Dan Brown’s new book is “the most anticipated book in decades”? Really?
We always had Maclean’s around our house growing up. I remember enjoying the movie and book reviews, and I think I learned a lot about editorial writing from Allan Fotheringham’s back page columns.
These days, the magazine seems to have lost its way. On the one hand it clings to its more serious routes, while on the other it indulges in these woeful, tabloidy covers. What went wrong?
Over the past week, we’ve been teaching a series of workshops in the Interior. We had a couple of media people in our sessions–one editor of a small town newspaper, and one veteran TV and radio producer. Both of them spoke about how they disliked the web’s capacity for anonymous comment.
For some reason, anonymity is acceptable — not as the justifiable shield for those who fear retribution if identified, but as a shield for those with other kinds of fears, motives or tendencies. Somewhere early in the game it became a rule instead of an exception to adopt a nickname and speak through it.
The result breaks what we were all taught rightly in school: That part of the bargain in speaking freely is the responsibility to stand up and be counted, and that part of the bargain in being criticized is to at least know who is attacking.
I’ve heard precisely the same concern from other newspaper folks in the past. This shouldn’t be surprising, for a couple of reasons.
First, when a newspaper is going to print a letter to the editor, they typically require (or at least request) validating details like an address or phone number. Second, I’m sure that most reporters have, at one point or another, been the subject of venomous, anonymous criticism. This might encourage some pretty black and white views about online identity.
Kirk is clearly a web-savvy guy, a Level 12 Web Citizen, so I don’t want to lump him in with the other media people to whom I’m referring.
We Trust the People We Know
However, I do want to extend a theory about the other complainants. They were all over forty, making them, in the parlance of demographers, digital immigrants. They never grew up crafting their one or more identities on the web.
They may not, for example, fully grasp that one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online. Over the last decade I’ve come to know and trust several online acquaintances despite never having known their full or real name. If they had, they’d know that there’s no equivalent of “getting their address and phone number” online, and that identities are fluidly built and demolished based on online activity.
I’m not making an argument for unfettered, anonymous comments in online spaces like a newspaper’s website. Mostly, I’m trying to encourage people to think of online identity as a continuum, not an on-off switch. And to point out that as the web gets more social, anonymity becomes less and less effective as a tactic. We trust the people we know, after all.
It includes a rented movie, three video and audio podcasts, two thousand songs, five Amazon Kindle ebooks, 10 games, 125 unread RSS items in NetNewswire plus dozens of cached articles in Instapaper, the New York Times and WSJ apps. It would literally take me months to go through it all. Plus once I landed my magical pocket computer filled up with even more - emails, tweets, feeds, etc.
Travis, likewise, itemizes what’s on his devices while taking a train to Denali National Park in Alask:
Instead, here’s what I had to content myself with: On my computer: hours of video: movies and TV shows and Web documentaries. Entire books, downloaded from Amazon. Computer games with shifting maps and dozens of levels. Yes, my battery would run out; there was undoubtedly an outlet on the train for me to recharge. But I wouldn’t bother Why would I, when I also had….
My iPhone: thousands of photos, hundreds of songs and a few audiobooks. And of course, offline email, SMS and a phone. Even if you hobble it: no Internet, no phone access, no GPS, there’s still plenty there to amuse and distract and fill your time.
I’ve been on six flights in the past week, and, like Travis and Steve, I’ve got a box of anti-boredom tools. I previously wrote about FORLORM: fear of lack of reading material. I used to carry an armload of books and magazines to combat the tedium of flights. Now my tools are a mix of the analog and the digital.
My usual regimen is, in order from boarding lounge to landing: read newspaper, complete crossword, read half a magazine, watch an hour of TV on my laptop, review notes (as I’m often flying to or from a speaking event), play games on the iPhone (mostly RSoccer09, a remarkably deep soccer game) then read the other half of the magazine. That’s usually more than enough for any domestic flight.
We are witnessing the death of boredom. On the other hand, we’re in an age of distraction. I don’t necessarily want to get all contemplative on an airplane. But we do need to be aware of the habits we’re forming, and how they might discourage healthy introspection.
“If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.
“In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.
“There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It’s remarkable this hasn’t happened in Ireland yet. We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.
“For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5% of them could emerge as Ireland’s answer to Microsoft or Nokia,” says Collins.
I’d say ‘Microsoft or Nokia’ might be a bit optimistic, but I applaud the philosophy.
On an unrelated note, I’m not a fan of the way the Irish Independent uses links. Like a few other newspaper sites, they link certain keywords such as ‘TechCrunch’ or ‘Wall Street Journal’ not to the sites, but to ‘topic pages’ on the Independent’s site.
In my Social Media Marketing 101 talk, I begin by reviewing seven fundamental shifts in media culture over the past decade. One of them is that old nugget of ‘conversation’, and how news consumers can talk back to news creators. My favourite example of this is the CBC News home page, which advertises its conversational aspect after every headline. On top of the whole two-way conversation business, the number of times a story has been recommended and commented upon is useful metadata for visitors.
Yesterday, I wondered aloud why so many blogs on mainstream media sites have so few comments. Consider, for example, the Global TV News blog. Most posts have no comments, and the most talked about recent post has all of four. I randomly picked a couple of blogs on The Province’s site, and the resultsare similar. It’s interesting to note how few comments Lisa Bettany’s blog on The Province site has compared to her personal blog, where she’s got lots.
There are exceptions, but most mainstream media blogs experience the same lack of conversation as, well, the average blog. The difference, of course, is that Global or The Province has a big built-in audience (both online and off) which they can direct at their blog content. When mainstream media sites like the CBC or The Province permit comments on stories, there tends to be torrents of discussion. One would think that the more informal blog posts would attract more interaction, but they don’t seem too. Maybe they’re simply too buried in the site?
Obviously, the lines between ‘a blog post’ and ‘an article’ are blurring everywhere, including on TV and newspaper sites. I don’t have any obvious answers for why mainstream media blogs attract so few comments. Maybe they’re just really under-read? What do you think?
I asked this question on Friendfeed and Twitter. Here are the Friendfeed responses, and I’ll embed the Twitter answers below, after the jump.
This week the Vancouver Sun (along with otherCanadiannewspapers) is running a series called ‘The Enduring Newspaper’. Today’s piece was entitled “Ad buyer remains bullish on newspapers”. It’s an encomium on the wisdom of advertising in newspapers. The article quotes the unlikely-named Sunni Boot, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Canada, whose company undoubtedly has spent plenty of money on Canwest ads:
“Newspapers work. It’s as simple as that. We know it works,” Boot said. “Newspapers draw attention. There’s an immediacy to it. There’s a credibility to it. It’s still a very, very good retail medium.”
The article also quotes a media buyer, president of an ad agency and the CEO of Canwest Publishing, Dennis Skulsky. Everybody, as you might imagine, has a dog in the newspaper advertising race. To no one’s surprise, they can’t say enough good things about running print ads. Here’s Mr. Skullsky:
“It’s not just about selling a full-page ad, it’s about an engagement that might have a tie to a digital program, to a website, a video, to a link to company website — it’s all integrated.”
That’s a great notion, if it were true. I browsed the paper, checking out all of the sizable ads. Few of them displayed URLs at all, and those that did weren’t prominently featuring the web address. It was an after thought. Here’s the best example I could find in today’s paper (apologies for the lousy photo):
All three of these ads included a URL, if in very small print. You’d have to be very generous to call these ‘ties’ to digital assets or any form of ‘engagement’. All the addresses point to non-custom URLs (admittedly one of them is DouglasCollege.jobs). If an ad buyer was designing an integrated campaign and wanted to measure the results, this isn’t how they’d go about it.
There are plenty of smart media people thinking about saving newspapers (my favourites are Mathew Ingram and the Sun’s own Kirk Lapointe), and a recent report suggests that Canada’s papers aren’t as bad off as those south of the border.
That said, publishing articles about the awesomeness of print advertising probably isn’t one of them.
UPDATE: Speaking of the Sun and old media, somebody pointed me to Stephen Hume’s recent column. He continues to wage war against the “semi-literate” new media barbarians at the gate, writing in praise of the editors that bloggers (et al) so sorely lack. There’s an exquisite irony in the article’s penultimate paragraph (the italics are mine):
I’m endless grateful to my unsung colleagues at The Vancouver Sun who so diligently keep the egg off my face.
I’m assured the typo was unintentional.
Hume’s correct in observing that everybody could use some editorial oversight. And yet, people keep reading the semi-literates without it.
I discovered the podcast for the CBC arts and culture radio program ‘Q’ while we lived in Malta, and listened to it quite regularly. When we returned to Canada and I had less free time, I grew a little weary of the format and host Jian Ghomeshi’s interview style, and unsubscribed.
Having just returned from watching the movie One Week (more on that later), I did a search for Liane Balaban, and discovered that there are a couple hundred video clips from Q on YouTube. As it turns out, the video version of Q also airs on the channel CBC bold (which apparently replaced the very poorly named CBC Country Canada). Never fear, it’s better than that insufferable radio-on-TV talk show on Sportsnet.
Something else kind of stuck in my brain from Stephen Hume’s column. His claim that the Vancouver Sun had received 10 million page views in February, 2009 seemed unusually high.
Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.
I checked out the Sun’sonline advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:
vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com
theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com
There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.
Analytics and Panels
I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.
Erin pointed me at Stephen Hume’s column in the Vancouver Sun from earlier in the week. With a certain “you kids get off my lawn” charm, Mr. Hume protests a little too much about the rise of new media:
Meanwhile, blogosphere chatter responds with gleefully patronizing pronouncements on how the “old media” are toast, about to join the pterodactyl. The “new media” leads the way to a promised land of free information and citizen journalism.
Permit a few observations from the tar pits. First, the old media are the new media. The Vancouver Sun’s website, for example, generated 10 million page views in February — more than 357,000 a day. Our blogs attract more than 500,000 page views per month and have become — let me quote from the boss’s last memo — “a vital tool to gather and distribute content.” And all these numbers trend upward.
In my experience, most thinking bloggers recognize the implicit value of the news media. We’re well past the gloating phase, and are interested in helping newspapers save themselves from their own lack of foresight. That’s why I enjoy reading Mathew Ingram and Scott Rosenberg, because they do a great job of analyzing the mainstream media’s troubles and, more importantly, they discuss solutions.
Mr. Hume also takes bloggers to task for hiding behind anonymity. This is a bit of a red herring. After all, pretty much every popular blogger identifies themselves. And Mr. Hume would do well to remember the value of anonymity for bloggers in countries like China or Iran. I wonder, does he think of them as ‘cowards’, too?
The Right Metrics
If the Vancouver Sun is the new media, then Mr. Hume ought to pick the right metrics on which to report. Nobody I know in new media uses “page views” when describing their site’s popularity. In my experience, an organization reports on page views when a) they’re not measuring their traffic accurately and b) they’re just choosing the number that sounds the biggest.
And if the Vancouver Sun is new media, why haven’t more of them come to Northern Voice? In five years, we’ve had, by my count, no more than one or two reporters out to the conference. And this is one of the biggest new media conferences on the west coast, in the Sun’s own backyard. Not to mention the fact that all Mr. Hume’s Editor-in-Chief is doing with her Twitter account is posting links to her own newspaper.
There’s plenty more to criticize in Mr. Hume’s piece. The notion, for example, that newspapers offer an “assurance of quality and public accountability” is highly dubious. But what frustrates me most about Mr. Hume’s column is the lack of proposed solutions. He offers a hagiography to journalists, but doesn’t have any suggestions for how the industry might right its floundering corporate ship. Maybe that’sin another blog post, or, rather, column? He should check out Scott and Mathew’s blogs. Not only are they journalists who play extremely well with the new media, but they’re thinking about answers.
UPDATE: In the comments, Lisa rightfully points out that I should have mention Sun deputy editor Kirk LaPointe, whose blog I read and enjoy. I’d also meant to mention the irony that while I can comment on the Sun’s news stories, I can’t comment on Mr. Hume’s editorial. It’s odd that I can’t provide feedback on the bloggiest of content.
UPDATE #2: Mike Davidson of Newsvinehas written a nice piece about the demise of the print edition of the Seattle P-I: “Overall, I’m not super optimistic about the future of a lot of these newspaper companies, but I really would love to see them at least replaced with something better. I still have a hard time believing that a 146-year-old company like the Seattle P-I is moving out of their own building before we are.”
