The project from the start required rethinking how to define the people that Macon Money aimed to reach, a task that is easily transferrable to “newsrooms that want to engage their constituents,” Goldfin said. When you start reconceptualizing how communities can be grouped, you can innovate cost-effective ways to reach them — whether it’s through games, content sections, events, tweet-ups, or some other channel.

“We usually define audiences or communities by very traditional demographics, but that no longer needs to be the limitation,” she said. “You can define communities through interest, rather than age. It’s the bigger picture. One size doesn’t fit all.”

Read the whole story

“Cultivating the Landscape of Innovation in Computational Journalism“

Before I started reading the paper (via Nieman Journalism Lab), I had some knee-jerk negative reactions to the premise of this paper (a computer scientist deciding that journalists just don’t get innovation—that they need some help from the real innovator; i.e., people in his field). But upon starting to read it, I’m inclined to be more charitable than that.

If you feel like reading it and sharing your thoughts, please do.

The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character but because of its great diversity. As long as there are many owners, each pursuing his own brand of truth, we the people have the opportunity to arrive at the truth and to dwell in the light. The multiplicity of ownership is crucial. It’s only when there are a few owners, or, as in a government-controlled press, one owner, that the truth becomes elusive and the light fails. For a citizen in our free society, it is an enormous privilege and a wonderful protection to have access to hundreds of periodicals, each peddling its own belief. There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases. The reader is free to range around in the whole editorial bouillabaisse and explore it for the one clam that matters—the truth.

— E.B. White, letter to W.B. Jones, director of communications at Xerox, 1/30/76

The Letters of Note blog has a wonderful three-letter piece up today featuring E.B. White’s criticism of “sponsored content” in the magazine business and other print media (in response to a Xerox-sponsored feature in Esquire magazine) — including a sort of elegy for a free, independent press that serves the public.

As someone who does a fair amount of work on business models for media companies — and specifically works with publishers who are looking for non-advertising revenue opportunities — I loved reading this. White’s very eloquent about his qualms: ”If I felt a shock at the news of the Salisbury-Xerox-Esquire arrangement, it was because the sponsorship principle seemed to challenge and threaten everything I believe in: that the press must not only be free, it must be fiercely independent—to survive and to serve.”

How, exactly, we support media without a complete reliance on advertiser and sponsor dollars, is, well, what I spend a lot of time thinking about. There are a lot of different approaches to using corporate dollars to fund journalistic enterprises, and I’m not sure I agree with White that sponsorship is always a first sign of evil for an independent publisher, but blurring the lines between editorial and advertising, which sponsored content often does, is a dangerous game.

I have encouraged projects at various employers and client publishers that were only able to go ahead with the support of a sponsor, but I admit that I have reservations about the effects of sponsorship on publishers and media in general. I do think there’s a certain amount of creativity-killing that happens when publishers continuously turn to sponsors for revenue, and I think White’s right that, no matter how subtly it happens, it does transform the writer’s relationship to the topic at hand.

Publishers need new models, particularly in an era in which readers are unwilling — or at least no longer being asked effectively — to help support the costs of producing content. Obviously, there are a lot of smart folks thinking about this today, but so far there are only some glimmers of success, a lot of failures, and no knock-out successes. I’m often disappointed by the number of these “emerging” models that are just attempts to bring advertisers into more efficient communication with readers (e.g., this week’s failure of the Village Soup). A big part of what I liked about our work at GigaOM Pro was that we were (and the team still is) genuinely trying to find ways to connect readers with useful content using cost-efficient production models* and, y’know, marketing content and information services that people actually wanted/needed enough to spend some of their own money on it.

…This isn’t actually a complete thought, but mostly I just wanted to share the Letters of Note piece, so I’ll leave it there and hit Publish.

* – On a related note, I enjoyed reading this piece (h/t Anand), which called into question the reasons why producing content is so damn expensive. I don’t think this model can work for all things — journals publish research papers written by authors who keep themselves fed and sheltered with income from other academic and professional jobs. But I do think it’s important to unpack what, exactly, costs so much about producing content in any publishing environment.

Interesting read.

This is a lengthy, A1 story in the weekend paper, but it does little to illuminate the topic. Here’s how I would summarize the story: “Students lack the self-discipline to do their homework because of easy access to technology and the diverting experiences it enables. Technology is good, but this behavior is bad. Teachers don’t know what to do about it, and parents do little about it, too.” Boring, right?

Come on, NYT. We’ve already done the hand-wringing. You say that plugged-in students lack focus, but guess what? So does the story itself. Instead of rolling modern life into one big mess of tangled wires, let’s get specific: Start looking at specific problems (in this example, say: parenting and technology, or technology aptitude and the college application process, or technology use in the classroom) and specific solutions (e.g., media literacy 2.0, how parents and educators are setting boundaries that work, profiles of teachers who are making low-tech learning effective for high-tech students, etc.).

Or, for starters, let’s start making important distinctions between differences in technology use. Facebook and Final Cut Pro are very different technology distractions. Texting in class, texting during homework, and texting during dinner are all separate behaviors worth treating differently, both in a story and in real life. Treat them that way. Once you break experience down, you can begin to ask the real questions about what’s good, what’s bad, what’s neutral — and what should we do about it?

OK, I know this is just sort of a rant, not a real post, but come on. I care about this stuff. Can’t we get some good coverage out there? This where you, my occasional readers, make recommendations on better articles, books, and other media to feed my brain.

Honestly, I feel bad enough when I buy something on Amazon that I could have probably picked up locally with a short detour on my bike ride home, but when I am confronted with excessive packing like this (below), I feel especially bad. And this snap below isn’t the worst example by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s nice to hear that Amazon really is using the feedback customer’s submit for good. I hope more companies heed the example of the Philips toothrbrush mentioned in the story.

“[For the revised packaging, Philip's packing company] could use a single material, and it went through a machine just once instead of the two to three times required for the traditional package. ‘From design to finish, it’s as efficient as it gets,’ he said.”

“The media is very good at making itself seem like something other than a business (and there are a lot of problems with what business it does manage) — but if you realise that every edition, every issue, every article, every bulletin, every thing made by the media is a product, then you start to think differently about these situations.” — Bobbie Johnson

The discussion of editors’ role in “shipping product” for the media business is great, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking more about who plays the role of “editor” in other non-media jobs. I work at the intersection of these two areas — editor and product manager — and my partner is a QA engineer, so lots of these issues are top of mind for me on a daily basis.

In my experience, what Ford says is true; being an editor is about “the willingness to schedule the living shit out of everything, the ability to see patterns, a total dedication to shipping, and willingness to say ‘no’”. That he goes on to recognize that this means “you start to have this very interesting source of power inside your organization, especially given the changes coming in web content, where you need structure and connections in order to play with others” is a really awesome insight.

Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small—
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

- Kay Ryan