In order to compete you must cooperate

That statement seems counterintuitive, but hear me out.

Consider the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic study in game theory:

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 1 year	I go free, you get 5 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 5 years	We both serve 3 years

Let’s say you and I rob a bank. We’re brought into separate interrogation rooms and the cops give us options: snitch on the other guy and go free or keep quiet and risk getting 3 years if we both snitch or 5 if only one of us snitches. Can you trust me? Can I trust you?

Obviously the matrix has arbitrary numbers. The worst case scenario for both of us is if we both snitch on each other, serving a total of 6 years, the best is if we both keep quiet, serving a total of 2 years.

What if we changed the matrix?

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 3 years	I go free, you get 10 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 10 years	We both serve 4 years

Let’s assume we were terribly arrogant about our bank robbing prowess or just stupid like most criminals and didn’t come up with a contingency for this scenario. Since we don’t know what the other person will do, we have to base our decision on some simple logic.

It’s now most beneficial for both of us to take our chances and point the finger. At best we go free, at worst we serve only 8 years total. This disparity in this fictional legal system gives us a positive expectation value to snitch. By snitching we can expect to only spend 2 years prison or a total of 4 years divided by 2 outcomes. By not snitching, we expect 6.5 years in prison or a total of 13 years divided by two outcomes. Obviously, we have to assume these options would be given to us ad infinitum to beat variation to get these numbers, but in the short term it makes sense.

Mathematically it looks like this:

Snitching = 0 + 4 years / 2 possibilities = 2 years.

Not snitching = 10 + 3 years / 2 possibilities = 6.5 years.

Without worrying too much about silly math games, the point is that the matrix changed in our favor (insert obvious The Matrix reference here). Duh. Change happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. No matter which way it breaks, you have to adapt.

Change happened to our industry and now we can’t continue making the same decisions. If we continue to keep quiet, we’re making a bad decision in the long run. We have to adapt our way of thinking to a new world model. We shouldn’t ask how change happened or what we could have done to stop it–the world we live in is a much more mathematically complex place than these games–we should ask how we can leverage our situation now.

Now consider the Tragedy of the Commons.

I have a cow. You have a cow. We all have cows. And we all live in a community where we raise our cows on our own lawns. We drink their milk and what we don’t use, we turn into cheese and trade for other items like bread, meat, Wii consoles and Diaper Genies.

But one day, I get the bright idea that I can take my cow out to pasture in the common park. I do this at night, in secret, while the rest of you play Wii and raise babies. My cow does much better than your cows and starts producing more and more excess milk, which I sell to buy cooler Wii games and expensive meats. As long as I can keep this secret to myself, I’m going to do better than you.

But then one day someone I like, say, Howard Owens, comes over to my house. He asks, “Hey man, how do you afford all these delicious meats?” I decide to let Howard in on my secret and he starts producing more cheese and eventually buys some sweet gold chains. He tells Ryan Sholin and Ryan blogs about it, spilling the beans to everybody. The common park fills up with all kinds of people and their cows. It has been democratized and we’re back to where we started, except now we ruined the park. You ruined everything, Ryan…

That’s the old way to think of media. We had a few people hogging the park, dominating communication and most of us were stuck there watching from our homes. The park had certain barriers to entry (like broadcast licenses or high costs of production). That’s just not the case with the Web.

We live in a post scarcity economy (a.k.a. abundance economy) now. Now, grass that’s already been eaten by some cows still has value to cows, forever. The grass never goes away and grass grows every day. It’s always green for the cows that want it, so long as you don’t put up a fence (which is futile). But this new world gets crazier, your cows can now occupy more space faster. They can be two places at once. Your patch of grass can also be your neighbors’ patches at the same time. These cows can teleport, man. It’s nuts out there.

Ground Zero

The old investment edict “buy land because they’re not making it anymore” no longer applies to our community. All because of a little number: Zero.

Gone are the days of false scarcity (i.e. airwaves, static parks) and expensive resources (i.e. ink, paper and shipping) where the prices continue to rise. The falling costs of technology make distribution easier. Chris Anderson recently wrote about this phenomena in this Wired article and he’s been working through the problem for quite some time on his blog. As bandwidth, storage and processing power drop in price, they approach zero in cost and we’re free to waste it by giving away free email, free video hosting, free content, free software, free everything. Obviously the cost of bandwidth, storage and processors isn’t technically zero, but because of the shear volume of it there’s an economy of scale where it’s more valuable to give one product away in exchange for market share and (this is the tricky part) find something else of value to profit from.

If you want to learn more about how free economies work, Mike Masnick covers free in a fun series here.

Free works best in the aggregate for companies like Google who don’t need to worry about how to create content. They just sort data and make it easier to find. For those of us in the paragraph factories, we must find a way to make our content easier to find. But it goes beyond search engine optimization and findability once you’ve got people on your site. You must control a niche (i.e. local news, or regional farming, gadgets, anything). To do that, you must cull the best from others, be where you’re readers are and help your readers help you. That means being a part of a community.

Listen to your mother: share

I know I keep harping about this, but we have to get in front of the conversations going on out there. The whole damn point of the Internet is share media and to “create copies,” as Kevin Kelly puts it; Content can be two–or two million–places at once. Be where your readers are. Unbundle your media. Separate it from your site. Ignore copyright. It sounds like heresy. Creating and controlling information has always been our bread and butter. It still is, but the game has changed. Distribution pipes no longer work and any attempt to fake them on the Web only obfuscates our inevitable failure.

The number one thing you can do to increase readership on your Web site is to make all your content freely available. Get rid of the pay walls tomorrow and I’ll personally guarantee you double digit growth within 18 months. You don’t have to change any processes in your organization. You don’t need to rewrite for the Web. There’s no corporate philosophy shift that needs to happen. Keep posting items at midnight, don’t do video, do absolutely nothing more than open your archives to Google’s and your readers eyes. Just stop trying the transaction model. It worked for old situations, but now it harms your bottom line. Give your site away and they will come in droves. They will find you.

The second thing you need to do: Ignore copyright. No this doesn’t mean letting your competition post your stories without crediting you. Don’t let the local high school post your photos without crediting you. Don’t let Yahoo! News take your content unless they provide a link to you. Give it to them on the condition they provide links back to you. Free of any other charges. Links, in the eyes of search engines, are points. The more sites that link to you, the higher your points, the more relevant Google sees your page. When someone searches for content you can provide, you show up first or second or third and they will come.

The third thing you need to do: Give it away. Unbundle your media. Put it on other sites. Right now, take your content and feed it out to people. Let other sites syndicate your content. Let people find it where they are. Those that don’t find you in searches can find you other places. All links should lead to Rome. They will come.

Lastly, you need to take what others offer you. Pull in the headlines from your competition. Scrape craigslist for classifieds. Syndicate local bloggers. Pull event listings from Upcoming.org. Link to anything and everything you can. Every day. If you don’t have content, link to someone else’s content. If you only do original reporting, you’re doing your site and your community a disservice. Look at how popular blogs like BoingBoing and Kottke constantly link other sites. Hell, look at Drudge right now. What do you see? Links upon links upon links. Sending people away secures page views for yourself. You just have to curate links for your target community.

B-b-but that not journalism! Correct. Journalism isn’t dead, far from it, but the game has changed. We still need to produce content. But we are in the media business. Journalism is just a part of that. Sorry to break it to you. This is good in ways not many people can comprehend yet, though, and we’re on the cusp of some very interesting times in the years ahead.

If you want to really secure your future as a leader in whatever content you provide, start by being a good neighbor.

End game

When I reply to someone on twitter, in public view, the message is meant for the recipient, but others can listen in. One-to-one conversation can also be a one-to-many conversation at the same time. I haven’t read Clay Shirky’s new book yet, but from what I gather this is part of his thesis. This is what I mean when I say the game has changed. We don’t broadcast or have conversation over a few drinks. We do both at the same time. And boy does it sometimes lead to awkward social situations.

But fear of doing something wrong or fear of losing control of the conversation shouldn’t detract us. We’ve already done something wrong. We’ve already lost control. We’ve been trying to play a new game with an old set of rules.

Now, I know so much of this just sounds silly. We should curate conversations?! We talk a lot about attention economies and jostling for eyeballs because on the Web, every site potentially competes for the same people. True to a point. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Yes, people spend a certain amount of time on the Web per day/week/month and what they find is usually all they get. If they’ve found someone else’s content, then they probably aren’t looking at yours. I get that. But we should ask a different question than “How do I get the people looking at site A to look at my site, site B?” We should ask how site A and site B can complement each other, distribute the workload, maximize audience and share in the benefits.

Before we look at a couple examples, I want to get back to ground zero: Free. Giving your content away doesn’t mean you’re going to lose the value of that information. If an article is worth one dollar and you give it away for free, you have to make that dollar back somehow to break even. This is the trade-off. Market share has no business value if you can’t convert size and type of community into dollars.

In reality, a page view has a cost of only a tiny fraction of a cent. Thousands of eyes on an article costs basically nothing to distribute, so charging anything more than a micro-payment flies in the face of market wisdom. And micro-payments don’t work for most products. They create a psychological hangup many people can’t or won’t accept.

So then, who takes on the costs of production and distribution? Advertisers.

Because the cost of producing a page costs so little, you can sell ads for huge returns. But, unfortunately we’re hung up on an old model that involves selling banners or tile ads or large formats to larger companies in our communities. We put ad reps feet to pavement and we go looking for big dollars.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Well, not so dumb. Yes, do that for your high profile, network-wide advertising or vertical sales, but think smaller. Every Tom, Dick and Harry sells their stuff on eBay and craigslist. There’s about bajillion craft shows all over the Midwest in the summer. These people have things to sell and they can’t afford TV or newspaper spots. They have local goods they want to sell locally. So they go to Google. They go to Yahoo! They go to Facebook. They fill out a form and drop $5-$20. The simple, highly-targeted ads direct people to sites where these merchants sell their products using freely available Web tools and you get none of that money. Web forms don’t need a commission. Nearly pure profit slips out of your grasp every second you delay.

There’s a new game in town. Your advertising needs to be as granular and as unbundled as your content. It needs context. Impressions are great, but advertisers are catching on. They want click-throughs and conversions, so make it easier for them to tap your communities. If you target your ads right, your users might actually find advertising useful rather than a nuisance.

Once you have the hang of that, seriously consider sharing your business model. Let other sites handle your advertising. Google does it. Amazon does it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t figure out how to share advertising, too. Build a relationship with your community to keep it healthy. This one really flies in the face of common sense and may not even work for smaller communities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Tying everything together

Ok, I think this has been the longest post I’ve written yet. So let’s take a second and breathe deep. In a nice digestible list, here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Pick a community. It can be a geographical region, like North Dakota or it can be a theme like Tech news.
• Start creating content. Make it evergreen. Let people into your archives.
• Start curating content when it is relevant to your community.
• Give others in your chosen community opportunity to share what you’ve got. This is how you build a relationship within the network.
• Once you’ve built up a large enough community of readers, you need to fill space with advertising that favors the content.
• Keep your community healthy by creating advertising markets to stimulate its growth.

Does curating work? Compare Drudge to the NYTimes.com. Last July Drudge had one-third as many readers as New York Times. Love him or hate him, He’s Just One Man.

Does opening up your archives work? Hell yeah it does. See that bump in people on the graph linked above? I bet you can guess when they opened their archives.

I want to talk about some sites that embody many of these principles.

The Hype Machine aggregates music posted to music blogs. It does nothing more, really. Just hit play on a song on the main page and listen to music bloggers post. But the site does some awesome stuff. Firstly it links to every blog it culls music from. Giving exposure to some great music blogs in a very, very crowded niche. Secondly, it supports itself financially through music sales at iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, as part of their ad networks. Lots of songs have links to where you can buy the tune.

Exposure to music blogs, so they benefit with link juice and spill over from click throughs. Exposure to music merchants, so they benefit through sales which also have kickbacks to the They Hype Machine. The whole site is a sharing machine. Just turn it on and let it do magic.

Everyblock aggregates data on a local level, breaking it down to the street level. The site culls information from official government sources as well as craigslist, Upcoming.org, flickr and others to give you a picture of what’s going on in your neighborhood. Throw in some story-based news and locally targeted advertising and you have a whole new way to think about news Web sites.

Lastly, this one is small potatoes, but it’s worth noting, because we’re going to start seeing more of it. There’s a small group of papers in Minnesota that started Minnesota Reader. Using only Drupal and some freely available feeds from newspapers across the state (including papers from Forum Communications, my employer), they’ve started aggregating Minnesota news. It’s basically the Google Reader OPML file we’ve set up for our editors in the state turned to face the public. It’s a bit clunky right now, but I think the concept has some interesting potential.

Take a look at the page for Woodbury Bulletin, one of the Forum Comm papers. On some of the posts, our RSS ads show up. On their page, with links back to our marketplace product. Some people may feel very uneasy about something like this. I don’t. It’s our RSS feed, so we basically control our content on their site.

Go out and grow your audience. Expand your network. People will gather around your content. Some of those people will support you by clicking on ads, more will given the right ad in the right context (either on your product or from somewhere else in your network).

All links lead to Rome.

Part one of this series can be found here. Part two, here.

Anecdotal evidence

A few of my colleagues in the journalism business refer to their jobs as “the paragraph factory.” These people are all under 30. Notice how, even though they’re gainfully employed by a newspaper, they don’t make reference to the printed product, rather their output.

Without knowing it, they’re starting to see the separation of content and form. Their job is to write words, they don’t really care about where those words are going to end up. So long as they get paid.

* * * I often spend lunch at a small Chicago-style deli about a block and a half from my office. There, I grab the local alt-weekly paper if I haven’t yet read it and sit down in front of the big screen TV that always has CNN on, unless there’s an afternoon Twins game. As I wait for my greasy, delicious food, I page through the paper, looking for something that interests me. I’ll listen to the TV, in hopes that some news comes up that I didn’t catch scanning the wires earlier that morning.

I imagine a lot of people in this field spend their lunches like this.

But there’s something new. I have a MotoQ. And I have a data plan through Sprint. And Google Reader has a mobile version.

When the alt-weekly, or CNN, or fails to provide anything to relevant to me, I turn to my phone and fire up my feed reader.

* * * As a freshman in J-school, I remember my Intro to Mass Communications professor talking about mobility.

You can’t easily carry a TV with you, he told us. Laptops are nice, but finding a Web connection is difficult. A newspaper is inherently the most mobile form of news media because you can fold it up, stick it under your arm and read it on the bus to work. You can read it at the table during breakfast, on in the afternoon on the crapper.

He might have been right then, but he’s not anymore.

* * * In the first part of this series, I talked about the synergy of the Web. Data and content are separate from form. Information on a newspaper page is stuck on a newspaper page. Information in a database can be output to a paper, to a Web site and to a mobile device.

When my journalist friends write news down, it ends up in a repository that gets put onto the Web, and into a paper. It is syndicated to readers via RSS and possibly picked up by other papers in our company.

When I’m at lunch, I can pull down any news I’m subscribed to via RSS. On a mobile device. Text, pictures and video come together on my phone. I can do the same on the bus…or on the crapper. And I’m engaging with the news. I’m sharing it like this.

As the technology gets better, so will my bathroom reading experience.

So it goes.

Howard Owens says something mobile could be the newspaper killer. I think mobile technologies in general are the newspaper killers. It is just a matter of time for smart phones with cheaper data plans and RSS and WiMax and whatever happens after the FCC’s 700 MHz auction to spread beyond the techy, business, and uber-user worlds into the hands of general consumers.

So it goes.

The game is changing…fast

This is bad news for news media, right? Wrong. It’s all opportunity to make money. It’s an expansion of reach. It’s the possibility of a wider aggregate audience.

This is a time of abundance of information. And want of information. Lots of want.

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Anybody who thinks this industry is more than that is greatly overreaching. Anybody who thinks this industry is less is vastly underestimating the business.

Many of the complaints I hear and read about money moving from newspaper and television advertising to the Web is that the dollar amount for a Web advertisement is substantially smaller than the dollar amount for a newspaper or TV spot.

I think the problem arises because newspaper types are still hung up on treating the Web as a digital copy of the paper; It is treated as another place for yesterdays news or an up-sell for print advertisers.

The Web is a wholly new product. Therefore it is a wholly new way to generate revenue.

The paragraphs and photos (and in the case of TV, the video) are the same in both products, yes. But the Web offers more opportunity than that.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there,” Larry King said of the Internet. That’s exactly why advertising is cheaper on the Web than in print. Resources aren’t scarce. Space is a commodity. Web ad inventory is determined by the size of your audience, not space or time.

Another point: because “there’s 80 billion things on there,” one Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. Think about your local news providers. In your geographical region, there’s only a few sources for media. Scarcity necessitates top-down control of information.

But on the Web, we, meaning your former newspaper community, can fragment into communities bound by interest, not necessarily by location.

Hyperlocal news is an attempt rebuild communities, but don’t get hung up on the word local. It has little to do with physical location, and everything to do with relevance of a subject to a potential reader.

You’re no longer a part of your community

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Market fragmentation means that your former readers are looking more and more to other sources for information, because you do not provide the information they want or because you are no longer a member of their community.

These two issues are related. First, not providing information that people want makes you irrelevant to their community. Second, if you are providing information that is relevant to their community you are not where they are on the Web.

One Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. You need to get out there and actively engage with your communities:

That means full text RSS feeds, active Facebook profiles maintained by real live staffers who drive discussions and answer questions, full-fledged mobile versions of newspaper.coms, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and videoblogs formatted for iTunes, and paying close attention to whatever’s next. (Ryan Sholin)

Bringing it all together

The paragraph factory mentality serves to coldly separate content from form. This is a good way to move forward by technically providing content across multiple platforms. But it feels top-down, megaphone, WE ARE MEDIA AND YOU ARE AUDIENCE. We need to move beyond this.

As reporters, producers, editors and publishers, we need to actively engage with our communities–our readership–on as much of a personal level as we can.

We, as news consumers, are also reporters, producers, editors and publishers. Give us a platform to share our content and information with you, as well as tools to share your content with others in our communities. We know our communities interests better than you do, so let us share easily. Let us be your megaphone.

This is how you grow an audience. And yes, it will be hard to meet our second purpose (to sell ads) on some platforms (like youtube or facebook) because we do not own those sites. But we’ll be engaging our communities, building relationships, and giving people opportunity to discover our products that pay our bills.

In that same Intro to Mass Comm class, my professor spent a large chunk of time one day talking about the letters to the editor section of the newspaper. It serves as a community bulletin board, he said.

Now, I think, all our content is a conversation.

You can find the first part of this series here. In it, we looked at what convergence really is. It is a synergy of previous media. It is how we interact with the web, either overtly through IM, email, polls, and blog comments, or implied through our usage of the Web’s technologies.

We can use the Web how we see fit. This is the key difference between the traditional (old) media and online (new) media. The technologies that combine to create the Web give the end-user as much control over the Web’s outcome as the original creator of a Web page.

Wait, what?

Think about it. New media bloggers, like those at Media 2.0 workgroup and Cluetrain fanatics, like to talk about the Web as a conversation. The Web ebbs and flows in reaction to itself. Since the we are the Web (loosely speaking the Web is a network of people as much as a network of computers), we create and build the Web every day, through our personal blogs, our Amazon wish lists, our craigslist listings and our email forwards.

The Web is full of conversations. Conversations from corporations to clients, from retailers to customers, friends to friends, bloggers to like-minded readers and insane people to anyone who will listen.

I remember watching Larry King a while back. He was talking to Rosanne Barr about the Internet. It was painful to watch. King said he wouldn’t like it, there’s “80 billion things on there.” And surprisingly, Barr hit the nail on the head. You can watch the video here.

She doesn’t know she’s talking about filters, per se, but she’s describing the single most important idea on the Web. The internet is noise. Constant noise. The ebb and flow of the Web means that it is constantly changing. And growing. If any single person tried to keep up with everything on the Web, they’d explode. Thank god smart people built robots to crawl the web, to give us the ability to search for whatever we wish. Thanks Google.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there.” King is right. But there’s also lots on books in a library. That’s why libraries are organized so that one person can dig out information relevant to their search.

The problem with libraries, though, is that we can’t easily add meta-data to the books we find in a library. All the information in a card catalog is meticulously entered by a librarian, god bless ‘em. However, that information is not extensible. We cannot add to the catalog.

Scarcity necessitates top-down control

Let’s step back and think about how we interact with “old” media.

Television, as I stated before, is locked into time. So is radio. There are only 24 hours in a day so a select few people decide what goes on air, much like librarians decide how to create filters for library catalogs. A librarian is a curator of filters, and an editor is a curator of content. But in doing their jobs, they both act as filters, leaving the the final users of the products out of the process.

And then step back even further to the technology that makes TV work. Previously, there were only a few stations over the air. Those stations are still the only few that exist on the air waves. Spectrum is a form of space, so the government had to allocate that spectrum to certain groups.

The same goes for newspapers and magazines and books, which cannot feasibly produce 80 billion page volumes every day. Economics and usefulness outweigh the value of near infinite texts. Scarcity necessitates top-down control. Someone has to make a decision as to what stays and what goes. Someone must curate.

But the Web is so insanely different it doesn’t need top-down control. The reason it doesn’t need editors or librarians is, surprisingly, because there is so much stuff. We curate our own corner of the world and we tailor it to our sensibilities.

The cost of creating a Web page is fast approaching zero. Unlike paper, it isn’t trapped in spatial dimensions. You can have one giant page full of content or a billion pages with sparse content, it doesn’t matter. The device you use to access the internet doesn’t have to also grow in size because the amount of content is growing.

Content is separate from form.

What a concept.

Infinite content

I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live skit. Watch it here. It’s fake commercial for a bank that bought the last Web domain available: clownpenis.fart.

It’s funny because people, when using the Web, don’t seem to give a shit what the name of a site is. They’re looking for content. They’re looking for usefulness. Brand isn’t a name anymore. Brand is interface. Flickr is a dumb name. So is Twitter. So is Google. But we’re not looking for a name. We’re looking for usefulness. We’re looking for content. We’re looking for what we want.

When we search, or click on a tag link, or drill down into a site, we’re looking for something that we want, that may be something general or something specific, but we want content and we want it now. We don’t want a name. If we don’t find something closely resembling what we’re looking for, we leave the page and try somewhere else.

The key for newspaper sites is simple. Make it easy for people to scan your pages. Make it easy to search for content. Don’t tell them what to look for. Help them find whatever it is they want.

If you don’t have it, or you make it hard to find, they will leave. We will leave. We’re not loyal customers anymore. Too bad, so sad. Deal with it. This is the main foundation for my argument for putting more “crap” on the Web.

Content everywhere

The Web is tearing down some ideals that existed in the past regarding ownership. The Web is a connection between people. A youtube video can appear somewhere other than youtube, which changes the videos context. RSS makes it hard to control where your content ends up. Hell, it could end up here. Or it could end up in my gmail account, my facebook profile and elsewhere as I’ve described here. Because we’re all curating our own corners of the Web, we’re getting flack from groups like RIAA, MPAA and overzealous editors who don’t see the value of their newspaper content anywhere else on the Web but their own Web sites.

Because content is separate from form, we can distribute it everywhere. I believe wholeheartedly, that distribution extends reach and increases content longevity.

Recently in our newsroom, we received an email from a professional photographer from the Twin Cities. He had taken a whole bunch of photos in a small town that was devastated by a massive tornado. They were great photos. Amazing photos. And he was giving them to us. All he wanted was credit and a link to his Flickr page.

This caused a stir that I hadn’t dealt with before. Why would this guy give away his great photos, members of the newsroom asked. Why wouldn’t he? It’s the Web. The guy makes his living from taking pictures (of weddings and such), not reselling his photos that were licensed under Creative Commons. The photographer wanted to use our site(s) to extend his reach. To get his name out there as a photographer. The photos are secondary to his ability to take them well.

And that’s exactly what newspapers need to do. Get your content in places where people will discover it. Think beyond your Web sites. You can’t expect thousands of people to just happen across clownpenis.fart on their own. You have to put yourself out there. Let your users stick your content in every nook and cranny on the Web. And then, once you’ve increased your market share, figure out how to profit off it. But we’ll talk more about distribution later.

What to make of this

The key points to take home here:

• Users want what they want, not necessarily what you have
• If what users want is not easily discoverable, they will get discover it somewhere else
• Many users want to do as they wish with your site, forcing them do anything else will only turn them away
• One way to achieve discoverablity is through distribution

Search is so important for newspaper sites. A newspaper.com is loaded with content, content that goes back years, if not decades. Hiding that from your users does nothing to help you. Give your users familiar tools to discover new content, and related content. You also can’t lay it all out there and expect them to know where it is.

Otherwise, expect them to leave as they (and the rest of the Web) get more sophisticated.

I’m often blown away by how outdated journalism awards are when it comes to the Web. The descriptions read like they haven’t been touched since 1999: They make reference to download times and layout, when those things are secondary to experience. There’s rarely talk about interface–meaning how you interact with the page. These awards, unfortunately, are geared towards thinking about the Web like you’d think about a newspaper. This is a sad byproduct of thinking of the Web as an extension of the print product (as a place to put things that can’t exist in print like audio and video), rather than thinking of it as a wholly new and largely separate product.

Without naming names, I’ve had the misfortune of trying to select special Web projects for these contests where the judges seem to simply look for a pages within your site that look different than the rest of your pages. It’s a process that’s extremely annoying. The content itself rarely seems to matter. Interface means nothing in these contests.

So, I’d like to talk about some things that may seem obvious–at least to many of us. I’d like to talk about what really makes the Web sing. This is the first of a multiple part series.

Information architecture

Broadcast. There are only 24 hours in a day. News, or rather, information can be made available as soon as a live truck can broadcast from a scene or an anchor can say a few words on air. But the information is fleeting because the medium is damned to time. The viewer must be watching at the moment the information becomes released or it is lost.

This is one reason, aside from the cost of producing news, why 24 hour news doesn’t fill it’s day with wholly new information every second of the day. Video, sound and information must be archived, selected and brought back to the surface periodically to cast a wide net on the audience. Broadcasters understand that people aren’t tuned in all the time, so they shoot for peak viewership. In a given 24-hour cycle, there’s hardly 24 hours of new information.

Throughout a day, information ebbs and flows and changes. It never feels complete, because with speed comes inaccuracy (or at the very least, incomplete information). It’s all regurgitated until someone in an office decides we’ve had enough or something new comes along.

Without sounding too much like Steven Hawking, time and space are the same thing to broadcasters.

Which brings me to print. Newspapers and magazines are far more doomed to time than broadcasters. Where broadcast has flexibility of seconds, newspapers must make decisions within hours of press time (and often, magazines must lock their pages months in advance). Print journalists spend their days gathering as much information as they can fit into a page and then, at press time, release it into the world. This is why when you pick up a newspaper or a magazine, it feels outdated compared to television or radio, yet it feels much, much more complete.

While print media gives the illusion of spending more time gathering news, it still has the absurd problem and blessing of physical space. You can only put so much information on a page and make it useful for readers.

Here’s the problem: Putting words and images on physical space makes it difficult for a media consumer to get news quickly. Where broadcasters flourish in time-sensitive or crisis news, print media struggles.

Here’s the blessing: Unlike broadcast, where the viewer is doomed to watch whatever information is available at the moment they’re watching, print readers can scan the headlines and select the news they wish to read, at a time of their choosing.

The great thing about magazines is that there’s a permanent record. You can start your own personal archive of each issue. (You can do this with newspapers, too, but you’ll look like a crazy person after a week or two of papers, without the aid of microfiche. The same goes if you tape 24 hour news). The not-so-great thing about this is you’d have to have the patience of a librarian to index, catalog and sort all the information held within those pages.

So to refresh:

• Broadcasts overlying advantage is speed, but with that advantage, it locks its audience into predetermined time slots. The viewer must be in sync with the time the content airs.
• Print gives audience the advantage to escape predetermination, but cannot offer speed of information that broadcast affords.The content therein can be read separately from the order it has been delivered (read sports first, if you wish). It is asynchronous.
• Both media are difficult for the end user to organize, to keep a record of all the information contained within. They are not extensible. You can’t inject meta data into the media, without the aid of another medium (i.e. a card catalog).

And to add a few quick thoughts:

• DVRs like Tivo have exploded the first point that broadcast be locked into time…for the end user. The content creators still only have a set amount of time to work with in a day. Television broadcasters are still primarily geared towards casual viewers, not those recording television. Furthermore, the act of recording live news defeats the advantage of speed somewhat.
• Print offers portability to readers, but portability is hardly exclusive to print. Now, you can buy portable televisions and access the Web from a variety of mobile devices. Note the word device, however, the newspaper is as much content as it is also device. I’ll delve into this more shortly.

Words on convergence

When I was in college, and still even today, the word “convergence” flies around newsrooms and J-schools. 99% of the people I’ve met who’ve exerted the breath to describe the meaning of convergence take the line that it is a convergence of content: Audio, video, text, pictures and interactive elements can coexist on a Web page. While that’s certainly true, I think we’re missing the point. Your Website should not be thought of as an extension of your broadcast or paper product. It is a wholly new product. It just happens to make good business sense that the content overlaps.

Convergence is a synergy of the advantages I’ve explained above. The Web is asynchronous and it is fast. You can deliver content quickly and your audience can peruse at their leisure. But there is so much more. Because a Web site is a singular element, as opposed to a moment in time (broadcast) or a periodical device (print), past news can be archived and retrieved easily.

That’s the beauty of hypertext. You can link to anything that exists on the Web, including your own content.

What does this mean?

It means newspapers and broadcasters need to take advantage of this synergy on the Web. A newspaper.com should not be mostly a digital version of your print product. It should be a new product.

We’re starting to see a lot of newspapers take on a Web-first mentality towards news; Breaking it as it happens throughout the day. This is good for newspapers, since they’re taking on their broadcast rivals territory. Broadcasters need to step up their game, too. They need to figure out how to use the Web to break out of the time-sync rut. And everybody needs to figure out the mobility of content.

What’s next?

I’d say stay tuned, but that phrase is fast becoming outdated. Check back whenever you’d like, I suppose.

• In the next installment of this series, I’ll take ask you to take a hard look at interface. How can we take advantage of convergence? And what are the pitfalls?
• After that, I’m going to talk much more about extensibility and the rise of serendipity on the Web.
• Lastly, we’ll look at the Web as a distributor. We’re all cyborgs.