I love news analysis that frames itself in the terms of a question. Those kindly authors make it all the easier to, if not poach content, enter into the conversation. Michael Learmonth, writing for AdAge yesterday, asked his readers, “Did The Daily Beast Eat Newsweek?” Learmonth provides an adequate answer to his own question—no spoilers here, click away—but I am interested in one piece of his argument:

“In the world of print, competition isn’t just a click away. But the web is a different story. Online, a four-paragraph summary of a story, skimmed between emails, will generally suffice when the alternative is a longer-form, high-polish take that requires pulling out a credit card or remembering a password.”

According to Learmonth’s logic, The Daily Beast/Newsweek strategy, predicated on a complementary short/long-form reading environment, is all wrong for online. Learmonth believes long-form to be a product of print news platforms. Magazines and newspapers now justify their subscription fees with the quality long-form they deliver; for the last decade at least, the Internet has far outstripped print’s capacity to carry breaking news. But long-form is experiencing a moment in the new media industry. See, for example, Jeff John Roberts’s account of why BuzzFeed is publishing long-form content. 

I do not believe that there are many binary truths, 0-1 solutions, either-or grammars. In the case of online news analysis, however, I do think that long-form is either a tenable form or not. There is not really a middle-ground scenario. Medium-form ‘isn’t a thing,’ so to speak. Yet I do find the shrinkage of long-form a fascinating phenomenon. Apparently, 1,000 or so words now count as long-form. To me, 1,000 or so words are a complete thought. Assuming a definite difference between long-form and short—that is, the maintenance of a distinction between in-depth, thorough, “deep” writing and scannable news briefs—our tenuous balancing act, the simultaneous entertainment of long- and short-form in the same spaces, cannot last. Either the room afforded to long-form will continue to shrink, until only a few hold-outs and bastions of tradition remain, or long-form will establish itself as around for the long-term. 

It seems unlikely that long-form will continue to shrink, up to and perhaps including the point of extinction. I think digital long-form is going to assume a more entrenched position with and against short-form news media. The real question is, how will long-form get delivered to readers, and how will readers consume it? Short-form has achieved the definite upper-hand for a reason: it is a more natural fit for Internet consumption habits, “surfing” as it was called in my younger days. Attending to long-form is aberrant behavior online. In fact, if you are reading this far down the page, congratulations: I’ve almost reached the threshold of short-form right about…here. 

A website like Longform.org is representative of future delivery technologies. To compensate for greater investments of reading time, long-form needs to get to readers more efficiently. Longform.org aggregates “the best of” long-form content. But the interface is somewhat “lo-fi,” so-to-speak, and certainly disorganized. Long-form needs to be delivered with the mad efficiency of short-form. 

A tool like Readability is representative of future consumption methods. The app allows readers to save articles for later perusal, for future revisiting. The depth and density of long-form content may require multiple reading sessions, spread out over a correspondingly longer period of time.

I predict that a digital news publication will emerge that performs the aggregation and time-delay functions of Longform and Readability and generates the aggregated and saved content. The distribution of similar kinds of long-form content production across multiple news sites is inefficient. I think that the withering away of long-form sources like Newsweek will provoke a natural convergence of long-form freelancers and editors towards a smaller number of long-form purveyors. The rapid rise of Grantland demonstrates how a conjunction of great writing, great editing, built-in credibility, and a built-in audience can fuel a long-form publishing system.  

• Tags
• long-form
• news
• digital
• media
• journalism

A week or so ago I argued that mobile news applications aren’t evolving fast enough to compete with e-readers. Yesterday, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram reported on a news app called Circa that might revolutionize mobile news reading. Ben Huh, best known for running Cheezburger Network, co-founded Circa to create and propagate news fitted to the material constraints of mobile reading platforms. Circa thinks about news in terms of “atomic units,” meaning the most basic constituent parts of a traditional news article. Users select how many facts, quotes, and media elements to display; and users can follow stories, meaning that the app pings them whenever new “units” are added.  

Circa reveals two possibilities for future formal innovations in mobile news delivery:

1.     Decoupling Narrative From News: Traditionally, journalism is a hermeneutic project: it interprets events as situated in complex relationship to an organizing structure, and then rewrites those events as a cohesive narrative. “News,” as it is conventionally determined, plots an atomized cloud of fact into story. And the “news” itself only constitutes the narration of that story. The limited material space of mobile news platforms makes the delivery of “news as narrative” difficult. Instead, Circa imagines news minus narrative, which isn’t really news or journalism at all. Instead, it’s a network of facts, strung together according to an implicit logic. To decouple narrative from news is to divest the journalist of his interpretational power. The journalist becomes a fact-finder, a computerized information retrieval system, not a storyteller. Does the consumer then assume the position of storyteller, or is the nuance of news lost in the (dis)organization of fact? Whatever it is that Circa distributes, it is emptied of its immediate rhetorical power, of its capacity to stimulate political activity. In effect, news and the “news-paper” no longer function as manifestations of the public sphere, spaces where competing discourses can play out to conclusion. There can be no con- or dis- sensus in the news-world of Circa.

2.     Multiperspectival News: One-channel news is a dead phenomenon. If the news of the future will be without coherent narration, it will be composed from multiple perspectives. News will be compiled from a diverse collective of more conventional sources—which, of course, suggests that mobile news systems of the future will rest on a base of traditional journalism. Nevertheless, the farming out of raw news production to conventional news machines will support a more heterogeneous flow of information to the consumer.

Circa is exciting because it pushes the formal assumptions of news beyond their contemporary limits. For mobile news to achieve maximum profitability, it will need to reinvent news itself—otherwise, the disjunction of content and material form will constrain user adoption and engagement with the “product,” the news content. 

• Tags
• media
• news
• innovation
• digital
• journalism
• mobile
• apps
• Circa
• GigaOM

As the Presidential election approaches, the deployment of political messaging on social media platforms will draw more commentary from who else but those very parties responsible for political messaging. The solipsism of journalism is really a variety of well-deserved narcissism. The gulf between private life and journalism is rapidly shrinking, especially as social media empowers non-journalists with the power of public speech.  This phenomenon has captivated journalistic attention, because the imminent ontological threat to journalism—as a medium of political discourse, and as a material medium itself—is playing out in the most visible of arenas. Average Joe and Jane, curating their personal Twitter accounts, have become involved, however inadvertently, in the battle for the continued relevancy of conventional journalism in an election year. What else can professional journalists and Joe and Jane do but rubberneck. 

Despite the fixed interest on “Twitter politics,” I am not convinced that this fall is unlike any other. Sure, the volume of political messaging on social media platforms has clearly reached new heights. It seems impossible to log on without encountering a barrage, no, slurry, of partisan and polemical utterances. So yes, in terms of usage patterns, in terms of what exactly gets posted when, October promises a decidedly different Twitter landscape. Yet, I would like to argue, provisionally and in an extremely constrained space, that political messaging on Twitter is irrelevant to its joint temporal and historical topology. I am not discussing Facebook for reasons that will become apparent in the course of the argument.

My first proposition is that Twitter does something quite different from Facebook to the divide between private and public life. Of course, I am excluding locked Twitter accounts, which function to a great degree like Facebook statuses denuded of profiles. Ordinary Twitter accounts are great equalizers: they position Average Joe on the same stratum as celebrities, politicians, and journalists. While the currency of Twitter, followers, varies wildly based on personal popularity and exposure, “branding” so-to-speak, in theory, Twitter allows civilians equal access to public fora as their more powerful peers. Thus, again, in theory, Twitter ought to facilitate a more actualized practice of democracy, a “better” kind of political activity, wherein citizens meet and strive for glory in a commons. However—and this is entirely anecdotal—I have observed a curious equalization of messaging itself, regardless of relative follower wealth, regardless of retweets, favorites, etc. That is to say, I grant approximately equal attention to the messages of friends and celebrities alike, which is to say, none at all. Honestly, I find myself not really caring about what people say on Twitter about anything, be it news, politics, or their personal lives. My disaffectation—perhaps, disillusionment—is not a desirable state of mind. I think my detachment is intimately related to the unfulfilled promise of Twitter-ized democracy. Although quarrels, productive conversation, and full-scale rhetorical wars break out on Twitter, they never seem to move towards any discernible conclusion. Tune in to the Twitter chatters, the Twitter news as it were, any day any hour of the week, and it’s the same chatterers chattering the same news. Slight variations, yes, but mere perambulations on a theme. Turn on the Twitter tube and you’ll find impassioned discussion happening around the clock. It’s just the same talk repeating itself on infinite loop.

My second proposition is that Twitter does something quite different from Facebook to the experience of time and history. On Facebook, there is a clear delineation of temporal sequence; heck, the entire Facebook interface is organized around the “Timeline.” Beginning, middle, and end. Facebook has a narrative structure, one not so dissimilar from Jane Austen’s. Twitter, however, is divested of temporal and historical context. There are quotidian and seasonal cycles of Twitter use-patterns. In the morning, people Tweet about coffee and the hot new content hitting the aggregators. In the afternoon, people Tweet about lunch and the hot new content hitting the aggregators. In the evening, well, you get the idea. Extrapolate across the seasons and other recurring periods, like election years, and the banality “history repeats itself” seems true in a sense more than figurative: Twitter actually does repeat itself, and Twitter’s reflection and representation of history thus repeats itself.

To read Twitter is to immerse yourself in a continuous flux of information that constantly changes on a microscopic scale. People do, after all, Tweet different things. But I would suggest that in aggregate, people Tweet the same things. I think reading Twitter is like reading a series of really bad novels. You probably couldn’t even call them novels. Pulp fiction. There’s a semblance of variation, of difference, but it’s all an illusion.

During this election cycle, I think that we will discover the a-historicity of Twitter. Like a theater of the absurd, Twitter has escaped the boundary lines of historical consciousness. Twitter is a solipsistic, narcissistic dream. Political messaging on Twitter happens under the flimsiest of historical parameters. On Twitter, one election is really every election. Different names, different faces, maybe different issues?—but the political discourse stays the same. Insofar as Twitter is kind of boring, I think its long-term potential as a democratic forum is limited.

• Tags
• Twitter
• politics
• social media
• news
• journalism
• history
• theory

Around sunrise Monday morning, Forbes reported on a new Pew survey that would get many mobile developers up on the wrong side of the bed.  Pew surveyed tablet and smartphone users about their news reading behavior. According to the survey—a very large and statistically significant study, evidently—60% of tablet users and 61% of smartphone users access news via their mobile browsers. Last year, those numbers were around 40%. The percentage of users getting news on apps stayed at 23%. Where do the new browser fans come from? The percentage of users reading on both browsers and apps decreased from 31% to 16%. In the battle between browsers and apps, it looks like browsers have a decided upper hand. Those users who were recently undecided have flocked to browsers, indicating serious and endemic deficiencies in news-reading apps. The flight from apps to browsers will likely continue as Apple’s tablet market share decreases. Most app fans are on iPads, suggesting that the ascendency of Android will precipitate an accelerating turnover to browser-based news.

The Forbes article does not probe why browsers are racing ahead of apps on mobile devices, probably because the Pew survey in question offers little rationale for the results. One clue comes in an oblique reference to pay-for-content models, “perhaps most pressing for the industry, the survey shows continued resistance to paying for content on mobile devices.” Apps tend to follow a subscription model, or otherwise replicate browser-type functionality in a non-browser ecosystem. In effect, apps do not provide value-added above the barriers to user entry, which include fees, irritating download systems, intrusive advertisements that depart from our comfortable and familiar web ads, and delays in data pushing into the app. The increase in social news reading has also increased browser activity. Proliferating links on Twitter and Facebook open pathways to news through browsers: few, if any, redirect into app reading systems. Users are incentivized to stay on the browser when simultaneously managing social media accounts and reading news.

That is not to say that it is impossible to develop an attractive and competitive news app. Such an app would need to integrate more successfully with browsers and employ less invasive revenue mechanisms. The ideal news reading app would collate content from multiple frequently read sites. A mobile platform populated by many individual news apps, each linked into its individual publishing unit, is inefficient. Short-term revenue streams may need to yield priority to long-term user retention objectives.

• Tags
• mobile
• advertisements
• revenue
• apps
• browsers
• news
• journalism

I titled today’s blog post with full knowledge of the risk of posing a QTWTAIN (Question To Which The Answer Is No, a genre of headline collected by John Rentoul, indicative of journalistic sensationalism and irrationalism, like “Is the Loch Ness monster on Google Earth?). Alright, I confess: my headline is a QTWTAIN. Journalism should not be subsidized. Unlike most of the QTWTAIN genre, though, my headline suggests a forthcoming affirmative—the QTWTAIN must always masquerade as a QTWTAIY—while delivering no affirmation of no expected principles.

Today’s commentary was inspired by a blog post on The Guardian’s website, “A broadband levy to fund journalism? Now that’s a very clever idea.” In the first paragraph, we stumble on the following statement: “We have been puzzling for years about how to subsidise [sic] journalism once it makes the final transition from print to net.” The statement includes two assumptions, one, that journalism will require subsidization after the print-to-digital transition, and two, that some nebulous “we” ought to undertake that subsidization when the time arrives. Both of those assumptions must be addressed separately, but, spoiler alert, I disagree with both.

The general argument underwriting the first assumption is that the print-to-digital transition will make “journalism” unsustainable. Such arguments rest on two prior and faulty assumptions, that print journalism (and its attendant forms and tropes) constitutes a kind of superior, ur- journalism so triumphant that it supersedes all alternates, and that the revenue model of print journalism will be infeasible in a digital ecosystem. Already, the media community is witnessing the transformation of journalism in a web milieu—crowdsharing, sourcing, and funding, instantaneous publishing, and social media have shifted expectations for not only digital journalism, but also its print sibling. That is to say, print journalism does not operate in stasis. Print media has been forced to evolve in tandem with new digital forms. The privileging of print media as a superior communication to digital journalism, or, for that matter, non-journalistic digital utterances, is a last stab by a struggling industry to slay its rival. There are few convincing arguments as to why digital journalism cannot accomplish the same objectives as print journalism, at least if digital journalism can sustain itself.

According to its detractors, the intrinsic problem with digital journalism is that it is not self-sustaining. Conventional (read: old) journalism relies on full-time journalists. Journalism has been professionalized and bureaucratized. And as we have learned since the days of Walter Lippmann’s “Drift and Mastery,” bureaucracy cannot survive without bureaucrats. If journalism is a bureaucracy that lives and breaths according to its subservient bureaucrats, then journalism needs adequate funds to feed those cells. Without the proper cash-money, journalists (who are often the ones making these claims) and journalism cannot last. Let us suppose that these claims are true, that superior formulations of journalism require a class of professional, bureaucratized journalists. Could digital journalism generate enough revenue to support its digital journalists? Not at the moment. It seems likely, however, that the enormous cash potential of online media consumption will become more accessible to content producers as digital advertising technologies become more sophisticated. The success of a companies like the New York Times and the Economist indicate that a print-to-digital transition is not a zero-sum game (meaning that print revenue streams will self-subsidize digital journalism for a long time to come) and that online revenue streams can develop to substitute for print advertising and subscriptions. 

What if the conventions of print journalism really are superior to digital journalism, and digital journalism cannot replicate those conventions, and digital journalism cannot support those replications? Subsidization would seem to be in order. Roy Greenslade  follows David Leigh’s proposal, a levy on broadband subscribers. A levy would help disentangle subsidies from the influence of the state on journalism. Concerns about subsidies usually center on those entanglements, wherein the state leverages its monetary support into undue influence. A levy system seems to solve the problem of state influence. I remain unconvinced, however, that in a worst case scenario, subsidies are the answer.

There are two problems with subsidies to large media companies making the print-to-digital transition. First, those subsidies will allow media providers to extend worst practices from the print to the digital ecosystem. One reason that print media is struggling is that print journalism no longer meets the demands of digital consumers. Subsidizing worst print practices online is like throwing money into a virtual hole. Subsidizing print journalism online will only perpetuate atavistic practices that ought to atrophy. Instead of preserving those outmoded practices, we should focus on incorporating the best applicable print practices into the digital ecosystems, and on rewarding those companies that are providing best digital journalism to consumers. Second, and in relation, subsidizing digital journalism will only subsidize the idea of “journalism” that has descended genealogically from print ancestors. Clinging to the idea of journalism is unlikely to prove profitable online. Journalism itself developed as a phenomenon of new material technologies in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Now that we have newer material technologies, immaterial technologies as it were, we must jettison the structures of journalism that depend on print.

We must be free to experiment without the entailments of subsidies. Everything that we thought of as true regarding journalism needs reevaluation. We must test the hypotheses of the column, the news section, the byline, etc. Leaving journalism behind will be difficult for journalists most of all. Yet, we must look to journalists to reject the constrictions of their own profession. Without their cooperation, flexibility, and enthusiasm, nostalgia for newsprint could destroy everything they want to save in newsprint itself. 

• Tags
• newspapers
• print
• digital
• media
• news
• journalism
• transition
• technology
• innovation
• subsidies

Cable news channels were a significant destination for viewers interested in getting the latest on the shootings in Colorado on Friday, according to Nielsen ratings from that day.

—TVNEWSER^® “And Now the News…About TV News”

In the documentary Kumaré, Vikram Gandhi assumes the title “guru” and sets out to amass a following. He succeeds in convincing gullible customers that he is, in fact, the guru Kumaré, a man of wisdom, spiritual enlightenment, and serenity. Kumaré has a lot to teach us about advertising, marketing, and public relations; but if it has one “actionable” point for media professionals, it is this: gurus always sell themselves. That is, the product of any guru is first, the guru, and second, the philosophy underwriting his or her—but, let’s be honest, usually his—guru-ism.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that social media gurus claim that social media is our most important news source. Despite the relentless social media boosting that pervades conventional, old media, ironically, traditional media outlets remain an equally important source of breaking news analysis. Contrary to the high visibility of social media platforms, atavistic news sources like television continue to keep huge numbers of consumers informed. News coverage of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado demonstrates how conventional media gets underestimated. For example, cable news stations experienced an influx of viewers as news of the tragedy broke. TVNEWSER^® reports that from 6 to 9 a.m. on the Friday morning of the attack, Fox News Channel averaged 1.34 million viewers, CNN 466,000, and MSNBC 450,000, all significantly higher than normal. As TVNEWSER^® concludes, “it is safe to say that cable news was a primary news source for 10s of millions of Americans Friday.”

Read more

• Tags
• news
• old media
• new media
• social media
• Twitter
• Reddit
• television
• cable
• guru

When Val Patterson died on July 10 of this year, he left behind a first-person obituary that shocked his friends and enchanted a nation. Originally published in The Salt Lake Tribune, Patterson’s obituary started making the rounds on Twitter yesterday morning. Eventually, it won a spot in The Huffington Post’s daily lineup of weird, funny, and otherwise un-newsworthy news. Why did the obituary of an exceptional and ordinary man garner national media attention? In his 875 word autobiography—because that’s really what it is, not a memorial or a eulogy or an epitaph—Patterson makes a number of confessions. As he clearly preferred, I will allow him to speak for himself:

Read more

• Tags
• news
• media
• digital
• publishing
• sublime
• philosophy
• newspapers
• print
• literature

According to the New York Times, it’s too late for newspapers. Needless to say, this is a grim pronouncement coming from the grand doyenne of newspapers, The Gray Lady herself. What with the Times-Picayune imploding, pundits have been weighing in from team print and team digital to defend their chosen deities. Most of these analyses focus on the financials. Conventional newspapers are failing to meet advertising benchmarks. Falling revenues and circulation stats have damaged the structural integrity of both print and digital media markets. The question for news media companies now is whether to cut value—by firing valuable and popular writers, eliminating sections and content, farming content out to subcontractors, etc.—or to reinvent traditional print content in a digital space. Unfortunately, liquidation (cutting value) frequently masquerades as reinvention. That is the case for the Times-Picayune, and that is why Advance Publication’s strategy has upset so many good people of journalism. I’d like to propose an alternative reason for the imminent collapse of the newspaper industry.

First, it’s necessary to recognize that our university system produces decent writers. Despite all the negativity surrounding journalism as a vocation, students continue to enroll in journalism programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. Furthermore, our better colleges give humanities students the skills to pump out competent news copy, if not great features writing. There is not a talent drought. 

Yet, the youngest, most talented writers are simultaneously hedged out of and discouraged from joining the largest, most venerable, and most obviously damaged newspapers and magazines. The implicit barriers to entry are much higher for the New York Times than HuffPo. Furthermore, HuffPo’s brand image is, to some extent, more attractive to recent graduates. Just on the basis of peer sentiment and public relations messaging, “new media” is raking in the most promising talent. New media recruits new media talent better than old media. For old media, that’s very, very bad news. 

Likewise, new media has infected old media with inapplicable paradigms. Mass confusion about the Supreme Court’s healthcare reform ruling indicates that solid reporting techniques are not compatible with the demands of new media technology. A “fast-as-you-can” ethos, instantaneous and comprehensive proliferation of content, and a de-emphasis on classic journalistic ethics have collided with our greater capacity for fact checking. Thus, old media faces heightened pressure to fulfill its own mandates from the technology that is decreasing the relevancy of those very mandates.

The final piece of the puzzle is that consumers have a low tolerance for bad product. Readers will not tolerant poor writing. Therefore, even though traditional journalistic practices seem relatively unimportant in a new media context, or have become the target of malicious evasion, users demand high quality content. Talent has fled to outlets where writers are required to produce homogenous, trend-following material that remains one-step behind the news curve. Ironically then, the tasks assigned to the talent do not require much talent at all. New media has been successful with talent-lite material because their distribution channels and revenue models depend on click-bait. They exploit readers who, though sensitive to poor writing, are the easy victims of sensational headlines. In effect, new media is all style no substance, which means that the energy of talent is being diverted into the external readability and timbre of content, not the substantial thought or analysis or ethics of the content.

Long-form is still viable. Look at an outlet like Gilt Taste, which pairs well-written and substantive content with targeted advertising. But “hard hitting journalism,” whatever that means—investigative reporting, news coverage without the misguided influence of new media directives—is under siege. All that made up the Gray of The Gray Lady is endangered and in peril of extinction. Is “good” journalism irrelevant, a thing of the past? Or rather, does “good” journalism add value that can drive newspaper revenue over the schlock reporting of new media? And along those lines, has the very definition of “good journalism” pivoted to incorporate new media structures? The comparison is, I’ll admit, inept, but think about old media like Facebook: neither knows how to monetize its core asset. If old media figures out the monetization pattern—if and only if it’s not too late—then the imperative to adapt will swing over to new media.

I don’t think it’s too late for traditional newspapers to turn good writing into dollar bills. Cutting value, however, is a U-turn straight into oncoming traffic. Liquidating a core asset forecloses the possibility of later monetization. Then again, if new media identifies a way to leverage* their poached talent into the core asset of conventional journalism, it’ll be game over for The Gray Lady.

At Parse.ly, we’re helping digital publishers figure out their analytics. 

*No tech article would be complete without the word leverage. 

• Tags
• newspapers
• digital
• media
• news
• technology
• innovation
• new media
• print
• publishing