Jonathan Harris:
Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.
We are a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.
His latest project — lovely, as always — and one I’m totally entranced by.
Update: I’m in! So thrilled. This is just the kind of storytelling I love most. I’d be honored if you followed along.
Roger Black on web advertising:
What we have now is the ugliest advertising in the history of the media. I used to say that web sites looked like the walls of a third-world futbol stadium, but that was unfair to the stadiums. Most content sites look so bad they actually repel readers rather than attract them.
Some half-cooked thoughts, not yet popped:
Issues make little sense online. Obviously, they’re necessary for print, but web readers — especially of a less news-driven publication — don’t think that way.
Some content is inexorably tied to a certain date. News and blog posts, in particular. (There’s context again.) But so much is timeless. Why force that content into an artificial issue framework on the web? The web is alive, constantly growing and changing. Does a web reader really care when, say, a great recipe was published?
Don’t think of the website as a repository for magazine stories and the stuff you had to cut from print. And certainly don’t think of the website as a “brand extension” and marketing tool to sell subscriptions. Your site is its own, complementary product. And, yes, you can make money online.
Consider a digital-first approach. Never stop producing stories for the web, and instead pull (and rework for print) the very best for a monthly magazine. Then add to the mag some new, context-appropriate content and you’ve got the kind of durable, evergreen product that magazine people love to hoard. Encourage your magazine readers to visit your website for more great stories, all month long. Macworld is a great example of this model.
Context is king.
That holds true everywhere we publish, analog or digital. Anyone can sling content — and on the web, everyone will — but an article out of context is no more useful than a printed book chock full of typed-out URLs, which would be screwy, intrusive, frustrating and a distraction from the reading I’d want to do. Context can elevate content, but the wrong frame can tear it down just as easily.
But what does context mean on the web? There’s no single answer, and that’s the very crux of the internet: The web is whatever we need it to be, just as water changes shape when poured into a new glass. The web is more than a medium for publishing or communications or commerce — it’s a customer service medium, and websites and services sprout to fill every possible need.
I’m going to limit the scope here to magazines, simply because, well, that and the web are what I know.
Let’s consider a printed magazine, maybe a small regional publication about a certain lifestyle, history and culture. You know the type, I’m sure.
Then flip to a section like, say, travel reviews, punchy little things with an overview and maybe a recommendation. Is a reader of this section looking for a new place to visit? Quite possibly. Sure, many folks read travel stories like fiction, as a way to mentally get away. But a lot of people clip out the intriguing destinations or save whole magazines for future reference. It’s a casual, mostly passive act: That sounds interesting, I’ll have to try it sometime.
So now this magazine’s next issue is going to press, and the web editors have a whole book full of stories to parcel out on the website. (This works in reverse, too, in a digital-first workflow, where the print editors must put web content onto a different platform with a different context.) The simple solution — and, sadly, the one I see way too often — is the cut-and-paste: InCopy to CMS to website to social media. Repeat. But what about context?
Let’s consider the travel section again, this time on the magazine’s website.
Don’t call me a reader or user, no, here I’m a hunter of information. I’m planning a trip and I’ve come to your website to do it. I know what I want: Someplace family-friendly, and outdoors, in a three-state radius; it’s only a long-weekend trip, plus the kids’ll kill each other if they’re in the car together for too long. Alright, I’ll click on the travel section and see what matches… What? A long list of travel-related magazine stories?
A magazine reader is not the same as a web user; it’s a casual vs. mission-driven act. On the web, I want those travel reviews sliced and diced, sorted and tagged; I want the facts; I want the metadata. And, without the space restrictions of print, why limit the review to a few paragraphs, a link and a photo? Tell me a story about the experience, relate to people, and encourage your community of readers to do the same. That’s how you build a useful web resource — and best serve your customers.
But enough about travel sections. What do you do with a feature? The default response these days — especially in magazines’ tablet editions — is, “Add multimedia!” And I’m not fundamentally opposed; why shouldn’t we take advantage of all the different ways to tell a story on the web? But it has to make sense. A video produced just to have a video doesn’t serve anybody. Multimedia have to add a new dimension to the storytelling.
I love the work of Jonathan Harris. In other hands, his latest project, Balloons of Bhutan, could have been a drab, text- and statistics-heavy story of a tiny nation. But by giving faces and voices to the men and women of Bhutan, he’s created something powerfully human, something printed words can never match. And that’s the best way to use multimedia on the web.
How about the feature itself? Often, the text of a good magazine story transcends the medium. You can (and should) add links, restore photos cut for space, spin off sidebars into full-bodied articles of their own, or even embed a YouTube video instead of describing it, but a compelling story — the core of the article — is no less compelling whether in print or on the web.
What’s so often left behind, though, is the design of the feature. Print designers don’t lay out stories just for fun. Great editorial design is as much a part of the story as the text: It sets the mood, elevates the drama, and inserts critical elements like photographs precisely when and where they’re needed. In short, the design adds context. When you funnel a story through a CMS into the same template as a 200-word blog post, you’ve lost all of that.
At the Chronicle, I’ve tried to champion, and web-ify, that ethos. In print magazines, I love the full-bleed photos, the careful typography, the feeling you get when you open up a gorgeous spread.
Why can’t I feel that way when I read a web feature, too?
Long live context. Long live the king.
ESPN:
Bill Simmons, in association with ESPN, announced the first wave of writer and editor hires for Grantland.com, the much anticipated sports and pop culture web site. … With Simmons as editor-in-chief, Grantland.com is scheduled to launch in June with a mix of original columns, long-form features, blog posts, and podcasts.
Looking forward to it.
New Kindle Singles-like publishing house, launching with an investigative piece by Jon Krakauer. Looks great.
I spend a good amount of time each day in front of my laptop, reading. For news and blog posts, the computer’s great, but for long reads it’s a terrible pain. Poor design and backlit screens wear on the eyes, and distractions abound. The result: I’d send many stories to Instapaper, but read few of them. In the evenings I’d reach for the book beside my bed, not my laptop.
Until the Kindle.
A recent birthday gift, the Kindle finally gives me the means to read the web’s bounty of long-form journalism, which I love so dearly, without wanting to gouge out my eyes afterwards. I can sit in bed with this tiny thing and have access to anything I want to read—be it books or Instapaper’ed articles—on a screen that looks awfully similar to a printed page. At last I can read whatever, whenever and wherever I want. That still seems like sorcery to me.
In the last few months, I’ve read more great stories than over any other span I can remember. And with so many Kindles, iOS devices and other reading machines now in the hands of consumers, I know I’m not alone. That bodes well for journalism and publishing, and a more promising future for both I can’t imagine.
From 1958:
And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
One of my favorite writers.
Phil Gyford on the making of his experimental newspaper site.
What, after One Hundred Whole Interviews, have I learned about one of my primary crafts?
Gawker:
On one side, a Times source explains, you have print circulation, which thinks it should control the iPad since it’s just another way to distribute the paper. They’d like to charge $20 to $30 per month for the Times’ forthcoming iPad app. […]
On the other side, you have the Times’ digital operation, which is pushing to charge $10 per month for the iPad edition and is said to be up in arms over print circulation’s pricing.
I like this bit about the Harper’s paywall:
Paul: I honestly, HONESTLY do not say that we are doing it the right way, but I don’t believe people know the right way. We are doing it in an INTERESTING way.
I asked Poynter faculty and staff for their five-minute analysis on what the iPad means for their areas of expertise in journalism.
The New York Times:
Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. […]
As the name suggests, the focus will be local—the lead story is an investigative piece about the cost overruns on the reconstruction and retrofitting of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge—but correspondents are weighing in from as far away as Afghanistan and on cultural scenes as un-local as Nascar.
And McSweeney’s is using Spot.us to raise funds for the Bay Bridge story.
A worthwhile read, especially for this:
But before we get out the party hats and noise-makers to celebrate the rise of nonprofit journalism, here’s the bad news. In the current arrangement, we’re substituting one flawed business model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately. No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions.
Very tough ethical question. Don’t miss the videos.
Renay San Miguel:
Most of those attending were using social media long before “social media” became the easy buzz-phrase to describe not only a revolution in communications, but also a symptom of what’s good—and bad—about modern journalism. I put myself in the camp that wants to meld social media with best journalistic practices, which is why I was one of the geeks attending the Gnomedex session entitled “Hacker Journalism.”
For anyone in or around the industry, it’s been the unavoidable question of the last few years: How can we save newspapers?
It hasn’t always been put in those exact terms, of course. Just two years ago I was taught that newspapers simply needed to reduce expectations and realize that high margins were no longer possible. The monopoly was gone, but the fundamentals, as it were, remained strong.
We now know that they are not. Journalistically, perhaps, the fundamentals are unchanged—though even that is a debatable statement. But the business model on which that journalism depends could not be weaker.
And so, as papers fold and quarterly reports grow grim, print media tread on uncertain ground. And the question is: What’s to be done to save them? But it’s a misleading question, one that assumes newspapers in their current form should be saved.
Much has already been written on the subject, with the short-sighted looking for increasingly unrealistic ways to preserve newspapers. And there’s the problem, as the forward-thinking have realized: Newspapers don’t need saving—it’s journalism that does.
Journalism itself is independent of any medium. It exists as ink on a page, pixels on a screen, sound in the air—but it is not really any of those things. New means of communicating will develop, and journalism will follow. Saving newspapers for the sake of journalism couldn’t make less sense. Claiming that newspapers need preserving assumes that, through new technology, journalism can’t be made better.
What then of the news organizations behind the newspapers? Perhaps, one might say, they’re worth saving.
Again, that’s a bit disingenuous. Is it even possible to save those news organizations as they are? To date, that’s been nearly impossible. Revenue from the print side has withered, and news organizations, bloated and overreaching, have been unable to support themselves with meager Web revenues.
Newspapers as they are cannot survive on the Web. They’re too large, too unfocused, too general. Look at the successful, independent web publications of the day, and you’ll find they are everything newspapers are not: small, hyper-focused and reader-driven. More importantly, though, there is no pay wall, which many newspaper publishers see, however wrongheadedly, as the answer to their woes.
So here’s where we are: Newspapers—the physical products—have little hope of surviving as they are. The same holds for the news organizations that publish them. They just aren’t viable in an age when the day’s news can be had instantly, for free, from any number of Web publications. Magazine publishers, living in their world of niches, have long known that general-interest news is incredibly hard to monetize—you don’t see many newsweeklies today for a reason.1
But it’s a lesson that newspapers are only now learning. What, then, is the future of printed news?
Print as a medium need not die, and I certainly hope it doesn’t. Printed products do many things far better than their digital equivalents. But to survive, print does need to reinvent itself.
Before long, all content will be digitized and available for download cheaply, if not for free. And why shouldn’t it? Digital content is cheaper to distribute, infinitely reproducible, instantly available, searchable—the list of advantages grows long, and will only grow longer as devices and experiences improve. But there will always be something missing, I think, when you’re not holding in your hands a physical, purchased good, and that difference, that experience, is to be exploited. Bits on a hard drive or pixels on a screen—they’re fleeting, gone with the press of a button. A beautiful print product resists that pull.
Vendela Vida, author and co-editor of The Believer, spoke in 2007 with Jesse Thorn on The Sound of Young America about the magazine:
Jesse Thorn: One time your husband [Dave Eggers] came to one of my college classes, and somebody asked him, “I want to start a magazine. What should I do?” And his two pieces of advice were, (1) don’t start a magazine, it’s not worth it, and the (2) was make sure that you can pay for the magazine with the price of the magazine rather than having to rely on advertisers. […]
It seems to me as though one of the elements of this plan is to create something that has more of a lasting value. A lot of periodicals are designed to be very much of the moment, and it seems like you designed it to be of the opposite.
Vendela Vida: My favorite thing that someone said to me once about The Believer was that it was the hardest magazine for him to recycle. And I like that, because we do try to make it more like a literary journal that you want to keep on your shelves and not something that comes in the mail and you throw out the next week. And part of that longevity does stem from the fact that because we’re not timely or relevant or anything like that you don’t need to throw it out when the week comes to an end. It’s not going to tell you what to do on Saturday night or what book came out this week, and so there is something that has more of a lasting appeal, to me at least, about it.
That, I think, is the future of print in a digital world. It won’t work for every publication or every type of content, but that’s OK—it doesn’t have to, not with the Web and e-readers available as publishing platforms.
Print media can’t compete with the Web as a means of publishing simple information and news, nor should it be so. To be successful, print products—newspapers, magazines, books and anything in between—must make use of the medium and offer something that can’t be duplicated online or on an eight-inch screen: something beautifully made, worth keeping (as much for the content as the design) and thus worth paying for. Offer anything else and you’re competing against a platform that trumps you, or soon will, in almost every way. But make something awesome, and people will pay for it.
For traditionally printed publications, this new model means radical changes. No more dumping content verbatim from one medium to another, or relying on one to subsidize the other. Daily newspapers will disappear: the news of the day moves exclusively to the newspaper website2, while a lavish print product is published once a week or twice a month, perhaps, filled with content much like that soon to appear in the McSweeney’s newspaper prototype:
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.
For print, it’s a reduced role, to be sure, but the Web cannot be stopped in its reinvention of journalism. As soon as publishers realize that fact—and start taking advantage of it—we’ll see productions on each side that are greatly improved and better suited to their mediums and the media landscape today.
Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Reuters:
I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.
Vs. the wrong way:
Visitors to the Web sites of newspapers owned by News Corp. will have to start paying fees to read the news within the next year, Chairman Rupert Murdoch said.
The entire piece, by Michael Massing for The New York Review of Books, is worth reading, but this bit stuck with me:
During a recent visit to [Talking Points Memo]’s office, on West 20th Street in Manhattan, the place seemed eerily quiet as a dozen or so young reporters, writers, and “aggregators” (who link to other Web sites) peered intently at their computer screens. […]
Over the years, [TPM founder Josh] Marshall has helped train many cyber-savvy reporter-bloggers who have taken their skills to other, better-endowed institutions. Take the example of Paul Kiel. […]
Kiel is an example of an emerging new breed of “hybrids,” schooled in both the practices of print journalism and the uses of cyberspace.
Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used. […]
Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use.
Linking is at the very heart of the web—in many ways, it is the web. That the Associated Press and newspapers, without which the AP would be much diminished, do not understand even this simplest of web truisms is regrettable but understandable.
The AP will lose this battle, as any organization that attempts such restrictions will lose and, in turn, only hurt itself. But sadly—and I say that earnestly, as one who still very much loves newspapers—the people with the power to save newspapers are those who have no incentives to change them.
And so we read reports of reduced expectations, margins and costs within, at their cores, unchanged organizations. But without a change, the news organizations of yore have not long to live. The traditional business model just doesn’t work anymore, and forcing it on the web isn’t going to work any better.
The choice, then, is natural selection at its simplest: Evolve or die.
The Guardian:
The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.
Good luck with that.
Michael Wolff:
But one effect of its Internet traffic and notoriety and the ensuing attention of cable news shows is that the original Allbritton idea for a Capitol Hill paper—one that now largely reprints Internet content—has become, with its special-interest-size circulation of 32,000, a major success. Internet cachet, in other words, has enabled a tabloid-size print version of Politico (also called Politico) to thrive and more than double the company’s revenues.
I’ll have more on the piece later, but this particular bit above reminded me of the newspaper prototype Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s are putting together for the fall. A lot of the pessimism surrounding print has been slightly misguided, I think. Printed, general-interest newspapers may not have a future, but that’s because it’s a combination that can’t compete with online media. Printed media, if done well and in the right context, can still thrive.
Because of thinking like this. Connie Schultz:
David and Daniel Marburger think they have the answer: Change the federal copyright law. I think they are right. […]
The Marburgers propose a change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.
This is, no doubt, the dumbest thing I’ve read in weeks. To propose something like this is to wholly misunderstand the web.
Andy Ihnatko:
Okay, I’m making a new rule: whenever I’m reading something online and I see the phrase “The Mainstream Media,” I’m instantly deducting 40 credibility points from the author. It’s a meaningless phrase its use indicates laziness, sloppiness, or a line of thought that was only half-formed to begin with.
Michael Andersen:
Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.
How do you catch up?
Four lessons from the Guardian’s fantastic crowdsourcing experiment.
Outstanding essay by Clay Shirky:
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. […]
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
I’m with Clay on this. But it’s important to remember that there is no magic elixir. What works for one may not work for another. Experiment constantly, and find what works for you. Once the Chronicle launches, I’ll be doing just that.
Steven Berlin Johnson:
Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.
Michael Josefowicz:
So readers will willingly buy words delivered in different forms, but it depends on a combination of price, convenience and timing. Sometimes they borrow books from the library. Sometimes they buy books. Sometimes they will even pay for access to words on the Internet — but more often than not, they balk at paying for words on the web. […]
“Read for free, pay for print or stuff,” on the other hand, is a model that can, and does, deliver revenue.