On reader (and viewer) loyalty

I received a call this afternoon on my cell phone from a dance company that I see perform once, perhaps twice per year.

The company's spring season is around the corner, and the sales representative wanted to offer me, the customer, a package subscription deal that allowed me first crack at reserved seats for shows in May, June and July.

The catch? A subscription entails four different shows in a row, same time and day of the week.

After several minutes ducking the hard sell, I politely declined the offer. I did the same exactly one week ago to another representative. I did the same last year to two or three more.

By most standards, I'm a casual customer. I don't follow the individual shows and seasons, and I only attend when I have the time and money. My ticket purchase history reflects this impulsive streak.

But the company continues to call my cell phone and insist that because I'm a loyal customer -- having seen one show this year -- I ought to consider signing up for three times as many shows I usually see, six months in advance.

An e-mail advertising the new season probably would have been enough to get me to convert. (Cheaper, too.)

If a customer/reader/viewer/user is on your list, it doesn't necessarily mean they're loyal. It means they're interested.

The growth of the web (and RSS, and Digg, and Stumbleupon, and Facebook, and Twitter, and...) has created many loyal customers, but it's also created plenty of interested customers.

Both are valuable.

Should Digital News Articles Reference Their Dead Tree Counterparts?

If you read the New York Times closely, a new change has appeared in the digital edition.

At the bottom of every article, there is now the following note in small, bolded font:

How interesting, no? For the first time, a newspaper's website references exactly when and if the article ran in print.

It's an interesting problem to address -- from the eyes of a digitally-minded person, it shouldn't matter, but from the eyes of a print-minded person, it's necessary ("...didn't I read this before?"). Instead of noting at the top -- "online only," for example -- the Times just placed notice at the bottom.

I'm all for an increase in information -- makes everything easier to categorize and what have you -- but it makes me wonder just how much it's worth it. Will they backdate old articles with such information?

And what's next? PDFs of the article as it printed? (Could be a lucrative source of additional ad revenue, since the ads can be reproduced in the PDF and also monetized by how many downloads occur.)

Hmm.

Philly.com Overhauled...For The Better? (hint: yes)

If there's one case study I continually come back to, it's that of the Philadelphia Inquirer (and Daily News), whose relationship with Philly.com stipulates exactly how the daily newspapers' content is portrayed and dispersed on the Web -- since Philly.com is the front door to their own respective sites.

(According to those who work on the site, the site is managed independently, and the papers have no say in how their content is displayed.)

Well, they've gone through a redesign. It's sexy, it's fun -- but is it newspaper?

(While Owen Wilson tracks through the Inky newsroom shooting "Marley & Me," I'll offer my two cents.)

To answer my original question, sort of. If you go to the Inquirer and the Daily News' direct sites -- they have their own individual styles. The Inquirer's is buttoned up and clean, the Daily News' is more fun -- which is a product of the previous redesign.

But Philly.com has changed, changed, changed -- and now looks like a middling, Web 1.0 magazine.

But that's a good thing. At least for now.

Before this, Philly.com looked almost identical to the Inquirer's site. Since they share content, that made it very, very difficult to figure out exactly where you were at any given moment. Am I reading the newspaper online? Or am I reading Philly.com content?

Why didn't I see this in the paper this morning? (Oh...)

Now, it's clear that each site is distinct, without sacrificing the relationship all three sites have that I imagine boosts traffic. Say what you will about the floating red ball logo, but the new site's got moxie:

The new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. [Well, you can argue that Philly.com isn't fully a news site the way philly.com/inquirer is...in which case, why have separate pages at all? -- The Ed.] Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

[bolded emphasis added -- The Ed.]

That's taken from the blog of Mark Potts, temporary VP-Editorial for the site (and erstwhile Recovering Journalist). And he's got a lot of valid points -- namely, that the redesigns aren't over, and that's the best news of all.

It suggests that it's not enough in this day and age to design a site and stick to it -- rather, news organizations have perfected the newspaper but are still working on the Website.

I could critique the sites down by specifics -- use of whitespace versus wasted space, picture sizes, architecture and linking schemes, branding and cross-branding -- but I don't think I need to. The site still has a long way to go -- I'd say we're maybe 50 or 60 percent there:

• from a site that simply exudes Philadelphia in a refined way, rather than a touristy way;
• from a site that exudes the Inquirer's staid, authoritative class;
• from a site that exudes the Daily News' fun water-cooler ways (this one's the closest);

...but change comes incrementally, and I'm seeing those changes creep in, some clearly as test mules. Don't forget -- changes are happening behind the desk, too.

Many of the changes that I listed in my last diatribe-cum-wishlist for the Philly.com megasite were answered by Brian Tierney and Co. What that means is that someone's listening.

Here's to progress.

Getting Inside Sewell Chang's Head

Last week, I was invited to hear The New York Times' prolific City Room editor Sewell Chang speak about what he does, how he got there, and his thoughts on new media journalism -- or as one could kitsch-ily say, Journalism 2.0.

Here are some highlights:


"When I was approached a year ago [for the City Room blog position], I didn't even know what an RSS feed was."
"The time has long passed that the Times is the one, be-all source to go to."

On the 'Morning Buzz' feature on the City Room blog: Chan said he reads all the major New York newspapers before he's even dressed. "I don't link to Page Six, obviously. We don't do society gossip."

On job convergence and relying on producers ("the biggest area of growth for the Times") for video and audio features: "In some ways, they're not encouraging us to do that, because we're not polished like CNN anchors."


Interesting stuff for a young journalist who admittedly is a "traditional, print journalist" and behind the wave of technology.

Rating The Latest Philly Inquirer Redesign

You readers know how dear I hold the Philadelphia Inquirer to my heart, having constructively criticized the paper's online endeavors before on this very blog.

Well this week, my prayers have been answered (including, finally, a blowout win by Mr. Donovan McNabb and his Eagles. But I digress.): The Inquirer has given its wing of the Philly.com estate a facelift.

But is it a success?

Well, I'd say that Brian Tierney and Co. are clearly concerned about their digital face, which is arguably more important than their printed one. But as good as some of the changes are -- and some of them certainly convey the right intention -- the overall result leaves something to be desired.

According to the site, "we added toolbars, flash viewers, more video and multimedia,most viewed, most emailed, and top story boxes" among others. All of this makes sense -- in terms of navigation, it's much easier to read the pulse of the day's news as well as what the rest of the city is reading (not to mention much more opportunity for the business desk to reap data from its readers).

Visually, the masthead is placed in much more prominence, with a smaller philly.com logo above it. However, a major navigation problem -- since the new layout preserves the philly.com layout, clicking "Home," "News," "Sports," "Living" and other tabs puts you right back into the philly.com-logo'd site, and not the "Inquirer" sections. Sure, the content is all the Inquirer's -- no use to double-report, naturally -- but the Inquirer masthead is lost into oblivion on all of the more breaking/online exclusive stories.

So how exactly is the Inquirer supposed to show that it's actually the one responsible for providing you, the reader, with content? The little "For the Inquirer" byline on each article in 50% grayscale?

To boot, mousing over the "Inquirer" tab brings up all the subsections of the actual paper, which are effectively mirrors of the Philly.com tabs. Not only do they look redundant, but they're actually out-of-date, too. As it turns out, the content under the "Inquirer" tab is what ran in that day's paper -- but there's nothing that would tell you that except the outdated timestamp. So if I wanted to find up-to-date coverage on the aforementioned Eagles-Redskins game, I'd have to use Philly.com's Sports tab, and not the Inquirer's own Sports tab -- even though the content is coming from the same source.

As for the front page, things are a little better. Some nice changes include including breaking news and a better front-page layout, with larger images and more selection of stories -- it now looks like the Inquirer publishes more than three stories a day. If you scroll to the bottom, there's a nice tabbed and featured-story layout, but more redundancy takes up valuable space. Why the doubled-up listings? And what's the tabbed box below the fold for?

One worry about the whole thing: I hear nearly every day that news studies show that a website loses 50 percent of its readers every "scroll" they must perform. On my high-resolution, small-font screen, it took me five scrolls to get to the bottom. Sp let me ask this: How many readers do you expect, honestly, at 800 by 600 pixels resolution, to get down to the pretty section-by-section breakdown at the bottom?

As you can see, there are some major unanswered problems in the Inquirer's redesign. For one, the front page gives up too much top and right-hand space to advertisements and doesn't distribute them better (and I'm looking at this in 1280 x 800 resolution, too, so "above the fold" is a lot of screen). Second, there's a major fight for attention: While the Philly.com masthead no longer dominates, it now fights for the reader's eyes with the Inquirer's venerable masthead -- even when the content is all Inquirer. As a reader, that means I don't know where to go for the news I want -- and also gives me far too many redundant options to get lost in. Once I'm lost, I can't find how to get back because the Inquirer masthead has disappeared.

So please, Brian Tierney, listen up: You and the boys are doing a great job (well, except for that whole headquarters mixup), but you're only halfway there. Keep pushing -- and call me.

Newspapers Aren't Essential, And Other Reasons Why This Week's Bivings Report On Magazines And The Web Is Flawed

Magazines are slower at adopting Web 2.0 trends than newspapers, according to a recent Bivings Report study and a post on this blog eons ago.

The study's authors write, via Romenesko:

"We can hypothesize that this is due to the differing cultures surrounding the two types of print media: newspapers and the content they present are essential to most people's daily lives. In contrast most magazines are something 'extra,' and are often focused on entertainment."

Wait a second, newspapermen: Since when is newspaper content by definition more essential to most people's lives than magazines?

Now I'm not here to fight the magazine fight, and I could sit here for hours and write about how much the "duh" factor comes in about magazine websites becoming full of unique content. But it looks to me like the study's authors are taking it for granted that newspapers are essential.

In a study that makes claims based on data, there's little data to support this. Why do most Americans need the newspaper? And what exactly is defined by "a newspaper"?

In my opinion, it can be argued, reasonably, that everything past the front page section of the newspaper (plus the figures from the business and sports sections) is entertainment. Top feature writer Paula Span said to me last week that feature writing is nearly half of all the writing in a newspaper. And nowhere is it more evident than the front section pages of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, the Washington Post, all the way down to your local rag.

Now feature writing and "entertainment" aren't exactly coterminous, but you can see where I'm going with this. A good portion of your daily newspaper is the same fodder that runs in a magazine. So I take objection to this assumption in the Bivings study.

So what, then? How do you explain the slow migration by glossies to the Web?

One word: Pictures.

Magazines thrive on images, and the Web is a text-driven vehicle, no matter how much you dress it up with images and video. Magazines, on the other hand, thrive on their artwork. The tangible nature of having that in your hands -- which I'm sure lends itself some perceived value -- is a good bet as to why magazines generally didn't see the need to run to the Web.

It boils down to this: The Web can replace a newspaper. But it can only supplement a magazine. And that's why I've never received a paper copy of The New York Times in my mailbox but I receive a small handful of monthly glossies.

It's not the entertainment content. It's the format.

Pride In The Name of News

If you care about getting the news in a timely fashion, there is no reason to read a newspaper.

Spot news, it seems, is disappearing from the pages and moving to the screens.

A recent New York Times newsroom memo from Bill Keller announced that the Internet will be key to 2008 political coverage:

For this Presidential election cycle we are organizing our coverage in a new (for us) way: for the first time, a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web. This new desk will include not only newspaper editors, but also people with experience in web production, database reporting and software development. Newspaper and online journalism will get equal emphasis — we are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side — for an audience that now expects its political news to arrive in full multimedia, interactive glory.

The goal is to develop a seamless operation that can feed our blog and home page with breaking news all day long, produce innovative and value-added multimedia and database reports -- and then deliver the smartest, freshest possible stories to our newsprint readers the next morning.

Basically, Keller and Co. have reorganized the way instant-news is produced at The Times. He's placed equality between the paper and the website, and as far as political stories go, he values the benefit of clickable electoral maps, live-voting feeds and comparison charts that aren't truncated to fit a peice of paper.

As I've mentioned before, this change at The Times is indicative of a new way to do the news: Internet first, paper second. And it's more profitable than critics think.

Web journalism has finally found its reporters. And it seems they're more inclined than ever to be versed in web production, multimedia and traditional reporting savvy.

The future is clearer than we think: spot news will reside online, and adventurous, well-rounded journalists will helm the ship.

Conversely, expect to see a change in the very basic format of writing a news story: half-reported stories will rarely make it to the page, and analysis will become a critical component of a basic news story - the real reason people will keep reading a publication.

The "news" in "newspaper" is now a relative term: it's news to anyone who hasn't read the website.

Will newspapers save the big, muckraking stories for the printed page? Maybe, if they think no one else has the story. But if a newspaper smells competition, don't expect to see any "exclusives" on the printed page.

For newspapers who pride themselves on getting a story first (and being cited as so), posting it online with a timestamp is the new proof of bleeding-edge legitimacy.

After all, aren't newspapers sick of citing blogs as the first sources for stories?