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.

The death of learning in journalism.

I wish I had a mentor. Several of them, really.

Sure, I've got an editor, and he's swell. But he's only one guy, with one career's worth of insights. In our 21st century-style distributed workforce, built largely upon the backs of freelancers around the globe, there's one key thing that's missing: a heirarchy of learning.

I'm not alone. The problem also manifests itself during the hiring process: leaning ever more heavily on freelancers, media outlets -- and editors, specifically -- find themselves facing a chicken-or-egg scenario where they need talented writers but can't find them.

How is this, you ask? There are a ton of freelancers out there ready and willing to work; that's true. But quality -- in writing technique, in work ethic, in creativity -- is rarer than you might think, and no modern editor seems to have the time to teach the freelancer, cultivate that quality and grow a talent pool. Meanwhile, there are a ton of already-talented journalists in the industry, but no editor wants to take the headcount lump to hire them away from another publication.

From a writer's point of view, journalism schools have become a near-requirement. "You can learn on the job," a seasoned journalist might crow when met with the suggestion that a young journalist seeks to attend j-school. But the truth is, you can't. Media companies are willingly outsourcing training to journalism schools, and the bill is footed by the eventual employee his- or herself. (I would know; I have the staggering loan bills to prove it.)

Do we really think all those bloggers are increasing their knowledge with each passing year, or merely refining what they've already got on tap? We are all stuck moving sideways. Few are climbing, mentally speaking.

The problem persists in the editor's chair. I've always been an eager learner, and I devour information wherever I can find it. But I often feel as though I can't devour it fast enough.

In the online world, at least, all outlets are on the same level. Magazines compete with newspapers compete with startups. But the smaller the outlet, the less knowledge that's accessible. You can watch competing publications' work from afar, but you can't really know how things tick unless you sit down and ask them to lunch. (Which, of course, they don't have time to do. Because we're all overworked in this new paradigm.) This was something that media companies used to provide internally. Now the chain of knowledge has been broken in so many places that there's barely enough there to grab.

The old joke is that you should put a line in for "media consulting" when you're an unemployed journalist. The truth is, each working editor and freelancer could really benefit from tapping that knowledge. Perhaps consultants should consult individuals, not corporations.

Disclosure: this is a cop-out.

 I spotted the following disclaimer on Mashable this morning:

"Mashable Op-Ed: This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication."

A fine warning, if the author was a contributor who had nothing to do with Mashable. Except the post I saw it used on was written by none other than Mashable's editor-in-chief, Lance Ulanoff. In other words, the guy who is hired to speak for the publication.

If Lance's opinions aren't Mashable's -- which is fine, Lance is an individual -- then who, exactly, speaks for the publication? Corporate communications?

(This reminds me of all those Twitter accounts with the disclosure, "The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer." Clearly! Does any reasonable person really believe that one small cog in the machine really speaks for the 25,000-employee-strong organization?)

In an age where it's acceptable to speak for oneself and not one's publication, does the publication still have a viewpoint?

Letting the cables sleep.

If you've been wondering why I've been so lax in updating this blog, here are my reasons. (See also, from August: "Jobs you'll have as an editor.") I promise I'll get back on the horse with haste.

The Internet's Valley of Death: Expectation

We all say that the Internet is full of poor journalism, bad (or none!) copy editing and churnalism at every turn. Yet few of us as consumers are willing to change that. In fact, we indulge it.

Yet when there's a terribly short or sensational or just plain wrong news article or blog post or the like, we wrinkle our nose. Some of us even leave nasty comments about the lack of quality of the work.

And yet this product -- this website, this blog -- was free to consume. Sure, it has ads, but it's pretty clear that a bunch of MPUs aren't going to pay the full-time salaries of all the writers, editors, product managers and developers to meet this expectation of quality. And too often, it results in a hostile user experience to maximize the profits, which irritated readers are all too willing to point out.

I hear you, reader. But it's akin to seeking Hermes levels of customer service in a Wal-Mart. Good luck, honey. You get what you pay for.

There is a tremendous disconnect in consumers between what they get and what they pay for. The dots don't connect. It's not their fault; this is what I'd call a B2B problem that ought not involve the C -- something a business needs to figure out for itself, and not blame the customer for acting naturally.

Still, the rift exists. We consume a bunch of low-quality news, and we dislike or hate it. But we keep doing it. And we don't visit the websites of those who practice high-quality news -- even if a paywall hasn't been implemented. Publishers with print editions use them as an anchor; their high-dollar advertisements and lead sales drum up enough revenue to shore up the online edition's inadequacies, even if the latter is in the black. The margins on the former are high enough to guarantee more than the minimum amount of quality for the latter.

But if you're only an online publisher, and your products are all free (albeit ad-supported, and any other business model you've rigged), well, good luck. You can't afford high quality content because your users aren't paying enough.

This isn't the consumer's problem; as with any product, companies must meet their customers halfway. But I'm not sure I have an answer.