Pretty hard to argue with Nieman Journalism Lab’s headline:
Click to read Nieman’s summary.
The whole leaked report is worth a read, if you’re interested. [I downloaded it, and ran it through Adobe Acrobat Pro to de-skew and OCR the text. If you want a copy of that file (~20 MB) drop me a line — address at the ‘About‘ page — and I’ll send you a Dropbox link.]
One theme that emerged is how aggregators like The Huffington Post, parasitically plunder the NY Times‘ expensively-produced original journalism, then use more savvy and aggressive social media tools to gather web traffic to themselves … with the ‘digital pick-pockets’ even evincing some queasiness for their victim.
Now The Huffington Post regularly outperforms us in these areas – sometimes even with our own content. An executive there described watching the aggregation outperform our original content after Nelson Mandela’s death. “You guys got crushed, he said. “I was queasy watching the numbers. I’m not proud of this. But this is your competition. You should defend the digital pick-pockets from stealing your stuff with better headlines, better social.”
The main thing I got from the report — whether I’m right or not — is that the NY Times sees itself as an institution, with a legacy to protect, and its competitors are more nimble, entrepreneurial and less wedded to the values of modesty and ‘straightness’, reliability etc of the traditional newspaper approach.
For the large part, with exceptions, the internet and its various echo chambers have brought about a dumbing down of news, in my opinion. Lowest common denominator. There’s also excellence. Like a wolf pack, the hungrier, more aggressive wolves will dominate.
The Huffington Post may have the traffic (it’s a long time since I’ve been there, and I used to go a lot when it was a political website — before it got hooked into ‘lifestyle’ and celebrity news) but not the reputation.
That’s not a howl of anguish. What is, is.
There’s a lot more to it. As I said: worth a read.
– P
What is fascinating about that report (in my view) is that they are still thinking about their audience as being passive consumers who will market for them in social media areas for no apparent reason. In fact a lot of it reads like material from my MBA 30 years ago.
If there is a single thing that distinguishes the way the net operates from traditional broadcast models like TV and newspapers, it is that intelligent (and sometimes unintelligent eg comments in Whaleoil) participation and feedback drives the system.
I’d comment on how these processes have operated on the net for the last 30 odd years at multiple levels from programmers desperately seeking coding information, to the current chattering levels between people that drives modern marketing. But it usually falls on deaf ears. So I’ll just point to a single graph.
At TS, we’ve never marketed, we don’t appear anywhere in broadcast media out of preference. Yet we regularly have a average audience of over 40k people in a month and steadily increasing. We offer personal opinions rather than “news”, however it isn’t that that draws people.
This is a graph of the last 10500 page views from our site (ie less than 24 hours including the overnight).
The “less than 5 seconds” includes everyone who clicked on the site, read something for some unknown time, and left to go somewhere else (you can’t figure out a duration from a single entry).
But even so 34.5% of the audience were on the standard for more than an hour. Which means they left it open and were participating at least once in every half hour.
It is called a conversation where people interact. It is what the net does best.
You don’t get it when newspaper put up a story and then provide a simple over-moderated comments section in which the author doesn’t participate and by all accounts seldom bothers to read.
You don’t get feedback when you live in an ivory tower.
Thanks for your comment Lynn. Interesting, and yes, I agree with the distinction you’re making about a ‘conversation’ driving ‘engagement’ vs despatches from an ivory tower.
I don’t see your website, or those like it, as ‘competition’ in a professional sense for a newspaper.
Sure, granted, Attention is the New Currency yada yada
but The Standard (or The Paepae) isn’t where I would ‘go’ for news or journalism.
I’ve written before about how some PR bloggers mimic or ape the language markers of news journalism in their efforts to spin and lead opinion, or just smear their champions’ opponents.
see: http://www.thepaepae.com/i’d-double-check-if-they-told-me-what-day-it-was/23492/
So, again, Kiwiblog and Whale Oil aren’t ‘news sites’ … they are parasitic pick-pockets (as is The Paepae, ahem, I admit it) but they/we don’t compete with, say, The NZ Herald (despite some fantasies to the contrary) in the same way say, Politico, Slate, Salon, Daily Beast & Huffington Post — online news sites — are competitors for The NY Times or Washington Post.
I’d be interested in hearing who the NZ Herald considers its online rivals to be (besides Fairfax/stuff, obviously). Any ideas?
The issue for ‘legacy’ newspaper institutions is dwindling advertising income, no?
– P
Nor do I. We’re something different that grew out of the net and specifically out of the BBS / usenet.
But the basics of how you market depends on the means available to you. Essentially we market by “word-of-mouth”, and in a digital age that means links being passed from person to person, from blog-to-blog, from facebook/twitter et al with *comment* attached, and finally from the search engine.
What I was more looking at in that report as the language about where the NYT was focusing their attention towards. In my opinion, they completely missed why the huffpost et al were getting the audiences attention. They just ignored the extremely active debate that happens below the journalists pieces at the Slate and the HuffPost (the only ones that I spend any time on).
They are composites between a news organisation, and a good old internet debating forum like an active blog / usenet / BBS. The internet site is what places like the NYT or NZH simply haven’t realised that they need to foster in any useful way.
The report really just focused on the headlines and news packaging because even where they were talking about facebook and twitter, they missed that the sender usually has to send an argument before it becomes interesting enough for others to open. Instead they diverted into questions about the quality of the headline.
The same missing of the obvious applies with comments on any story. Comments that get no reaction are destined to echo in a empty chamber of pompous blowhards talking past each other (BTW: Pete George is an excellent example of this effect wherever he chooses to go). When I read the comments on the Herald, this is what I see.
So they lose the entire effect of having comments and interaction between commenters and between authors and commenters pushing the quality of the authors performance in research and writing.
But they also miss the effect of having people getting engaged in the debate and spreading it out amongst their friends with a link back the the source. Now I don’t mean the faux attention stuff of “I won here” or the strident faux outrage that you sometimes see from the blowhards (I never read them myself). It is usually the ones that say “I am uncertain about how I feel about this” that cause the largest spikes in referrals.
The problem is for the newspapers is that the news medium is saturated with content, the majority of it being PR in one massaged form or another. Modern generations have grown up distrusting it because of that. What they are looking for is the arguments about what it all means, and preferably to get involved in having something to say about it themselves. And they’re interesting more in what they can do themselves.
That is what you see in the evolution of everything to do with the net from email through to cell blips. It is personal.
The eventual result of all of this person to person information sharing is going to be interesting long-term. Because I suspect it is going to cause a *real* fundamental shift in how people operate in a global world. It already has in the IT world.
Incidentally if you want to see the future of peer to peer information then you should look at a programmers area like ummm http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month – read a few questions with a reasonable number of kviews and reasonable numbers of answers. What invariably happens is some pretty rapid problem solving with a whole lot of education going on at the same time about differing approaches.
Yes, good point about the evolution of online discussion ‘forums’ … in my own case, Compuserve user groups/special interest groups, and before that, Wellington Apple User Group bulletin boards … and I agree that news media in the ’90s, & early ’00s were largely absent from that ‘fringe’ world.
The disdain (I think that’s an apt word) that I think many in news journalism by and large held for usenet groups etc, with their ‘flame wars’ and trolls, and the huge variety from alt.sex, D&D games, to witchcraft threads saw an ignorance, dismissiveness and a distancing.
This lack of engagement with web (and pre-web) communities meant a lack of the skills & understanding of the culture required to encourage, cultivate, host and moderate online communities — including discussion, comments … particularly anonymous comments. That’s one of your strengths, it seems to me, and it’s a learned skill — it doesn’t come from nowhere, and can’t just be bolted on, in my view.
Huffington Post, my criticisms aside, was built by Jonah Peretti, Andrew Breitbart, Kenneth Lerer (look at their online pedigree!) and Arianna Huffington, who is one smart and determined media person. And it’s evolved.
I must admit, I struggled to cope with aspects of the dynamics of online discussion too, when I first engaged at the PropertyTalk discussion forum. I’ve always posted in my own name, and felt deeply suspicious, by default, of anonymous or pseudonymous commenters (I called them ‘glove puppets’ not knowing the nomenclature was ‘sock-puppet’).
I also had to learn the downside of my own contributions being moderated (the horror!) and the moderators and the hosts/owners of the site dealing with heated discussion, legal threats and business pressure the best way they knew how … which, astonishingly to me, led them to actually censor (as in REMOVE) some of the highest-read discussion threads. [see: http://www.thepaepae.com/?s=propertytalk ]
One of the tricky aspects of Newspapers going online and hosting potentially defamatory/inflammatory discussion (especially anonymous ‘spray & walk away’) is that by nature, their enterprises are a target big enough to sue — unlike most ‘new media’ websites, yours & mine included.
This aspect, naturally, often leads to a conservative, risk-averse approach to what they are willing to ‘publish’. The NZ Herald has more at stake than The Standard.
In my experience, reporters and editors can be bloody-minded, defiant and determined in protecting their own words & allegations … they’re naturally not so protective of a drive-by-shooter’s words & allegations.
Anyway, good points about ‘engagement’. Interesting. There’s more I could say, but … another time.
– P
As far as a moderator is concerned it makes absolutely no difference. We don’t know who in the hell you are. We really don’t care if you call yourself lprent or Lynn Prentice or AncientGeek. We’re interested in your behaviour in our space.
They’re all just handles. The ultimate punishment in online forums is to dump someones long fought reputation as their handle gets banned. There is nothing as outright frustrating as watching the discussion going on without you, and frequently about you. Most don’t even bother starting a new identity even where it is possible.
Too much work – descending into anarchy. You just arbitrarily shut it down. Works a treat. Less work next time when you mention that you’re getting irritated or you wish to change a rule to eliminate a problem.
The problem with popular online media isn’t the system itself. It is the art of the operators being known to not be worried about popularity inside the site and having a somewhat draconian attitude to modifying behaviour when they feel it is required.
People who over-use that level of control lose their audience over time. People who under-use it lose the audience to the mindless yammering of knuckleheads – who drift when they find out they don’t like yammerheads. People who aren’t aware of the outside world start spending time in court and with the police.
It gets fascinating seeing spaces like twitter, facebook, huff etc going through the exact procedures that long since permeated other online spaces.
They are also big enough to employ full-time moderators. In fact they already do – dumb anonymous ones, ones who don’t provide the feedback required to establish behavioural requirements. People don’t respect systems. They respect personality and bloodymindedness. The newspaper sites that I’ve looked clearly have no understanding of how people operate.
The point is that it is easy to avoid liability. You warn, redact and take-down/ban. But you have to do it long enough and consistently enough that the culture of behaviour builds up. Then the number of times people will step out of the bounds diminishes dramatically.
Exactly the same social issues have been solved in many areas from bars, to police techniques (ever look at the ratio of police to people here, they have manuals about how to control random strangers?) to the army (ever consider what a flamewar would look like in a barracks without NCOs?) to the net (there are at least 2500 regular commentators at TS – and I barely have to moderate these days).
The real problem is that newspapers aren’t the type of organisation who have had to deal with people in groups. They have very little institutional knowledge. They also appear to be a bit distraught at the idea they might need to in order to survive their loss of the classified advertising.
We’re also completely bloody minded about protecting our authors. From both the occasional silly legal threats, but also from malevolent commentators. We’re completely bloody-minded about protecting the site and the way discussions are held there.
There are quite a lot of people who have had their ability to comment removed for exactly those reasons. In a very few cases they have found that they can no longer even view the site. These aren’t public spaces like a park or a road. These are privately owned areas who allow guests to use the space if they follow our rules. One of those rules is to not insult your hosts, and another is to not cause your hosts harm.
The effect is that after 6 and half years with more than 17 thousand posts and 730,000 comments about the areas of life that make people mad and upset, we still haven’t had a legal threat beyond the odd lawyer trying it on with a letter. It isn’t that likely that we will be because we’re highly protective, quite legally aware, and not stupid. We also have a well trained set of commenters who know the things that are expected and tell us when something violates them – including when we do it.
Which again comes back to feedback and why the newspapers are going to need to learn some new tricks.
What an interesting discussion!
Well, I find it so … How those running online communities work at moderating heated, sometimes acrimonious discussions, accusation/counter-accusation etc while keeping the balance between too-tight-or-too-loose is something I’ve thought about … and been on the sharp end of.
I remember reaching a point in 2008 — just before I started my own blog in some frustration at the restraints — where I saw the Mods at PropertyTalk caving in to concerted collective activism by some of those subject to pointed criticism on the forum (some of who were advertisers at the site) to ‘clean up’ (i.e. censor) the discussion which they felt exposed negative aspects of their marketing claims and track records.
It reached a point where long-standing, previously moderated discussion threads with hundreds of posts and thousands of views were excised — I called it ‘ex-Sponged’, in reference to one of the threads about a failed subdivision promoted by a couple of infamous spruikers who promoted themselves heavily on the website. The thread was “removed for consideration”. It’s gone.
In the lead up to their capitulation and holus-bolus removal of such threads (discussed briefly here: http://www.thepaepae.com/ad-blockers-not-the-problem/2543/ and http://www.thepaepae.com/the-peasants-are-revolting/3022/ ) the Moderators had decided on a strategy of deleting multiple ‘offending’ posts, then putting contentious posters on a watch list which delayed their posts appearing (if approved, in same cases never appearing) and, from my POV, giving the complainants/advertisers an easy ride in terms their own replies … sometimes in an unbalanced way. This behaviour drove some posters away forever, just as you say.
Being the ‘let’s discuss this’ type, and greatly valuing my experience at PropertyTalk over the previous 5 years, I persisted in trying to understand what was going on and explain my way of looking at the ‘muzzling’ and banning of longtime members. I remember saying (futilely, it seemed to me)
From this discussion: http://www.propertytalk.com/forum/showthread.php?16388-Where-is-xris
The concerted pressure, psychological warfare and threats of threats of legal action from the United Federation of Property Spruikers which led to the censorship … and the effort to resist it led to this comment from a Mod: “…moderation has become a tiring, unrewarding chore trying to keep everyone happy.” http://www.propertytalk.com/forum/showthread.php?25133-Sponge-Bay-thread-disappeared
And, yeah, that’s an important factor.
It seems to me bullies sometimes wear reasonable people out.
Now, from running this (very modest) site, I’ve learned more about the need to protect the ecology of the site and I feel responsible to protect people from unrestrained drive-by shootings etc. I have nothing like the volume of discussion – not a tiny fraction – at PropertyTalk or The Standard, but I’ve had to ban a troll who just kept, annoyingly, accusing me of stuff which i had point-blank denied, and I have used the moderation controls to make sure I approve each and every comment some people make. I ‘disapprove’ very little.
Anyway, your point, as I read it: that Newspaper websites have neglected the ‘discussion forum’ culture that would drive more engagement, interaction & traffic …. and they do this at their peril … is worthwhile.
Like you, I watched the Huffington Post’s blossoming & evolving online comment community … first Wild West, then various community-moderation efforts (badges etc) and tougher censorship. I don’t know how they do it now, because I don’t go there. But, they’re winners in that space, according to the NY Times report.
No such thing as a free lunch. If they want the community they’ll have to do the work.
I saw what I regarded as a pretty fair comment recently from Cameron Slater’s wife Juana in the aftermath of his recent win at the Canon Media Awards, wherein she ascribed the whale oil website’s success (However you measure that. It has apparently very high traffic figures) to, among other things, ‘hard hard work’, ‘working 7am to Midnight 7 days a week!’ and a willingness to publish comments which disagree with him, and post what the audience wants.
Well, ‘right wing work ethic’, that’s telling Martyn, isn’t it? 🙂
– P
That particular attitude is always a trap, the idea isn’t to make other people happy. Ultimately there is one basic rule at TS – the old role of “keep the sysop happy” from the bastard operator from hell days. It is pretty effective.
Now I happen to be the sysop. But it is distinctly a role or a facet of my personality for me rather than expressing the whole of my personality. I use different roles for everything I do; from home, extended family, work coding, work mentoring, work managing, writing on other forums, and even when I am operating inside TS as an author or commenter.
The sysop is happy when the policy and its backing document the about is being adhered to. Those were written long ago largely by the author group in 2007 and 2008. We tweak them when something comes up that isn’t covered or isn’t clear. But we haven’t needed to touch them for a few years.
The resemblance between a sysop and a judge interpreting and *being constrained* by law is not coincidental. It is a social model that has a lot of history to show that it works. Paradoxically the restraints of freedom that it represents, actually provide more freedom within the constraints.
Exactly. My suspicion is that all online systems will wind up with active and involved online communities attached to them. Otherwise they’re get done by systems where people can get involved and feel part of the community.
The other lesson you get from looking at online communities is that you can evolve your community, but pushing radical shifts of direction tends to be disastrous. It is better to figure out what will and won’t happen early. That is what makes the current reddit debates interesting (surprisingly stuff had something on it today).
Frankly I completely distrust his traffic figures. However if you look at the number of comments on RSS (something that is a lot harder to manipulate), the recent 4 weekly numbers are something like
Whaleoil ~23k
Kiwiblog ~16k
The Standard ~15k
The Daily Blog ~3.8k
I’d give the actual figures, however I’m away from that system at present. The quality of the comments is of course a different matter. But lets ignore that for the moment.
You can hardly deny that Cameron is a hard worker. And he exposes the slave grinding philosophy of the now defunct Truth pretty well. However he is also highly unproductive.
My total average time on TS per day is well less than 2 hours. Much of it is done while I’m engaged in other activities like TV or listening the news or waiting for a compile/process/copy/upgrade to run at work. The same applies to all of our authors in varying amounts.
The combined total of the hours spent on TS by all authors, moderators, and me is going to be well less than a half and maybe as low as a quarter of the time that J says Cameron spends on his site.
Why? I’m holding down a fulltime job that typically takes between 50 and 60 hours per week. It is usually more fun than running a blog and certainly pays a lot better. I have done a lot of external volunteer work and I leave room open for more of that. Then there is family, friends etc. But mostly I like to have a lot of time to hang out and do whatever I want to. Like my sunday ritual of reading The Economist with a lox bagel and a few coffees at Blake Street – which this comment interrupted.
The same applies in varying degrees to everyone else on the site. We aren’t trying to build a “news medium” or depending on TS for an income. We’re doing it as a hobby and because we feel like it. Authors come, authors go (we have more than 50 with logins) and the hardest work is usually to show them the standard with which they have to setup their posts.
Personally I absolutely detest hard work and particularly the repetitive hard work of the type that Juana is glorifying. As far as I’m concerned it usually indicates a failure of intelligence. Repetitive hard work is something that machines should do and using humans as dumb machines is the probably the nearest I’d ever view as being a sin requiring eternal damnation. It is akin to slavery. And I tend to regard those who inflict or self-inflict it as rather inhuman.
So everything on TS is designed for productivity and getting the most out of minimal workloads. It leaves us all more time for getting into the other things that need doing.
Ha! I laughed at this:
… because that’s fine for a blog, and indeed, practically, for most other avenues for discussion BUT if one chooses to self-promote as ‘Free and Independent’ and publish a list of ‘rules’ about how it’s all going to work, then I think the community (the real community, not fly-by-nighters) is owed some consistency, for their voice to be heard and for change to be on an evolution rather than revolution basis.
None of my comments should be seen as ‘hating’ on my beloved PropertyTalk forum or the Mods there. They blew it, in my opinion, and bowed to the bullies/commercial interests, introducing censorship and sanitising public comments in an unseemly vaguely Stockholm Syndrome fashion. But so what?
I value hearing your interpretation of the issues from your POV, and appreciate you being so candid about your approach. I enjoyed the policy & about pages for The Standard — clearly you guys have thought about it and evolved/responded.
This
just made me laugh.
—
Well, *if* Cameron Slater is gaming the click-counting system, I wouldn’t expect Juana would know about it.
As for the “hard hard work”, yeah, well, as I have observed before: manic, if not demonic energy. Not my game.
Cameron’s obvious aping of the widely-admired-and-almost-as-widely-copied Andrew Sullivan (‘Face of the Day’, ‘Mental Health Break’ etc) were a good idea. The stream of ‘Trivia’ and best of YouTube doesn’t suit me so much, but meh.
I guess my own traffic to whale oil drives up his clicks — often, to tell the truth, these days I end up there because bloody John Drinnan 🙂 links to the site on Twitter fairly regularly. (Maybe too regularly, JD?)
Watching the Len Brown affair story spiral out of control into a ‘right-wing sleaze merchants plot to blackmail the mayor-elect’ and ‘What did John Palino know and when did he know it?’ and the whole ‘Can you believe what a scumbag this Young Nat/not Young Nat Luigi Wewege turned out to be?’ controversy was, let’s face it, entertaining.
Even more so as Cameron got more and more spittle-flecked and bombastic about the whole thing. (But loving the attention, naturally. Fair enough.)
Cameron *IS* a sleaze merchant, and there’s a market for that. Perhaps his Canon win will mean he (and Carrick & Simon) can “demand” more money for their PR attack blog’s hatchet-jobs?
– P