The Evolving Newsroom

Is it just me, or do you find in your organisation that people expect websites to mushroom by magic, as if little elves were at work while you slept?

I've lost count of how many newsrooms I've come across which rely on the efforts of a single, young, overworked web editor to monitor and update their website 24 hours a day, seven days a week (impossible, of course, they just do their best Monday to Friday and hope nothing breaks on the weekend to make them look like muppets).

And then there's the large institutions which have nothing - NOTHING - in the budget for maintaining some of their websites. Nothing. Nada. No one to make sure the sites are up to date, clean, free of dead links, lovely to look at, useful.

Did I nod off and miss the memo that said websites are for free?

Here's the way I see it:

1. Publish a magazine/newspaper... it costs you money, you get sponsorship/sell advertising, you pay people to produce it.

2. Publish a website... it costs you money, you get sponsorship/sell advertising, you pay people to produce it.

Advertising sales on US newspaper websites are in good shape, according to a Borrell Associates survey of 3,000 sites in various-sized markets.

The survey, reported by Publicitas, found newspaper sites earned more than $2bn from local online ad sales in 2007, which gave them 27 per cent of the total local online advertising market and put them ahead of Yellow Pages and television sites.

"The largest newspaper websites achieved a majority of revenue from non-print advertisers for the first time, developing a broader base of customers to generate new revenue streams. The online-only advertisers accounted for 59 percent of the total ad revenue generated by newspaper sites."

Interestingly, "websites who employ at least one salesperson dedicated to selling online advertising averaged 87 percent more revenue than sites that relied solely on print representatives to sell online ads."

I've had a number of people tell me that print sales teams often don't yet understand the online ad space and miss opportunities to educate and enthuse clients on its merits. This survey suggests bringing in specialised online staff may be an interim answer. Any thoughts?

I spent much of today describing a website from the ground up. I say describing because I haven't drawn any pictures of it yet, haven't written a formal requirements document, and it's far from being built. At this stage it's just words on a page describing what needs to be included, and the preliminary decisions that need to be made about navigation, search, display, archiving, content entry and so on.

I'm taking this description to a meeting, in which most people will know a lot about the content and nothing about the back end of a website. The rest will know a lot about the back end but nothing about content.

I'm somewhere in the middle.

I've been to these kinds of meetings before and seen how badly awry they can go. I've seen people talking at each other, past each other, over each other's heads, but seldom to each other.

The first problem, naturally enough, is that each side knows nothing of how the other's domain works. The second problem is terminology. Words mean different things in different environments. And when you're in a meeting talking about things you don't readily understand, when you hear a familiar word you tend to assume it means what you've always known it to mean. Which can lead you and everyone else up the garden path.

Take the word template as an example. When I first got involved with websites I took one look at the form you used for entering content and called it a template. It reminded me of the templates you create in Word to prevent having to recreate standard documents from scratch each time. Made perfect sense to me.

But every time I used the word template in meetings with IT people, they thought I meant page templates - the fixed elements of the homepage, section pages and story pages across the website.

That's just one example but there are many more. I've noticed too that terminology varies from company to company, and from country to country.

It strikes me, though, that neither problem is hard to fix. It just requires someone from each side to draw some simple diagrams to show the main steps, hazards and outcomes of their domain, and to label the diagrams clearly so the terminology is understood by all. A brief explanatory/definition session in the first meeting would surely slash the confusion quota and improve productivity across the project's life-cycle.

I've never known that actually to happen, mind you. I've had people get cross with me, patronise me, ignore me and tolerate me. Happily, I've also had a few people demonstrate enormous patience and goodwill in taking the time to teach me, although generally these have been people I've approached personally.

But I can't see why every user-developer collaboration shouldn't start with an explanation/definition session. Sure, most people might know most of it, but at least the one or two who don't won't be left sitting in the corner unable to contribute because they can't find the terminology to do so. After all, their knowledge and ideas could prove hugely valuable.

It can also be hugely advantageous to have one or two people on a project who know a bit about every side of it, who can act as interpreters and make sure the various participants are communicating effectively. Business analysts can sometimes, but not always, fill that role in the corporate world but it seems to me there's room for plenty more to step in and specialise.

Meantime, in my website description document I'm trying to spell out terminology and write simple explanations as I go, and I'll try to draw some diagrams before my meeting. All going well, we'll have a productive meeting and a good project. Fingers crossed.

Nothing like a bit of Silicon Alley Insider gloom for a Monday morning. So here's a piece about US newspapers experiencing their worst drop in paid advertising revenue for 50 years.

It serves as a reasonable opener to Eric Alterman's excellent essay in The New Yorker: Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper. (Thanks to Nathan and Jim for the link.)

Alterman notes in the opening paragraphs that, "Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost 42pc of their market value in the past three years, according to media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have... The New York Times company has seen its stock decline by 54pc since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the last year."

He goes on to examine the impact of the web on newspapers.

"Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of licence to print money. In the internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created websites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in reenue from ciruclation and print ads.

"Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

"The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies' solution to their problem was to make 'our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.' "

Along the way Alterman sweeps through the history of newspapers since their beginnings as political broadsheets and touching on the ideas that led to the press taking on the mantle of 'objective' recorders of important events.

And he does a good job characterising the somewhat fraught relationship between bloggers and newspapers, spending a good bit of time on the Huffington Post, as seen in this excerpt:

"In October 2005, at an advertisers' conference in Phoenix, [New York Times executive editor] Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely 'recycle and chew on the news,' contrasting that with the Times' emphasis on what he called 'a journalism of verification,' rather than mere 'assertion'.

" 'Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out," Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog. Like most liberal bloggers, she takes exception to the assumption by so many traditional journalists that their work is superior to that of bloggers when it comes to ferreting out the truth. The ability of bloggers to find the flaws in the mainstream media's reporting of the Iraq war 'highlighted the absurdity of the kneejerk compairson of the relative credibility of the so-called MSM and the blogosphere,' she said."

Well worth a read.

Foreign users outnumber domestic readers on UK news websites, according to research from comScore.

Media Bulletin reports that the Daily Mail has the highest proportion of overseas users, at 69%, while many others attract 50%-60% of their readers from abroad.

"Around 59% of the BBC's audience was international, with 27m of its 46m users residing outside the UK.

"The Telegraph drew 57% of its...users from outside the UK; Guardian Unlimited attracted an international audience of 56%; and Times Online had an overseas audience of 55%.

"The Independent had an equal split of domestic and international visitors among its 1.8m users, but The Sun's website was more popular with UK visitors, who account for 55% of its 6m user base.

"British Sky Broadcasting and ITV have a much lower international profile. Just 20% of BSkyB's 9.6m users were from outside the UK, as were 23% of ITV's 7.7m online audience.

Global appeal should be reassuring, although I gather sales execs balk at trying to convince local advertisers of its merits. I don't have figures to hand for NZ, but anecdotally I understand them to be similar. Can anyone point me to recent user figures for NZ news websites?