Danny Sanchez on digital media
Hey folks, just a quick heads-up that the new Poynter column WebSpeak is now being offered up via RSS. Woot!
(And yes, “RSS” is in the queue.)
WebSpeak is a regular feature in which my Orlando Sentinel co-worker Dana Eagles and yours truly define terms you’ll need to know to survive in this webby world. Think of it as a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online News!
First, the Allentown Morning Call generated lots of buzz with its popular Breeders and Kennels search widget. Now, they’ve gone and done it again with a new 2007 elections tool that allows users to search a plethora of local elections and embed a widget of the results on a Web page.
Run a search, and check out the “Create a Race Widget” link (it’s small and to the far right) to get some embeddable iframe code. The widgets are available for each race.
[UPDATE: Jeff Johns over at Mccall.com comments: “We have widgets built into our project requirements, we try not to launch a project without a widget. We feel it really connects more users with our content.]
Taking that extra step to create some simple widgets can be easily forgotten in the scramble to get data features up. But widgets are a great opportunity to really serve your online audience and have your content reach more people. Don’t pass it up!
My former competitor, the World’s Ugliest Dog
Oh, the poor, frail egos of journalists. If low pay, the threat of a shrinking industry and malcontented, loudmouth editors won’t do their self-esteem in, then the most e-mailed lists on their Web sites surely will.
Jon Friedman argues in MarketWatch that news sites should abolish the most e-mailed, most read and most blogged about lists from news sites because they will cause journalists to “lower their standards and write top-40 stories instead of pieces with actual depth.” It also, says Friedman, “reinforces that we’re a nation of gossipmongers and dummies.” (For a more humorous take on this issue, take a look at The Onion‘s “story” back in April: ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times‘ Newsroom Apart)
With all due sensitivity to journalists’ egos, it’ll be a fun, freewheeling day in the obituaries section before I advocate getting rid of tools such as the most e-mailed/viewed/blog list. Those lists serve as the original way in which readers can “vote” their stories to the top, often circumventing the filters of newsroom editors. The lists serve as a way of spotlighting interesting content long after the unforgiving minute-by-minute news cycle on the Web has pushed it along. It also let’s readers see what other readers are checking out, giving them an alternative way to consume news on the site. And last but certainly not least, it’s just plain interesting to see. It’s part of why news ranking sites such as Digg are so popular.
The real issue is that journalists can’t stand to see stories such as “What Shamu taught me about a happy marriage” become the equivalent of a perpetual hit on the newsroom pop charts while big Sunday snoozer projects, stories about politics and other Serious Stuff barely register a blip. It boils their ego-rich blood.
The answer is not doing something so foolish as abolishing the most viewed list. The solution to this particular pickle is educating the newsroom to understand metrics a little better.
Many journalists don’t realize (or forget when they see these lists) that the most viewed list is a representation of an audience that reaches far beyond the circulation area of the newspaper or viewership area of the TV station. It also doesn’t show how long a person took with the story nor who exactly read that story. I hate to sound like an elitist, but wouldn’t you feel better about your story if a senator read and reacted to it as opposed to if your average Joe did the same?
Back in August of 2005, I wrote a story for the Sun-Sentinel titled ‘Thefts from cars among top crimes’, which took a look at how thieves break into cars and what readers could do to avoid this particular crime. It turned out to be a popular story. But August also marked the rise of the so-called “World’s Ugliest Dog.” It was to be an epic struggle.
The World’s Ugliest Dog and my car-theft story duked it out for the title of Most E-Mailed Story. I climbed to the top of the list first. Then the hideous little fiend inched me out. Then, in a surprising turnaround, my story knocked him down a spot. Alas, when the next day came, the repulsive canine had permanently bumped me from the top, where he remained “top dog” for several weeks.
But I wasn’t offended. I had been “hip to the Web” so to speak and understood that interest for the ugly dog’s ran far beyond the corridors of Broward and Palm Beach County. I also had seen quite a few metrics reports before and had a more balanced understanding of what becomes popular on the site. Lastly, I knew my story was helping the readers who viewed it in a very real way. Those readers most likely spent way more time on the site reading my story then examining the dog. They e-mailed my story to their friends likely because they thought reading it would help their pals too.
The lesson is that the “top” lists on news sites should be taken with a grain of salt — but they should definitely be taken. Editors dare not ignore page view reports, time spent, visitor paths and other critical metrics. They must receive and read them regularly so that they’re not shocked by outliers. They have to understand what works and what doesn’t on the Web, even if it’s more art than science. If that affects our journalistic sensibilities, well, too bad. It simply is not an option to close our eyes and ignore the interests of our readers — prurient though they may occasionally be.This doesn’t mean our whole news site needs to be composed of frivolous content. When an item like the Shamu story or the ugliest dog occasionally bubbles to the top, we tend to ignore the hordes of other “serious” news that our readers find interesting. Just because we consume page view metrics doesn’t mean we need to perpetually pander to the lowest common denominator of the public’s interest. Do readers want our site to be a showcase of Britney Spears and animal freaks?
Despite what our metrics occasionally say, do you in your heart really believe that is what our loyal readers want our news sites to become?
The New York Times has a must-read story about the discrepancies between publishers’ own data and the data put forth by firms such as Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore. From the story:
Online advertising is expected to generate more than $20 billion in revenue this year, more than double the $9.6 billion it represented as recently as 2004. Nobody doubts that the figure will grow — particularly as advertisers hone their techniques for aiming messages to particular consumers — but the question remains how much the clashing traffic figures will hold the market back.
Read the story here.
(And yeah, yeah, I know it’s from Oct. 22. Just catching up on some feeds… sigh.)
Shawn Smith over at New Media Bytes queried the hive mind at the ONA listserv, did his own digging and has put together a list of best newspaper blogs for comments, community and readability.
[UPDATE: Also, make sure to check out Squared’s list of Mama Tribune’s most popular blogs. Good stuff here!]
Among the picks: Bakosphere, Pop Candy, Pogue’s Posts, Stuck in the ’80s and many more.
This is a great list for inspiration and to gather pointers on blogging practices (at least as applied to newspaper sites), so check it out!
(And since Shawn for the most part excluded sports blogs on the list, I’m going to plug The Other Football, a soccer blog written by Brant Parsons for the Sentinel, as a heck of an example of how to do a sports blog well all by your lonesome.)
[UPDATE: A spot check of the WaPo and LA Times shows their PageRank have returned to normal. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!]
Ok, we all know my measly online journalism blog –thrilling as it may be to journalism geeks– isn’t as “important” as the esteemed Washington Post and LA Times. But Google apparently seems to think so nowadays. You will receive latest updates via cherryscustomframing.
Google recently tweaked its PageRank algorithm in its continuing war against terr.. er.. link farms (more about PageRank here). If you’ve got the Google Toolbar, you’ll see Journalistopia has a PageRank of 5 out of 10. However, such highly established and respected publications as the LATimes, Newsday, Forbes, the Washington Post, Engadget and the San Fransisco Chronicle were recently booted down to a 5. Others, such as the Seattle Times, Washington Times and Charlotte Observer were booted to a 4. Here’s the list of some notable PageRank drops put together by Daily Blog Tips.
If you know someone in the online marketing department at one of these publications, you’ll probably find them spitting pea soup with their heads spinning, that’s how bad this is. If your site took a big PageRank hit, you may want to round up your best SEO people and start theorizing as to why the heck this happened. And, try to unearth whether they employed any evil black hat SEO techniques…
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The New York Times gives us a closer look and some philosophizing about Google’s famed “20 percent time” during an interview with Google software engineer Bharat Mediratta.
In a nutshell, 20 percent time is the amount of time given to Google employees to work on self-directed projects. GMail and Google News both stemmed from 20 percent time, says Mediratta.
During the ONA conference on Wednesday, I blogged about Lisa Williams’ talk and how important it is to take some cues from technology companies on how to be competitive online. Check out the Times article for starters and keep looking into how tech companies do their thing; I know I will.
PLUS: Google News “goes social” with a new Facebook app.
DOUBLE-PLUS: Toronto has a really cool project called Murmur, which provides interesting local audio stories to visitors via cell phone call or download. I’m sticking around Toronto for the weekend and took the audio tour of Spadina, which really brought the neighborhood to life for me. This’d be a neat type of project for local news sites…
Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…
Adrian Holovaty looks at a photo of the world’s ugliest dog and sees 1s and 0s.
Displaying a photo of the hideous animal, Holovaty –the big brain behind ChicagoCrime.org and the Python framework Django— says there are loads of data in the ugly dog image. Who/what is the subject? Who took the photo? Where was it taken? When was it taken? What kind of camera was used? What colors are in the photos?
So how can that image, if tagged with metadata, give your site a big advantage? A good example is Flickr, which allows users to search photos by all sorts of non-traditional criteria. The result is a site that is stickier and allows a high degree of browsability, a trait that users nowadays are beginning to view as essential, Holovaty said.
News organizations have reporters attending city council meetings, high school sports games and covering local crimes — something Google doesn’t or can’t do. But rather than just having reporters gather facts and fuse them into a “blob” that is unreadable by machines (aka, a news story), Holovaty wants to also see news organizations compiling that information into a database format that can be easily browsed by users.
“We have all those killer advantages, but the tragedy is that we haven’t actually leveraged the information we collect,” Holovaty said.
How to get started
Being that crime databases are all the rage these days –no thanks to Holovaty– here is a set of processes and tips to get one rolling:
-Analyze the raw data you get from the police department.
-List the data’s fields (Date, time, crime type, address, etc.)
-Identify the key concepts. If a user clicks on a field, is it useful to that user to see the data sorted by that criteria? For instance, browsing by date ishelpful, but case numbers are unique and not really browseable.
-Make list pages with multiple records that are browseable by a certain criteria.
-Then, make detail pages for individual crimes.
-Every piece of information needs to have a permalink. Linkability/bookmarkability is critical, not just for users but also for search engines. “Your Google juice will go up,” Holovaty said.
Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…
Lots of cool folks are now blogging the Online News Association conference:
-Amy Webb is writing up a great string of posts on the blogging ethics working group going on right now (I know this because I’m peeking over her shoulder… muahaha).
-Bryan Murley has been busy blogging too and even took a picture of me looking creepy in the background behind Jay Rosen.
-BlogTalkRadio has been broadcasting live from the conference.
-Steve Safran over at Lost Remote has touched on some of the community journalism issues.
-Matthew Ingram blogged the future of news panel (and entirely on a Blackberry no less).
-Alfred Hermida blogged the future of publishing panel, focusing on mobile devices.
-JD Lasica –who showed off his mad moderator skills during the community evangelist panel– blogs about the future of news discussion.
-The student newsroom is chugging away with stories, photos and video.
-And last but not least, we’ve got Tweets galore here.
Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…
This shall be the year of the “data center.”
Gannett’s online data initiative has hit it big with online news industry types who are now itching to put up databased treats such as school report cards, crimes, property sales, public employee salaries and restaurant inspections.
Easier said than done.
David Milliron, now at Caspio but formerly a data guru at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, provided some insights on what’s needed to get a news organization started putting up great searchable databases.
Of the many things about which Milliron spoke (getting advertising on board, worrying about server load), the thing that struck me the most was the need for getting educated the right way and having a solid network of other pros to lean on. When the crap hits the fan and your site goes down because of a bad query, it’s essential to have the “under the hood” knowledge of how the database and application work. That means understanding the programming language behind the framework, Milliron said.
Furthermore, having a network of pros –whether its at your shop or otherwise–means you tap those other folks’ wisdom, have them give you great ideas on how to write good, efficient code and have them spot-check your work. For some without a mentor in-house, that may mean finding a local users group or joining a listserv (such as the ones offered by NICAR and other organizations).
Some things Milliron says you need to consider before starting database projects:
-Are there other people in your shop or at other shops in your industry developing with the programming language and framework you’re picking?
-Can you get someone knowledgable to review your code?
-If the person developing your applications gets hit by a train or hired away, will you be able to bring in someone else?
-What are the costs and time associated with maintaining the database, not just what it takes to slap it up.
As Milliron said, it’s a rare thing to find one person who knows how to gather data, analyze it, clean it, draw meaningful conclusions from it, put it up on a server, build a rocking database application and then fix it when the thing blows up. And if you do run across such an individual, they probably already have a startup or work at Google…
Now if you want to get your hands dirty with code, Milliron suggests checking out your local community college or professional development programs for database classes. That comment struck me because yours truly has been going to a local community college since August to learn some honest-to-goodness programming (in C++ of all things). I can tell you that after banging my head against a PHP/MySQL book for weeks and making little progress, having a pro hold my hand through those concepts helped me build a useful PHP app for our web producers in about four hours.
Creating interesting, functional, user-friendly databases is a big undertaking. Just don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, and don’t fear failure. You will probably write a bad query, crash a server and have some whiz kid rewrite your 70 lines of code into seven.
But if it means gaining the knowledge to build great apps, it’ll all be well worth it in terms of page views for your site, value for your readers and –most poignantly– your job security.
Is the concept of a “mashup” turning your brain to mush? Does the idea of “crowdsourcing” leave you feeling … lonely?
And I’d really like your help.
I’d love to hear about the very latest buzzwords you come across, as well as your take on what they mean. Eventually, we hope the glossary will become a comprehensive –and evolving– list. We’ll be putting out weekly terms on Poynter’s site .
So all you online media wordsmiths, help me out with some suggestions and please provide feedback!
(Now back to the ONA conference…)