Stop hurting the Internet

 Can we please just stop hurting the Internet?

Please?

Inside baseball on the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News sales talks

(But not the inside scoop, I'm afraid. I'm merely a spectator.)

News arrived this morning that the chief executive of the Philadelphia Media Network, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com, may have massaged stories about its own sale to buyers.

He denies it, of course, but the obvious interest is to play down bad news (it's been a rough decade for the beleaguered company; 37 layoffs occurred only yesterday) until the sale goes through. The potential for pressure is there.

I've complained before about the problem of Philadelphia being a one-newspaper-company town, and here we are confronting it head-on: there are few broad-interest news outlets willing to cover the sale of a major employer in the city, because most of the bootstrap reporting on such topics is done by the company in question. (Which is why the New York Times and Washington Post have stepped in to fill the void.)

It was bad when the company's products began to degrade in terms of quality.

It was worse when the company hit bankruptcy.

It was even worse when the company continued to lay off whatever value it had lying around, from its building to its talent.

And it was even worse when the company's only interested suitors are the major city power players who have, for much of their careers, been the subject to critical coverage by the paper. (As Erik Wemple wrote this morning in the Washington Post, "How could the reporters at these Philadelphia papers cover anything aside from Halloween without crossing this ownership group? How could the papers avoid becoming a factory line of conflict-of-interest disclosures?")

Now, this: a potential violation of the very ethical core to a newsgathering organization.

However hellish the business, the PMN should have taken steps to avoid all this.

It should have walled off a reporting group to report on the company, with zero intervention. Placed barriers where they needed to be, for the benefit of both parties. Explained, publicly, what it was going to do ahead of time. And, for the reporters' sake, made sure that every word that went live in those reports was perfect, because any edits to the published product would be immediately suspect.

You say you didn't intervene? Release email conversations to the public. Let us decide, instead of leaving it he said, she said. (A journalistic no-no, as any editor with his head screwed on straight will tell you.)

For a company that has been troubled for so long, it's amazing that there is still confusion when it comes to managing internal reportage around its activity.

Like General Motors, this company's going to have to fail, and fail hard, before it ever has the chance of succeeding again. It's just too bad it came from its own mismanagement, and not stiff competition.

Poor user experience: no one's fault but yours.

"We can't. That's how we've always done it."
"We can't. We would be giving up revenue."
"We can't. [Insert internal group here] won't let us."

The bigger a company gets, the more frequent excuses become a form of social currency. Eighty percent of the time, they directly hinder innovation. Somewhere along the way, breaking the rules turned from a business model to a business stigma.

But here's the thing:

• There is no excuse for pop-up or pop-under advertisements.
• There is no excuse for rollover links that trigger ads littering the copy of your publication.
• There is no excuse for that useless "social engagement" bar that runs on every page of your publication's website. Look at the data -- no one uses it. Just get rid of it.
• There is absolutely no excuse for autoplaying talking advertisements hiding somewhere on the page. Minus double points for processor-sucking video ads.

How much is reader satisfaction worth to your organization? Quality control for your publication starts with you. The bottom line can't be ignored; that's true. But for every user-hostile experience you allow on your publication's website, you effectively wager that the money is worth more than the reader. And that, my friend, is a race to the bottom.

(Who's waiting at the bottom, you ask? The great Google monster, with a massive bat, ready to bludgeon your publication's SEO with a results-destroying swing.)

That social engagement bar? That autoplaying video ad? Those entirely irrelevant sponsored links? Those horrific Google advertisements that roadblock articles? A daily reminder to all of your readers that you can't say no.

You wouldn't do such things to the front page of your printed product, would you? Why do you allow it online? Find a better business model, before you lose all of the readers who attracted those advertisers in the first place.

The squishiness of digital reader satisfaction.

For some reason, when a product goes digital, we quickly forget that real people use it.

We become focused instead on traffic metrics: how many pageviews did we get? Did we increase our unique users? What's our average duration?

And then we use these as a proxy for how satisfied our readers are.

Instead of running the numbers, two questions we should ask ourselves:

1.) Would I be happy with this publication? (What would I fix?)

2.) Are my readers happy with this publication? (What would they change?)

Don't try to read the data tea leaves for emotion. Just ask.

On building a publication from scratch.

Building a publication from scratch -- scaling it so that there's regular content, and then regular good content, and then regular original content, and then increasingly new and different kinds of regular original content, is very much like a game of Jenga in reverse.

Add a piece. Add another. And another. Ever higher you go.

Don't topple the tower.

On (finally, incredibly) paying for news online.

I just subscribed to a newspaper for the first time in my life. I'm a journalist, but a young one, and so have until now been able to get my news for free, on the web. (Fun fact: I have paid for exactly two copies of a newspaper in my life: one for each journalism degree, as required by a professor for class.) As paywalls are slowly but finally erected, my hand is forced. In this case, for the New York Times.

A few thoughts as I offer my credit card number to the news gods:

1.) This is an especially difficult transition for anyone who could be called a "Millennial," since we've never paid for news.

2.) The value proposition is also challenging because advertisements remain all over the site. Online users have been taught that payment for a website often allows for a tradeoff in the amount of ads. This is not the case here.

3.) In the New York Times' case, the payment structure is, in a word, ridiculous. (If you're unfamiliar: $15 per month [$195 per year] for website + smartphone app, $20 per month [$240 per year] for website + tablet app, $35 per month [$455 per year] for website + tablet + smartphone apps.) Make no mistake: I'm not harping on the sticker price, I'm complaining about how these products are packaged. How much does high-quality journalism actually cost? How much does app development for each platform really cost? Bundle pricing understandably masks this, but the NYT's particular structure takes the representative costs way out of proportion to the end user. (Do apps really cost more than high-quality journalism? They do according to the structure outlined above. To the reader, it's an a la carte menu devised by Tim Burton, as perplexing as a medical insurance bill.) Even without comparing these prices to those of other newspapers -- let's assume, for argument's sake, that the NYT is unique and irreplaceable, kind of like The New Yorker -- it just doesn't add up to the consumer. Yes, it's reasonable to charge extra for multiple ways to view the content, since each platform costs money to maintain. But this pricing structure makes it appear as though NYT is trying to penalize the reader for being technologically savvy. It's unbecoming.

4.) Another thing with regard to the NYT: all but the "all access" digital subscriptions don't allow a family member access. This is malarkey. If I subscribe to the print newspaper, I can share it with everyone in my household. Call it the "kitchen table" concept. This should be the same digitally. There's no reason my wife should pay full price for the NYT if I subscribe, and every method I could use to get around this (having her use my computer; sharing my login information) creates a road that NYT can't monetize. NYT bean counters: get smart and adjust the prices to align with actual use cases, or risk losing money like record companies did in the Napster era when they moved to block, instead of reasonably monetize, the ways users were using their content.

5.) Paywalls spell trouble for many newspapers, and I expect to see consolidation in the industry accelerate. I no longer live in New York, but I'm more willing to pay for NYT than the Philadelphia Inquirer online. I wish I could get both. Most people will only have the time to read, and be willing to pay for, one daily newspaper. How will the cards fall? To survive, regional papers will need to wrestle potential digital readers in their region away from national brands like NYT, WSJ, etc. with quality content and products -- good enough to be an alternative to the above marquee brands -- or face apathy. (A point for further exploration: regional daily papers who pursued the "local only" strategy, such as the Inquirer, will be forced to price themselves to complement a daily national news subscription, e.g. the New York Times, to survive -- or rebuild their diminished national and foreign desks to be good enough to compete for a single daily subscription.) Similarly, the NYT will, as most have predicted, lose its occasional readers. The era of "filter failure" is rapidly coming to a close as paywalls go up. Which news brands will readers choose when they are forced to pay for just one?

6.) Corollary to the above: the wild card here is the always-free websites, from the reblog-happy Huffington Post to other sites like TheAtlantic.com or those for which I work. Do those sites benefit from paywalls going up? In a sense, yes, because occasional readers of NYT et. al. will find their news elsewhere, where it's free. On the other hand, the affinity of those readers is low -- not a good foundation on which to build a readership against which to sell ads, from a publication's perspective.

Online journalism needs '20 percent time.'

Sometimes I ask myself if there's really any creativity left in online journalism.

Let's face it: innovation in online publishing is awfully hard to come by these days. It may be because we're so busy looking at everyone else's work 24/7 that we can't wall the assault off and think for ourselves. But it may also be because we are, in this endless and boundless news cycle, without the structure that forces us to think.

In the magazine world, the format dictates idea incubation. A lead time and a firm publication date helps drive hard but reasonable deadlines. The inability to publish sooner insulates the a person's ideas from escaping unbaked. The structure forces them to think; the same applies to broadcast television and radio.

But online, the beta culture that persistently urges to get-it-up-right-now-and-move-on reinforces a reactive, not proactive, stance. Investigative journalism, pensive features and other hallmarks of quality content are, like the process of drug withdrawal, difficult to confront when the easy way out presents itself at every turn, every second.

The "hair of the dog" would not exist without the hangover; shoddy -- OK, perhaps just superficial -- journalism would not be so pervasive if it were more difficult to publish it. The burden then rests entirely on an editor's shoulders to build this structure, often in direct opposition to the data-driven interests of his superiors.

Google made headlines early in its corporate life by publicizing that it gave engineers "20 percent time" -- that is, one day a week to work on whatever the hell they wanted, so long as it would benefit the company in some abstract way.

Why don't we have this at media companies?

For an industry that must reinvent itself constantly, I'm kind of baffled by this. Sure, editorial meetings serve as a sort of forced innovation, but they only provide narrow results: find a new story for this, a surprising source, a new theme for a forthcoming issue. Ideas about coverage get bounced around, but no one's rethinking how the business works.

Online, where editorial people need to find a new feature and product people need to rethink how they present content and engineers need to rethink how they build the systems that lie beneath, this matters. Media companies can't just give their engineers a day to daydream; they need to do the same with marketing, editorial, communications, product and sales teams.

Because if you're not innovating, you're dying. And too many publications are already dead.