Recovering Journalist

How Useful (and Usable) is Your Site?

The always-great John Temple has a valuable post today urging senior-level news executives to stay away from their print editions for a couple of weeks (painful as that may be for some). He suggests that they try relying solely on the Web for a while to get a better idea of how their increasingly digital audience is consuming news and information these days. 

If they would try this, I think newspaper executives would quickly see flaws in their offerings and would also more clearly understand the flood tide that is running. I'm not writing to criticize specifically what papers are doing online. Only to say that my experience being outside a newspaper tells me that other executives while they still have a chance might want to experience the world without their newspaper. I believe it would hasten their sense of urgency. I'm not talking about a sense of urgency about revenue. We know that's there in most buildings in this economic downturn. But is it there to the same degree in understanding audience and what's available to people today? Is it there in making sure their offerings stack up?

It's an excellent suggestion, and I'd take it a step farther: Every editor and publisher should spend some time trying to use their Web site the same ways that readers do, to truly find out what the user experience is for a site visitor. I think they'd get a jarring education in just how crappy and hard to use many (most? all?) newspaper sites are.

In fact, here's a little test that you can give your newspaper or broadcast site to find out how well it's serving the typical user. Try this list of tasks to see how your site measures up. I don't think you'll like what you see.

1. Without using search, find continuing, in-context coverage of a long-running local story.
2. Similarly, find a comprehensive package of information (even a collection of past stories) about a significant local icon or personality.
3. Locate all the coverage and information on the site about a specific local town. 
4. Starting on a story page (not the home page) quickly find other key information, e.g. the day's top headlines or most-read stories. (Remember, the vast number of readers don't enter your site from the home page, though print-focused newsies obsess about home pages.)
5. Find a list of the best local restaurants, or ratings and reviews of a particular kind of cuisine, preferably by locality (extra credit: user reviews). BTW: This is why Yelp is really hurting newspapers.
6. Find a local movie listing, or better yet, a local theater listing and review (extra credit: user reviews).
7. Find something a family can do for fun this weekend. 
8. Find any location mentioned on the site on a map—wait, no, you're not allowed to leave the site. No MapQuest or Google maps! 
9. Using the site's search function, search for a term you know appeared in the newspaper in the past 24 hours. 
10. Subscribe to your site's mobile alert function (you have one, right?) and see if it's truly useful. While you're at it, be sure to look at your site regularly on its iPhone or mobile version (you have one, right). Is it updated as frequently as the main site? 
11. Find something in the paper's archives.
12. How easy is it to e-mail a story, or print it out, or view it on a single page?  
13. Find a way to quickly contact a specific reporter, or an editor, or anybody at the paper. 
14. Find an ad you know is on the site. (This drives advertisers nuts, incidentally.) 
15. How easy is it to place a classified ad online—or to buy any kind of ad?
16. How easy is it to manage your print subscription online?
17. Using the site's search function, search for just about anything in the list above.
18. Now, try the same searches from Google.

I suspect very few traditional news sites will get even close to a passing grade on this test. You'll find that it takes four or five clicks to find that theater review and show time, or a list of the best restaurants (if it exists at all). You'll discover that there's no package of stories about the mayor. You'll be painfully aware of how inadequate your search function is. You'll see why your readers throw up their hands when they try to contact you with a problem, or to buy an ad. You'll realize that vast expanses of your site are all but invisible to Google.

Your readers already know all of this, and it drives them nuts—and it drives them away. These are basic blocking and tackling elements of good site design and usability, but newspaper sites—thrown together haphazardly over the years, without a good sense of what works on the Web and too many legacy bad habits from the print world—come up very, very short. This is how the increasing number of online-dominant readers view your news product. As John Temple said, you need to take a step back from print and view your site through their eyes.

Extra credit: This one's harder to do because it happens infrequently, but next time there's a major breaking news story in your area, try following it entirely through your site. If something's happening during the work day, that's where readers are going—not to local television. Similarly, if a major local news story breaks overnight, your site is the place people are going to look for information that's not going to make the next morning's paper.

There was an unfortunate example of the wrong way to cover breaking local news this week in Connecticut, where an ugly divorce-related hostage situation spilled over into the late-night hours. Most of the state's newspapers and TV stations didn't bother with it or used wires, but the Hartford Courant and New London Day sites stayed with it—up to a point. 

Even though the story's fiery ending came after midnight, the Courant's coverage weirdly signed off at about 10 pm (damn those Tribune Co. budget cuts). The Day stuck with it 'til the end, but its online coverage—like the Courant's abortive coverage—was disjointed, uneven and at times hard to comprehend, with copy that read like a strange combination of news story and newsblog, wild changes in tense, outdated information and an overwhelming sense that nobody in the newsroom was actually reading what was on the site. (And note to The Day: hitting "next" on a photo gallery should show the next photo, not reload the entire story page.) 

I'll bet traffic at both sites spiked because of interest in the dramatic situation. But the readers who came to those sites to find out what was going on deserved much better. Yes, a breaking news situation is hard to corral. But if you're going to try to cover breaking news online, think about serving the reader as well as possible, not just shoveling information onto the site and figuring you can clean it up in the next print edition. That's too way late.

This Just In: Michael Jackson, Still Dead

There's been a nagging suspicion in many enlightened journalistic quarters that the Michael Jackson story has been massively overplayed in the media, especially by TV news (even NBC Nightly News led with the story most nights last week, which was ridiculous). 

It was quite apparent that Baby Boomer media managers—out of touch with popular culture and audience interest, but obsessed with a performer from their youth who hasn't been relevant for years—were staying with the Jackson story even though they didn't understand that people really were over it. Indeed, Jeff Jarvis supplied some great data last week that showed that, measured by hard data on Internet searches and blog conversations, interest in all things Jackson had dropped precipitously after the first couple of days.

But the TV talking heads and cameras and helicopters droned on, providing unrelenting coverage on most of the major networks of a story that basically was over once the coroner declared the singer dead. This culminated with live coverage by most networks today of Jackson's funeral, in LA, replete with breathless predictions that hundreds of thousands of mourners would pack the streets around the Staples Center for his memorial service.

Um, not so much. The AP reports:

The traffic snarls and logistical nightmares that had been feared by police and city officials had not materialized. The thousands of fans with tickets began filing in early and encountered few problems, and traffic was actually considered by police to be lighter than normal.

"I think people got the message to stay home," said California Highway Patrol Officer Miguel Luevano. "When you have people staying home, it clears up those freeways."

Deputy Police Chief Sergio Diaz, operations chief for the event, said authorities had expected a crowd of 250,000. Besides reporters and those with tickets to the memorial service, the crowd around the Staples Center perimeter numbered only about 1,000, he said.

Only 1,000 people? When 250,000 were expected? That's some lousy predicting, but it was doubtless fed by media hype. We haven't seen the ratings yet on today's wall-to-wall coverage, but I suspect they're going to be similarly paltry (there's some indications of heavy Web traffic to streaming video of the memorial service, but that may reflect a curiosity factor that's going on while people are at work). Jackson's death was a big story, but it was over in a day or two. By sticking with it and flogging it, big media showed, once again, that it's out of step with its audience.

Update: Turns out the Jackson memorial service was boffo on the Internet. Go figure. But I suspect that had a lot to do with it happening while people were at work, and streaming the video on their office PCs. (Hell, I watched it, out of morbid curiosity.) As Dan Woog notes in the comments, Facebook saw a bunch of MJ-related activity, too, though nothing close to the Obama inauguration. But I think the lack of crowds in LA was very telling. And I hope that the story will just go away now. At least until the toxicology report is in!

Back in The New York Times This Week, Eight Letters (Hint: "Acrostic")

Two weeks ago, The New York Times pissed off its many acrostic puzzle fans—including myself—by omitting the biweekly acrostic from the printed Times Sunday Magazine. This shortsighted budget-cutting move was inspired by a reduction in the magazine's page size, which led to a decision to print the paper's weekly "variety" puzzle (which includes the acrostic) only when there was enough advertising in the magazine to make room for it.

Well, this weekend—traditionally one of the slowest advertising weekends of the year—somehow the Times found enough space to put the acrostic back into the magazine. Hurrah! I'm sure the many complaints the paper received from angry puzzle fans were merely a coincidence. Let's hope the acrostic is back to stay (and you can resume printing the other variety puzzles anytime, too, NYTers).

"Aged" News Indeed

David Kurtz in political blog Talking Points Memo makes a very good point:

If you read only the print edition of the New York Times, you would still not know anything about the Mark Sanford saga, according to my search of the paper's archives. Yet, right now it's the lead story on the paper's website, and has been, for better or worse, the dominant news story this week since The State first broke news late Monday afternoon that the governor was missing. Presumably, The Times will have a story in tomorrow's print edition, by which time the story will have bubbled, built, arced, and be on its way to fading out. That's not a criticism per se of The Times' news judgment. By the old standards, the story was arguably too undeveloped to warrant inclusion in The Times. But it points up the difficulty of keeping an old-line newspaper relevant to its better-informed readers.

I've written about this before: News happens—and is covered in online and electronic media—much faster than it can be printed. As a result, print newspapers feel increasingly out of date. Former newspaper editor John Temple, whose blog is just rocking these days, makes a similar point, noting that several papers led Wednesday's editions with President Obama's tougher stance on Iran—which actually was announced midday Tuesday:

This "news" in Wednesday's editions comes from a midday (Eastern Time) news conference on Tuesday. I heard it through the day on the radio and TV and read many updates on the Web, including on some of these papers' sites. Yet, still, this is what editors decide to deliver the next morning.

This is precisely what the Daily Show was saying when it did its devastating riff the other night on "aged" news in The New York Times. With more and more people getting their news online and from TV, in real time (or close to it), print newspapers are looking very "aged" indeed. As Temple says, this cries out for newspapers to really reinvent themselves. They have to find a way to provide deep context and analysis, or spin a story forward, or find stories (hint: local) that just aren't available anywhere else. Being 18 hours or more behind just doesn't cut it anymore.

A Crossed-Up Acrostic Fan

It's a dirty little secret that what journalists think is important in a newspaper isn't always the same sorts of things that readers find essential. Transfer the city hall reporter or lose an investigative star to another paper, and readers may barely notice. But try messing with the TV grid or the comics, and angry readers will storm the building with pitchforks and torches. Sorry, journalists. Those are the things a lot of readers really care about.

This reader is sharpening his pitchfork for an assault on the glitzy new New York Times headquarters building after the Times screwed around with the crossword puzzle lineup in its Sunday magazine this week. And it appears I'm hardly alone.

In reducing the page size of its Sunday mag by 9 percent earlier this month, the Times found itself unable to continue its traditional crosswords layout. The classic Sunday crossword puzzle is still there, but the smaller page size forced the Times to move the "variety" puzzles that ran below the main crossword, rotating among acrostic puzzles, cryptics, diagramless and others.

Those sorts of things are important to word-puzzle geeks like myself. My particular vice is the acrostic puzzle, which runs in the Times every other week and combines vocabulary skills with literary quotations (it's hard to explain; if you know acrostics, you know why they're such challenging fun). I really look forward to my biweekly acrostic fix in the Times magazine. So imagine my surprise when I picked up the magazine this past Sunday and....no acrostic. In its place on the main puzzle page was a bastardized version of Sudoku called KenKen (sorry, not even close to a substitute for a word puzzle), and unlike the week before, when the variety puzzle appeared a couple pages away, the acrostic was completely missing from the magazine. Instead, there was a line of very fine print directing acrostic fans to the Times crossword Web page.

Now, I'm all in favor of moving features from print to the Web, especially when they're widely available elsewhere or really don't particularly benefit from print publication (stock tables and sports stats, anyone?). It's a logical way to save money and newsprint. But going online-only with the acrostic is crazy, for a number of reasons.

As it happens, word puzzles are particularly well-suited to print—you can sit there with a pencil (or, heh-heh, pen) and fill in the blanks, assess all the clues and see patterns in the words. That's hard to duplicate online, especially with the crappy Java implementation of the acrostic on the Times' site. (It looks like something a kid put together in a high school programming class—and the kid would have picked better-looking colors.) And the Times didn't make it particularly easy to find the electronic acrostic, either, once it had directed people to its crossword page (here, you try. It's almost as challenging as the acrostic itself). Sure, you could print out a PDF version of the puzzle to do it on paper—but hey, I paid six bucks for Sunday's printed New York Times. I thought I was covering the cost of having them print the acrostic puzzle for me.

Yes, I sound like a crazed cruciverbalist fanboy on this subject, but I'm hardly alone. The comments section on the Times' Wordplay puzzle blog has lit up with complaints from other disenfranchised acrostic junkies, some of whom cattily pointed out that this omission of their favorite feature happened just as the Times raised its Sunday price a buck (oops). Letters are being written and e-mailed to the editors. Pitchforks and torches, anyone?

And it turns out that even the Times' staff itself didn't know what was going on: Times puzzle blogger Jim Horne initially responded to the reader complaints on the blog by saying he was sure the puzzle had been printed somewhere in this week's magazine (um, nope), and then Times puzzle editor Will Shortz chimed in to explain that the new policy is to print the variety puzzle—unless it's determined that there isn't enough advertising in a particular issue of the magazine to provide editorial space for it. Turns out this was one of those weeks. Given the current advertising/economic environment, we could be in for a lot of those weeks. "It's my understanding that the variety puzzles will reappear once the advertising increases," Shortz wrote. Don't hold your breath.

And so, The Times is discovering what's really important to many of its readers. It will be interesting to see how the paper reacts. (Hint: The magazine's idiotic Ethicist column would be an excellent sacrificial lamb.) But somehow I suspect the acrostic will be back in print long before the advertising increases—if it ever does. You mess with reader favorites at your peril. That's no puzzle.

PS: More on the missing acrostic from Richard Turner at WSJ.com's Speakeasy blog.

How Sick is Gannett?

Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy. So are the owners of the Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, New Haven Register and many smaller newspapers. McClatchy is trying to refinance its debt. The New York Times Co. is struggling with its financial obligations.

And now it looks like industry giant Gannett may be in trouble. TheDeal.com, crunching Gannett's numbers, suggests that the company is facing a $400 million debt payment within two years that it may have trouble paying. "Gannett as we know it will be lucky to last through June 2011," the financial news site suggests. Uh-oh.

The full, highly detailed analysis is worth a read. Like McClatchy, New York Times Co. and others, Gannett has been operating with a load of debt, in part because of acquisitions over the years, but the falloff in the newspaper business isn't generating enough cash to make the payments. Kind of like if you take out a huge mortgage on your house and then have a sharp drop in income. 

This is why Gannett's debt is rated as "junk" by the Wall Street ratings firms. The current credit crisis is just making the situation worse—it's all but impossible for big companies to refinance debt these days, especially big companies that own lots of printing presses that just aren't printing money like they used to. The Deal concludes that Gannett is going to have to do something radical, such as defaulting on the bonds to try to force a restructuring by its lenders. As we've seen in Philadelphia and Minneapolis, that's a tactic that could put the behemoth publisher into bankruptcy court.

This will be interesting to watch. Late last week, Gannett CEO Craig Dubow announced that he'll be taking a four-month leave of absence to deal with back problems, news that further rattled Wall Street, even as rumors circulated of more cuts and layoffs at the company. I wonder if Gannett itself will follow Dubow onto the disabled list.

The People Have Spoken

Nothing really new here, except that the numbers are becoming overwhelming: a new Zogby poll finds that most Americans prefer the Internet as a news source—more so than newspapers, TV and radio combined. Oh, and they consider the Internet more reliable than those other media, as well.

As if that wasn't bad enough news for the traditionalists, get this: only 1 in 200 of those surveyed—you read that right, 1 in 200, or one half of 1 percent—believe that newspapers will be a "dominant source" of news within five years. Would somebody please remember to turn out the lights in the pressroom?

Some interesting breakdowns within the numbers, though. Newspaper Web sites do well, with 41 percent of respondents describing them as important sources of news. Facebook scored 10 percent; Twitter scored 4 percent.

The usual caveats: 3,000 respondents, 1.8 percent margin of error. But that's still not enough to make the future of newspapers look any brighter. The readers are voting with their feet—or their fingertips and mice.

Hat tip to Greg Sterling for spotting this.

Upwardly Mobile, Pt. 2: What Works

Just as it was stupid to paste a newspaper onto a computer screen, it's dumb to assume that what works on the Web works on a cellphone screen. They're very different.

In the first part of this two-part post, I described the explosive growth in the delivery of news and information to mobile devices such as cellphones and smartphones—and why newspapers and other local news organizations need to jump quickly into the mobile fray with sophisticated products that have real potential for advertising and even subscription revenue. In this part, I look at what works (and doesn't) in mobile—and why it's different from news and information delivery on the Web.

What really distinguishes mobile is immediacy and location. You want news and info you can use immediately to make a decision—to reroute your trip home because of a traffic jam, to find out about a fast-breaking story or sports score, or to search and find a restaurant, an entertainment venue or a local business. The phone in your hand is your direct pipeline to solving problems right here, right now, and mobile-enabled services have to recognize that. It's the purest definition of the old "news you can use" chestnut.

That breaks down when news organizations aren't smart about what they provide mobile users. I'm a subscriber to WashingtonPost.com's local text alerts, for instance, which veer wildly between traffic and weather bulletins (generally very useful) and not-particularly-time-dependent local news headlines (not very useful, and generally limited to District of Columbia news rather than the Washington suburbs where most of the Post's audience lives). The Post's iPhone-enabled site is fairly slick, but it isn't updated frequently enough: While the text alert service was prompt in delivering results of Virginia's gubernatorial primary election this week, the WashingtonPost.com iPhone app was hours behind with the news. The Post's mobile products are also very lazy about redirecting users to the Web site for more information (a lost opportunity) and do nothing with advertising (lost revenue!).

That's a case study in how not to do mobile news, or at least how to do it poorly. On the other side of the ledger is Tampa Bay Online's ambitious mobile service, which slices and dices local traffic and weather information (the latter very important in hurricane-prone Florida) down to the local town level, so that users get exactly what they want and need in those areas. It even provides localized radar weather maps.

Tim Repsher, who oversees mobile services for Tampa Bay Online and its parent company, Media General, says the secret to a good mobile strategy is "news and information, wherever, anytime, anywhere." A mobile user is "looking for something I want to know right now. ... I want to know things as they happen." And that information has to be immediately useful and actionable—not something that can easily wait to be read later. Art Howe, whose Verve Wireless supplies mobile services to Media General and many other newspaper companies, echoes that sentiment: What works in mobile, he says, is "stuff that is immediate to peoples' lives. It's stuff that helps you through your day and your life."

Along those lines, mobile users want to be able to use their phones to search for restaurants, businesses and the like, preferably with reviews and other information (this is why Yelp's iPhone application is so good). Other things that work: Personalized classifieds notifications (e.g. the car you're looking for just popped into the classifieds database), hot deals, sports scores—even high school football results: Media General's WSAV-TV in Savannah signed up booster clubs at 44 high schools to provide real-time football play-by-play via text messages, and gave the boosters a piece of the associated ad revenue to keep them properly motivated. Smart.

Repsher emphasizes that Media General doesn't see mobile as a standalone business. "We use mobile to always draw people back into the core product," he says. "Mobile is supplemental to all your efforts, all your products. It should never be standalone." Media General also uses mobile services to help reporters and photographers file stories and photos, to update liveblogs and Twitter, to solicit and gather user-generated content, and even to help advertisers build their own mobile services. Oh yeah—Repsher also says the company's mobile business is "very profitable," with a very aggressive ad-sales effort.

That's a sophisticated mobile strategy, one that other papers and local news organizations should be studying and emulating. Just as the Web did 15 years ago, mobile is really taking off as a news and information delivery platform, and it may even prove to be more ubiquitous than the Web (the notorious "digital divide" doesn't seem to be affecting mobile growth, so seemingly everybody has—or will have soon—a cellphone or smartphone in their pocket). Perhaps even more so than the Web—and as a direct replacement for the portability of newsprint—smart mobile products give newspapers a chance to retighten their loosening grip on local audiences and advertisers.

PS: The NAA is doing webinars on mobile strategies.

Upwardly Mobile, Pt. 1

If you work at a news organization, what's your mobile strategy? You'd better have one. And it probably needs to be a lot better than it is.

Fifteen years after the Web forced newspapers to rethink the way they publish information and deal with readers and advertisers, mobile news is posing a similar challenge. The ability for readers to get news headlines, sports scores, traffic updates, search results for local entertainment venues and businesses, traffic and weather bulletins and so much more on their cellphones is changing news and information presentation and distribution almost as much as the Web did.

The numbers on mobile growth are explosive. Just about everybody's got a cellphone these days that will at least accept text messages; smartphones like Apple's iPhone, Palm's new Pre and the various flavor of Blackberries are proliferating, and offering many more ways to deliver information to people on the go. According to The Kelsey Group, 54 million Americans now access the Web on their smartphones; Nielsen estimates that about 40 percent of those regularly check their phones for news. And the vast majority of the news and information that people want on their phones is local: traffic, weather, local entertainment info, business searches, deals. "We believe that the mobile Web is a local medium," says Art Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless, one of the leading providers of mobile news services to newspapers.

Moreover, mobile usage numbers are going straight up.  Howe says his business is increasing at a rate of about 50 percent a month, and he expects to be serving about 1 billion mobile pages monthly by the end of this year. That's "crazy growth," he says. Indeed. The New York Times alone is doing 60 million mobile page views a month (double the rate a year ago), and its iPhone app has been downloaded 2 million times. CNN has 11.6 million unique mobile users. These are serious numbers for what's a fairly new medium.

Most significantly, mobile advertising is increasing, too. Kelsey Group estimates that advertising on local mobile information services will hit $3.1 billion by 2013, a 20-fold increase over 2008. I'll bet that's a conservative guess. The CPMs for local mobile ads are particularly high, too. "Advertising is really starting to lift off on a local level," Howe says. And based on experiences with cell services in general and the iPhone App Store in particular, there are encouraging signs that consumers will actually pay for mobile content and services, because of its immediacy and value and because, unlike the Web, they haven't really been conditioned (yet) to get it for free. Ooh! A subscription model!

So news organizations, especially local news organizations, need to jump on the mobile bandwagon. But many haven't. Ask a gathering of newspaper people who's got a mobile strategy (I've heard that question posed at a couple of conferences recently) and you tend to get ... crickets. Or they've done a quickie "lite" version of their Web site to optimize it for a smaller smartphone screen, or they're blasting headlines indiscriminately via text messages, sans any advertising or business model. That's boring and dumb, and too reminiscent of the unsophisticated way that newspapers moved onto the Web 15 years ago. Mobile users, especially on smartphones, want much more, and the growth demands more sophisticated approaches.

Ironically, mobile is a particularly good fit for what newspapers have traditionally done best: covering local news. It wipes out one of online news' biggest perceived disadvantages—a lack of portability. For years I heard that digital news couldn't compete with printed newspapers because, well, you can't read news on a computer while sitting on the toilet. Well, the iPhone pretty much kills that argument. Indeed, portability is one of print's clear remaining advantages—but mobile devices match that, and add immediacy, interactivity, search and so much more.

But mobile is a very different medium than print or the Web, and consumers have very different expectations about the kinds of information they want delivered to their phones and how they want it delivered. In my next installment, I'll take a look at a few things that work—and a few things that don't. If you're going to be a player in mobile—and you'd better be, because it's primarily a local medium, particularly well-suited to newspapers and other local media—you'd better get it right. And fast.

The Daily Show and The New York Times

The Daily Show's skewering of the newspaper business in general and The New York Times in particular was spectacular. Highlight—though some might not see it exactly that way: Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones asking Timesman Rick Berke to point out one thing in the "aged news" print newspaper that actually happened today. Um, um, um...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Not pretty. But as we used to say in the newsroom in a slightly different context, truth is a defense. And in this case, savagely funny as hell.