Comments Off// Posted in Journalism Industry by Jeremy Rue on 06.17.10.
During a recent keynote address, Steve Jobs spoke about the marriage of technology with the humanities. (image Apple.com)
During a recent keynote address, Apple CEO Steve Jobs displayed a slide depicting the road signs of technology intersecting liberal arts, saying one of the keys to Apple’s success in creating beautiful yet innovative products was the idea that design was just as important as the technology.
When watching this, I couldn’t help but feel how far from this “intersection” we are in the journalism industry. We are an industry of content creators (reporters) and technologists (graphic artists, Web producers). But both sides seem to be miles apart. Reporters are enwrapped with the idea of stories and content. Technologists are into, well, technology.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen lots of impressive journalism online. But more often than not it is an either/or situation. We talk about the powerful stories. We talk about impressive informational graphics. But very few times do these types of projects actually intersect.
I spend lots of time with journalists from across the country through the Knight Digital Media Center training program. One of the more common issues I hear about is the separation of newsrooms between content gatherers and the producers. I hear people tell me, ‘yeah, we’re doing really cool stuff online, but I don’t have anything to do with it. It’s being done by those web guys.’
In my job I work with lots of technologists and I work with lots of content creators. At times if feels like I’m speaking to people from different worlds. They know what the other side is capable of, but rarely do they collaborate. The technologists are obsessed with innovation, design and communication. The content gatherers are obsessed with stories. Both are valid parts of the complete puzzle.
How did Jobs do it? How did he marry the content creators with the technologists?
Comments Off// Posted in Online Tools, Web 2.0, Web services by Jeremy Rue on 05.07.10.
At the Web 2.0 Expo, I had an opportunity to check out a few sessions on the cool new features of HTML5.
Let me just say this: HTML5 is going to change everything. The Web will become amazingly beautiful in a few years, all because of this new standard. But, more on that in a future post.
I am a Flash instructor at UC Berkeley’s journalism school, and a few people have asked me about my thoughts over the whole Flash vs. HTML5 debate. For me, it comes down to just one thing – an IDE.
For the non-techies out there, an IDE (or integrated development environment) is a software program that helps people build things, like websites. More importantly, it helps non-programmers create amazing content on the Web using a drag-and-drop interface. This is what Flash currently does.
I teach Flash to journalism students who have no programming experience at all. After six classes, students are capable of creating some very creative stuff that would take months – more likely years – of study to do with a coding language like JavaScript.
A Berkeley student produced this Flash project for the Washington Post.
Flash opens a whole world of interactive multimedia to the common person. Anyone with a little time on their hands can learn to use a software program like Flash and take part in the creation of beautiful content.
So, let’s come back to HTLM5. What many laymen don’t realize is that the best parts of HTML5 are actually done using JavaScript. The “HTML” part of HTML5 is only a really tiny part of all of the new stuff it will be capable of doing. HTML5 includes some new <video> and <audio> tags, but that alone won’t produce the amazing things everyone has been demoing. For that, you will need a real JavaScript coder.
A part of the Web 2.0 expo this week included a sit down discussion with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, where he hinted that Adobe would build an IDE for creating HTML5 content. I suspect Lynch is referring to DreamWeaver, a software program that in my opinion hasn’t lived up to its potential.
What Adobe, or another company, needs to do is build a superlative timeline-based tool for HTML5. If a company really brought HTML5 capabilities to the masses, it would offer huge potential to a number of industries – especially ours.
Comments Off// Posted in Journalism Industry by Jeremy Rue on 05.06.10.
For the past week, I have been attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I sat through a handful of sessions related to online advertising, none of which came from the perspective of the journalism industry. It seems making money online is an issue for more than just news companies.
I find this area especially interesting because let’s face it, lack of online advertising dollars seems to be one of the chief issues affecting most print news publications.
While no one has a definitive solution to this quandary, there were lots of fascinating perspectives from some of the panels, and I thought I would share two of the better ones here.
1) The modality of online ad experiences
I attended a panel discussion on monetization of the real-time Web (referring to sites that have streams of content like Twitter). The discussion mostly centered around how to display advertisements in a stream of content without disrupting the user’s experience.
Ads tend to pull people out of the experience of consuming content and unless people are accustom to being pulled out of an experience, like TV commercials or movie previews, they usually don’t appreciate it. There was a lot of emphasis on creating “good ad experiences” and gaining the trust of users.
I thought, ‘yeah, that makes sense.’ Create valuable ads experiences so they don’t hamper the overall experience of the site. This is especially difficult to do with display advertising, because ads essentially compete with the attention of the main content. TV doesn’t suffer from this problem as much, because it is a more linear experience, and people are used to it. I made a few graphics to illustrate these concepts:
TV advertising is a linear experience.
Physical newspapers and magazines are quasi-linear because people will generally flip through them, and there is (usually) a starting and ending point. There is a premium on full-page ads because users will often see them. You can’t ignore ignore a full-page ad without getting to the next page.
Attention is more scattered with print publications.
Attention on the Web is all over the place. In an attempt to mimic the full page ad, there are some tricks to getting people to look at an advertisement before they come into the main content of a webpage, but these ads are mostly annoying and create a bad user experiences.
Web ads compete with a user's attention (and often lose.)
But even if one is successful with ad placement, there are so many other factors to creating a good ad experience.
One of the factors the panel spoke about regarded the content that the ad is married to. The moderator of the panel was Brad Stone from the New York Times and at one point he did allude to the news industry. One of the panelists said point blank that news is incredibly difficult to monetize. Its content is unpredictable from day to day. Toyota doesn’t want an ad running next to an article about its cars failing. And let’s face it, content in our industry is usually bad news.
2) All of this is moot, it’s about how you sell the ad
Another session I attended was how to build an ad-supported network around a community, hosted by Chris Tolles of Topix. This was a great session because Chris actually worked in ad sales and he knows a thing or two about what goes on inside an advertiser’s mind.
Without explicitly saying it, Tolles said all of this stuff – the metrics, the click-throughs, placement – is really nothing compared to how you sell the ad to the advertiser. One figure he showed was that 20 percent of Topix’s ad staff sold 80 percent of its ads. It had more to do with who had connections at the big ad agencies and if they could sell them on the idea that companies would get a good return by advertising on their site.
“Get your story straight. Tell them a story of who you are going after, and why… Sell to people you know and repeat…”
Advertisers, he said, don’t just want lots of volume. A million eyeballs is meaningless if it is not the right million. Advertisers want niche products and verticals with really specific demographics. Rolex only wants to advertise in places where it knows its customer’s will see it. So does Lexus, Ford trucks, Wal-Mart, and Gap. Can you think of an audience for each of these products? Advertisers sure can, and they have data to support it.
Tolles was also against the idea of CPMs, or at least in when you’re a small publication. Sponsorships or selling monthly ad plans are much more valuable, unless you’re Google and have billions of people going through your site.
Some sites go after volume with no focus – and some succeed – but they have to have a very large audience. If you have focus, it is much more valuable in the long run.
8 Comments// Posted in Journalism Industry, mobile by Jeremy Rue on 05.04.10.
Back in the late 90s, usability expert Jakob Nielsen came out with a series of articles about how people consume media on the Web. These articles were profound in that Nielsen realized fairly early that people consume content differently on the Web. In order to communicate effectively over the Internet we need to format the media to fit them medium.
I’m not sure why this might come as any surprise to anyone who produces content that could end up on the Web. We have been reformatting media for different mediums for decades. A newspaper story is structured differently than a radio story – than a broadcast story – than a magazine story. Why shouldn’t we format stories specifically for the Internet?
One article by Nielsen that I think tends to often get overlooked is when he used the terms lean-forward and lean-back mediums.
The idea behind lean-forward mediums is that people are engaged when they use the Web. They are in scanning mode, actively looking for content – and their attention span is much shorter. People use the Internet with purpose. Articles should be shorter and get to the point sooner, videos should be snippets or separated into clips of only a few minutes long.
Lean-back mediums on the other hand are the times we sit down and veg out watching TV, read a book or flip through a magazine. Our attention span is much longer because these are passive mediums and we are in a consumption mode. This is why most long-form doesn’t work on the Web.
The iPad is a particularly interesting device, because it aims to bring the Web into the living room where it could become a lean-back media device. I think this is why so many magazines are excited about delivering their content to the iPad. With tablets, people might actually spend time consuming media rather than frantically searching.
At the recent Apple presentation for the next iPhone software, Steve Jobs spoke about the future of mobile advertising and introduced a new product called iAd. At one point Jobs said that the average user spends an average of 30 minutes using apps on the iPhone, and they rarely use search tools like Google. It’s not about search, but about consumption of content. This really plays into the idea that mobile devices are in fact lean-back mediums. Apple is really smart in positioning itself as a leader in advertising innovation in the mobile space, because ad dollars tend to gravitate to lean-back mediums.
On the storytelling side, the news industry should start taking these ideas of lean-forward and lean-back mediums into consideration when creating content. Unfortunately, I don’t have answers on how that can be done logistically with the state of the industry and all of the cut backs. But, it’s interesting to think about.
Comments Off// Posted in Web 2.0 by Jeremy Rue on 04.24.10.
I went to see Conan O’Brien the other day in San Francisco. He was incredible. The guy really knows how to put on a memorable show.
What I thought was particularly fascinating about the experience though was how many people were tweeting from the event. Later that night when I came home, I checked the Twitter feed using a hashtag from the show (#cobnob) and was surprised to see how many photos different people had uploaded.
There was one point during the show where Conan walked out into the audience playing I Will Survive. I found half a dozen angles from this one single moment.
I don’t have any revelations or insights, I just thought it was an interesting example of the times we live in.
http://twitpic.com/1howsb
http://twitpic.com/1hp3ah
http://twitpic.com/1how2m
http://tweetphoto.com/19543086
http://twitpic.com/1hp4xq
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