today’s young generation gets older that they will accept anything less than personalized, individuated news.
And to quickly address the age-old argument about personalized news, I think that most news consumers will receive and want both a “Daily Me” and a “Daily We,” where the latter is news and information that everyone wants and needs to know to live in this society.
Jun 26, 2008 in Personalization | comments(2)
I spent today at the Global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper, hosted by MediaNews Group and run by MN’s VP of targeted products, Peter Vandevanter, who is a long-time student and fan of personalized news. Forty or so people gathered in the auditorium of the Denver Newspaper Agency building — an interesting mix of technologists, entrepreneurs, and newspaper folks. Editors and publishers were in the minority at this gathering, though I wish more of them could have heard the message of this conference.
While the organizers chose the term “individuated” for this event, that’s not the best choice. While everyone in the room understands that term, it’s a bit geeky and I don’t think it’ll resonate with media consumers. As the industry rolls out “individuated newspapers” in the future, we’ll have to come up with a more approachable name. (And by individuated newspapers, I of course don’t mean just personalized print editions; delivery platforms also include home printing, phones and mobile devices, PDFs, etc.)
Here’s a really brief description of the key messages that came out of this conference (the ones I want more news executives to hear):
A heartening signal of the industry starting to take personalized news seriously was MediaNews CEO (and chairman of the Associated Press board of directors) Dean Singleton, who presented a (taped) speech about how important he believes individuated news is to his company. That sends a signal to the rest of the industry.
